Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by InclinedPlane 3017 days ago
They don't have it because it's a very hard problem. You need IR sensors providing near global coverage and you need the sensors and the data processing pipeline to be good enough to provide low latency on detections (ideally seconds) with high confidence through filtering out false positives. That's an incredibly challenging technical problem. The US solves this problem with a fleet of satellites that each cost $1.9 billion a pop with R&D probably several times that and ground based infrastructure that is probably similarly expensive. Russia's defense budget in total is only about $50 billion a year, they just don't have the money to afford such a program.