[asynchronous]

I agree with the sentiment but LEO constellations like Starlink can and have been disrupted, via sub-orbital jamming. Not to mention that in actual large conflict surface to LEO missiles will simply destroy large amounts of satellite constellations.

[dotnet00]

Starlink is supposedly harder to jam than typical satellite comms due to its use of phased array communication. IIRC you need to either be flying overhead or putting out a ton more power in a ground based jammer to be effective.

And as the other user mentioned, no country at the moment has the kind of stockpile of ASAT weapons needed to wipe the constellation (plus, due to orbital dynamics, there's a limit to how quickly they can take out satellites).

Between trying to wipe the constellation and jamming it, it'd be far more cost effective to jam even accounting for the higher power requirements/lower jamming range.

There would also be other interesting options like capturing and using enough terminals to force the entire cell to be disabled. That has been one of the challenges SpaceX has had to deal with near the frontlines in Ukraine.

[throwaway48476]

You can build a Faraday cage with a hole in the roof and starlink will be mostly unjammable.

[throw73391073]

Starlink satellites are vulnerable to repeated uplink transmitting their preamble code (which is public and the same across any user terminal). The satellites are so tuned to that code you can jam them through their receive sidelobes.. taking out all beams on the satellite.

[throwaway48476]

Won't you need n jammers = n satellites in view for this? I haven't seen anyone commit to investing in this.

[throw73391073]

A single omnidirectional transmitter on the ground can transmit this one preamble code in all directions and it jams all satellites in view. All Starlink satellites use the same uplink code and they can't change it because it's how new terminals enter the network.

[bagels]

You could use a phased array to target each of them rapidly

[panick21_]

No government currently exists that has nearly enough rockets to impact Starlink. There is a big difference between doing individual tests and taking down a constellation of 1000s.

[verzali]

You don't need to hit every satellite. You only need to create a lot of debris, and that'll do it for you. Alternatively the radiation from a nuclear blast could take out a big chunk of the network, which is presumably why Russia is working on orbiting nuclear weapons.

[panick21_]

Actually its not that easy even if you did create some debris. Orbit is much bigger then people think. And these sats are much smaller then people think. Without propulsion lots of that stuff quickly drops below the level of the sats. Sats can also raise their orbit in response and fly corrections.

Even modest investment in better tracking could massively improve crash avoidance. It would take far more then a handful of sats to truly impact the functioning of the network. And even more to complete take it out.

Russia is working on everything if you believe their marketing. I seriously question if any work on 'orbital nuclear weapons' is anything other then marketing. And its questionable how effective that would actually be.

This isn't as easy as people think. A country like Russia might have some readiness of nuclear weapons. And maybe a small readiness of anti-sat weapons, but not anywhere close to enough to attack a network like Starlink. Preparing for something like that simply wasn't a thing anybody considered necessary until 2020 and Russia certainly hasn't invested huge amounts of money in that since then and given their recent success with rocket development, I not sure how effective it would have been even if they had.