Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by beambot 1292 days ago
4x giant geostationary assets have a drastically different adversarial profile compared to 10,000 mini assets.
1 comments

The DoD has far more than just 4 satellites up there.

Anyway, it’s vastly easier to destroy LEO satellites than Geostationary ones. A surprisingly tiny missile fired from an aircraft doing Mach 2 can take out Starlink satellites as you only need vertical speed the satellite provides energy at collision, but geostationary orbit takes significantly more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

> The DoD has far more than just 4 satellites up there.

Yeah, and they want a hell of a lot more. Seriously, read up on NDSA. For the transport layer they want hundreds to thousands of satellites in LEO.

From the sources I looked at, NDSA is supposed to be less than 1,000 satellites by 2030 which isn’t a huge jump over what they already have. They just don’t benefit from that kind of satellite density at the bottom of LEO when it comes at the cost of lower lifespan.

What they want from NDSA is multiple different systems each with a separate focus that can all use a uniform transmission layer.