Posted on 03/21/2024 4:01:33 AM PDT by hardspunned
Russia has accused the United States of using commercial satellite operators for its intelligence efforts — and is threatening to take military action in response.
The news comes days after Reuters released a report earlier this month, detailing a classified contract that SpaceX signed with a US intelligence agency to launch hundreds of spy satellites.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Tough to do. Musk has 5000+ Starlink satellites up. There is no existing weapon that can touch more than one at a time, at far greater expense than Musk can replace them.
The Lusitania was a private ship that was being used to ship weapons to Europe to be used against the Germans in WWI. The Germans sank it. Which thrilled president Wilson who used it as a reason to declare war.
So ... we’ve been here before.
The worst Putin could do is assassinate Musk himself.
Putin has been bested.
Musk needs to ridicule him to get Pooty to over step and die.
“Musk is the most important potential individual military asset since Wernher von Braun.”
He should not have crawled in bed with the pentagon.
Weren’t they threatening to nuke the world a year or two ago? Now just some sats? Sad how far they’ve fallen.
Do you think Musk personally designed and hand crafted each system? He just supplied the idea, procured the funding, and oversees them.
Our government could take it over and continue operations like nothing ever changed. And they are in the process of indirectly doing that now.
Until government incompetency and policy ruins them of course.
I think Putin is smart enough to know Musk himself is not the real threat so he is safe.
Excellent example of how history repeats it’s self. And in current times of thought crimes just the idea he “might” is now enough to declare direct war.
Cue up a false flag on a bird or two and here we go whether real or not.
Putin might want to be careful about declaring war on Musk. A military division of Space X would be formidable and well within Musk’s capabilities.
“Tough to do. Musk has 5000+ Starlink satellites up. There is no existing weapon that can touch more than one at a time, at far greater expense than Musk can replace them.”
Kessler Syndrome - Once a satellite is broken up, its remnants become weapons, basically projectiles that would take out more and more satellites.
That’s the risk Musk took with Starlink, and why he should thinking a bit harder about weaponizing it.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/musk-starlink-satellites-kessler-syndrome/
This is not correct. The Lusitania, which was owned by the Cunard Line, was built to compete for the highly lucrative transatlantic passenger trade. The Lusitania was sunk in May of 1915, 2 years before the USA went to war.
In fact, it was outrage in the United States which forced Germany to stop unrestricted submarine warfare.
The USA sent a note to Berlin expressing an indictment of the principles on which the submarine war was being fought. The note was written by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist who was leery of issuing too forceful a rebuke out of fear that it might draw the United States into the war. This note and two following ones constituted the immediate limit of U.S. reaction to the Lusitania incident.
Germany caved, and in September 1915 announced they’d no longer sink passenger ships without warning.
Deliberately creating a Kessler syndrome event would be a Pyrrhic “victory”. It would cut off all humanity’s access to space and could provoke a strategic response.
It’s a comic book villain “destroy the world” scenario.
“Deliberately creating a Kessler syndrome event would be a Pyrrhic “victory”.”
I’m not sure when Starlink was approved, but it’s difficult to see how that constellation ends in any other way, as lunching many thousands of them will lead to at least some failures, which is all it takes. All Russia would be doing is speeding up the process.
As to effects and retaliation if the process is ‘sped up’, that will depend on how well each country is positioned to deal with it. My hunch is that the country with the most domestic resources, the shortest supply lines for imports, and the fewest Drag Queens per capita would win.
Orbital lifetime for starlink orbits is only 5 years.
So unless some whack job tyrant intentionally creates a problem there won’t be one.
Not only can Musk can put them up far cheaper than Pooty can shoot them down, over a sustained period Musk can put Starlink satellites up FASTER than Pooty can shoot them down. :-)
Putin is threatening my Cat Pix and porn? NUKE HIM!!
“ Tough to do.”
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More like impossible for the foreseeable future.
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2019-074D
The first 1584 Starlink satellites are to operate from a 550 km orbit. Later sub-constellations are planned for 1200 km and very low 340 km orbital altitude, bringing the final constellation size to nearly 12000 satellites.
Almost certainly, an interceptor would be a fragmentation type device, so I'd say there's a pretty good chance the Starlink sat gets holed, but doesn't break up, shatter, etc. The frag material though, would by design mostly miss, as the idea is to create a small cloud of fatal shrapnel. What I don't know is what kind of orbits / heights some of those shrapnel might attain. It'd be pretty dang ironic if a piece went on to clonk a Russian satellite...
Pretty good article on the newer Starlink sats:
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-newest-and-largest-starlink-satellites-are-also-the-faintest/
The vast majority will be in the 340km/5 year orbits as far as I can tell.
I think they moved the planned 550km orbits down to 340km before they actually launched them.
Either way, physically attacking satellites is kind of a Wile E. Coyote move to begin with.
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