“But it would interesting to deploy a fleet of drag sails ready to mosey over and de-orbit a bunch of enemy satellites.”
Anything we can do they can do better.
The term enemy satellite is a big question. All of them have the possibility of being built to use as weaponry or support to the same. The last of the real insert of low level “communication” satellites was accomplished in the mid 1990’s with the orbiting of a device by a combination of Bill Gates, Craig McCaw, Boeing, Motorola, and the federal government and was called Teledyne operated by Teledyne Technologies.
The second sentence on their about us web site reads:
“These markets include aerospace and defense...”
https://www.teledyne.com/who-we-are/about-us
So just because they are called communication satellites doesn’t make them so. Also the term deorbiting means trash entering the atmosphere that doesn’t always burn up. Where’s it going to hit the ground and how much radiation is it going to spread, especially Russian owned orbiting devices?
The Soviet Union had a few such mishaps since it launched all those nuclear satellites. In 1978, its spy satellite, Kosmos 954, crashed into the Northwest Territories, scattering radioactivity across almost 48,000 square miles.
In 1995, NASA scientists found a cloud of liquid, radioactive sodium and potassium coolant in orbit. The space agency eventually figured out that it came from the Soviet satellite Kosmos 1900. Something else in space crashed into it, causing the nuclear reactor to leak. The cloud of radioactive fluids is still floating up there, and space agencies continue to monitor it.
The good news is that all of these, so called, dead nuclear-reactor-powered satellites are in orbits higher than 430 miles. There’s barely any air molecules at that height to slow down the satellites, so it should take them hundreds or thousands of years to wind their way back to the earth — at which point much of their radioactive contents will have significantly decayed. But not all of it.
Bad news is it’s not over. NASA and Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, are looking into building nuclear engines again. This time, they want to build hyperefficient rockets that might one day take humans to Mars.
If this sounds like science-fiction, it’s not. NASA built several perfectly functional nuclear rocket engines from 1955 through 1973. All it takes is funding.
wy69
Teledyne, Cyberdyne, what’s the difference? As long as Skynet gets built, right?