Posted on 04/03/2025 8:27:15 AM PDT by Red Badger
Time to revive “Rods from God”
Polar orbits are all about recon. It is a major Russian advantage in Ukraine.
Satellite imagery from overhead can be transmitted line-of-sight to analysis centers in St Petersburg essentially in real time.
US satellites imaging Ukraine have to store and wait for pass over NRO in Chantilly for the line-of-site downlink. It’s about 40 mins of delay.
There was a time when there were plans for uplink of low earth orbit satellites to geosync altitudes (23,000 miles) and then across to another geosync vehicle over Chantilly for downlink, but it’s still a few minutes of delay and in the old days, experiments were failing. Dunno if they ever perfected that. Sooo much easier to store and forward that I suspect they didn’t spend that money.
Sputnik all over again.
Thanks for the post. I was unaware of our delay vs the Russian smaller delay.
I still like the idea of “a big ball of goo” satellite.
It creates a large ball of polymer ‘goo’ that is then guided to collide with space junk, most of which is quite small, but moving at a high speed. Being able to change its course, through dozens or hundreds of orbits, each ball of goo snags thousands of known dangerous space debris. Then it collides with a few big pieces before burning it all up in the atmosphere.
Improvement of the old days of parachute drops from low orbit satellites.
How do you control the big ball of goo?..........
Wouldn’t Musk have a good time with this! Great idea.
The latency of the Starlink network is less than 100 milliseconds. Why not use that?
Okay let's use it for target practice.
The LEO satellites are moving very fast, with respect to any Starlink satellite. So you will take your image and then try to find a Starlink satellite that can deal with the doppler shift of the transfer signal, not to mention the fact it is encrypted.
Nah, I’d say no. The recon satellites were not designed with a presumption that Starlink is there, and will not even have the right frequency on their imagery downlink transmitter. All the content would be classified, too, which means the entire Starlink ground team would have to be cleared.
Nice idea, but nah, no way.
Orbital EMP device?
Starlink has launched satellites in polar orbits. While legacy satellites may never be able to integrate with starlink, seems like new ones can be designed to natively do so. The classified content can be handled through encryption. That’s what encryption is for.
Maybe an old cosmonaut’s ashes.................
Every Russian satellite is a secret Russian satellite,
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