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Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

newscientist.com

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Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#141

Post by triage8004 »

adolph wrote: post #110
polalavik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't get why more folks aren't just going for the much cheaper option like this https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/

That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight. There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer space. This debate is unsettled. [0]…

Found those balloons very strange, hope they were up to something nice

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#142

Post by Razengan »

bluGill wrote: post #133
johnnyanmac wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our current knowledge of physics says they can't. Who knows what others figured out. We still can't even explain 80% of the mass we measure.

we know enough to know what we don't know is constrained by current rules. Newton physics mostly is good enough even when relativity is more correct - likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.

> likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.

What? I thought it needs to generalize to/fit into quantum mechanics.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#143

Post by anabab »

rationalist wrote: post #100
bryanlarsen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink is redeploying to 300 miles. Many consider Kessler to be impossible at 300 miles. Any unpowered satellite at a 300 mile orbit will deorbit within a couple of months. But a collision means fragments which deorbit faster because they have a higher surface/weight ratio, and because orbit disturbances lower that time considerably. Any single disturbance that raises aphelion lowers perihelion.

Would collisions cause debris to be ejected into a higher orbit? Although I guess as long as the debris does not pick up any significant speed boost, its orbit would be elliptical and would just collide with Earth (burn up on re-entry)?

the 2009 collision was well documented and there are interesting reports online

e.g. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100002023/downloads/20...

which has a chart of apogee/perigee of debris. There seem to be examples of debris with _perigee_ above the collision altitude but the vast majority stayed beyond.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#144

Post by pyuser583 »

jmyeet wrote: post #11
kolinko wrote: post #2

The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's. (And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are. The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Fa…

The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea. Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in…

The Soviet Atomic Project was helped by starting early and capturing massive amounts of fissile material at the end of WWII.

British scientists helped some.

But the spies at Los Alamos were giving updates on US progress, not delivering secret technology.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#145

Post by mna_ »

pantsforbirds wrote: post #66
jmyeet wrote: post #26

There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US. An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on…

You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation. Either NATO is a scam that exploits Europe, or it's a security umbrella that Europe needs. The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for d…

You list "operations" that occurred after Trump burned bridges with us. Why would we help you after the insults, political meddling, and tariffs? Now go look at the Iraq War and Afghanistan War, when the US invoked article 5 (the only time it's ever been invoked). In those wars, our men and women died fighting for your country.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#146

Post by frm88 »

palmotea wrote: post #53
jmyeet wrote: post #26

There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US. An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on…

> There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US. That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.

because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least.*

Source?

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#147

Post by ergocoder »

kolinko wrote: post #2

The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's. (And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are. The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Fa…

How did Starlink get so far ahead of everyone that everyone else is 20 years behind?

We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive.

Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#148

Post by spwa4 »

jltsiren wrote: post #51
spwa4 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in defense tech. This is true, but it should be described much more as "Europe believed US would save their ass - for free, and did nothing" (with exceptions, like France, and some token efforts within NATO) The US was not holding back much within NATO.

It's more that most European countries had little reason to spend money on defense. Until recently, Finland and Sweden were small countries close to Russia but outside NATO, and their defense spending was similar to West European NATO members. In other words, nobody saw any real military threats to Western / Northern Europe, and the NATO security guarantees had more political than military value. Then Russia invaded…

You know, we're saying the same thing. The TLDR is that Europe systematically refused to spend even token amounts on defense, despite agreeing to spend more in international treaties (and then cheating on what little spending they do, e.g. "raising a bridge" for a tank to pass under it, as defense spending. Coincidentally doing this saved the maintenance spending that the government had unlawfully delayed. And most countries raised more bridges "for tanks" than they had tanks in the first place, and widened them to boot. This then was the promised defense spending ...)

They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".

The idea of all these is slightly different, but boils down to that because first the cold war ended and then communism "died" with the Soviet union, democracy would just win everywhere without any effort from anyone (or at least, no effort from anyone but the US). Because of this wars and militaries and ... would just end. Because why would you have these between trade-based democracy? Let's just leave some military rescue units in place and get rid of the rest!

In reality it was progress that ended. Or, at least, a lot of technological progress ended with the end of defense spending. For example, the EU (technically France), was the first nation with a starlink-like satellite network. Of course it was version 0.01beta of starlink, not remotely close to the capabilities of the current version, but it did do packet transmission over very long distances). I have helped write software to make it's use more tolerable. They let it wither and die, just like everyone since.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#149

Post by ExpertAdvisor01 »

nine_k wrote: post #119
ExpertAdvisor01 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they will be destroyed immediately

To shoot something down at 70,000 ft (21 km) all you need is a conventional military jet fighter, and a long-range rocket, or even a MiG-31 with a conventional cannon. At best you can make these birds cheaper than the rocket + flight time. Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, bu…

The f-22 balloon kill was at the same height as the altitude quoted on their website .

Like you said either any fighter jet + missile or an high altitude jet + auto cannon will shoot it down reliably.

This is probably a good solution for redundancy if you already have air superiority.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#150

Post by bluGill »

Razengan wrote: post #142
bluGill wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we know enough to know what we don't know is constrained by current rules. Newton physics mostly is good enough even when relativity is more correct - likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.

> likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity. What? I thought it needs to generalize to/fit into quantum mechanics.

that too. However the well supborted expirements I'm talking about are in relativity, and we don't know how to generallze relativity to quantum mechanics. Thus my claim stops at relativity.
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