[greedo]

China won't shoot down commercial satellites, they'll just either jam the signal, or block ownership of the ground terminals. Shooting down satellites is very expensive, and would cause an incredible hue and cry internationally. It's one thing to shoot down one of your own defunct satellites, quite another thing to shoot down someone else's.

[larkeith]

China might or might not shoot down the satellites, but the FCC would absolutely not have authorized the satellite network had SpaceX been so blatantly antagonistic towards China as to provide service there.

[lev99]

> Shooting down satellites is very expensive

It's less expensive than launching satellites, and the Chinese goverment has enough money to do it if they want.

[positr0n]

> It's less expensive than launching satellites

I doubt it, since a single Falcon Heavy launch would carry dozens of Starlink satellites but the existing anti-satellite technology can only hit one at a time. Keep in mind they have said the final constellation will be 12,000 satellites!

edit: and BFR could theoretically carry 300 when it is operational. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/25525/how-many-spa...

[lev99]

I'm not sure that it is cheaper, but I am sure there is a cheaper way to shoot something down than to keep it up. Idon't know if the tech and economics are correct, but the physics says it should be.

Moving something to the same altitude as Leo requires much less energy than moving something to Leo. Rockets don't fire straight up because the need their momentum to be at an angle. In addition, the payload of a communication satellite is more expensive than the payload required to throw it either disable the satellite or put it into a declining orbit.

Maybe Elon's rockets are just so cheap he can make it up in margin, but we are really talking about we aren't talking about marginal amount of difficulty difference, but an entire order of magnitude.

[positr0n]

Yeah I completely agree it could be done cheaper because physics, my comment was about the current economics.

I'm not sure how efficient China's military industrial complex is, but I wouldn't trust the US's military to be able to build a weapon system that could destroy SpaceX satellite's more efficiently than SpaceX can launch them, haha.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's less expensive than launching satellites

Are you sure? If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs. We’ll also likely implement a suite of sanctions. Shooting down a satellite is an act of war.

[jessaustin]

Why am I ever surprised at the constant expansion of justifications for war?

Wars kill lots of people. You knew that, right?

[reaperducer]

>If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs.

No, we won’t. We’ll impose several decades of meaningless tariffs and embargoes with tons of loopholes so it looks like we’re doing something until everyone forgets what everyone was mad about in the first place.