[uSoldering]

You are missing the forest for the trees. This is an aerospace vehicle capable of flying in the air indefinitely. How many drones can you fit on a vehicle? How many vehicles can you fly at once? 60 miles is already reachable by the cheapest and most deadly weapon class of short-range drones. And now all they need to do is fall down. At freefall that is 140 seconds until it reaches the ground.

[ianburrell]

The drones would burn up. The satellites are in space and moving at space speeds. If the satellite drops anything, it stays in orbit and slowly decays. Dropping anything requires a large rocket to get out of orbit. The payload would still be going fast and deal with re-entry.

Also, the article doesn't say that they are at 60mi, just that VLEO goes down to 60mi. The satellites are likely to be higher because there is less drag.

[brookst]

You come across as fairly confrontational.

But I don’t understand the point. Satellites already fly indefinitely and can drop payloads of kinetic energy weapons. Why all the complexity of VLEO and drones? What could you that’s impossible with other, simpler, already-extant weapons systems?

[zardo]

> Why all the complexity of VLEO and drones? What could you that’s impossible with other, simpler, already-extant weapons systems?

Assuming the tech works, you can move the sat to any orbital plane, making it significantly harder for an adversary to track all of your vleo assets.

[uSoldering]

I am voicing my opinion in which I believe in strongly, nothing more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM

[rsynnott]

I mean... okay, but no matter how much you believe in it, it doesn't make any sense. This would offer no advantage over conventional satellites for this application (ie it would be similarly terrible for it).

Are you thinking of something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#2003_Unite...

Again, you probably wouldn't bother with VLEO for that, too much extra complexity with no obvious advantage vs VLEO.

[BalloonsInVLEO]

We already have fully autonomous space drone swarms armed with nuclear warheads, we just keep them underground/underwater because...humans are weird.

[rsynnott]

> And now all they need to do is fall down.

That's, ah, a huge 'all' :) They'd be moving at about 8-10 kilometres per second. The vehicle is not _really_ 'flying in the air', it just looks a bit like that. It's in orbit at terrifying speeds. Your 'drones' would require very extensive heat shielding. They would not be at all cheap. And why use this rather than a normal, cheaper, less complex LEO satellite? Or an ICBM. If you want to arbitrarily drop heavily shielded gadgets on someone's head at silly speeds, the normal tool is an ICBM (the gadgets usually contain a nuke, not a drone, mind you).

[pavon]

They wouldn't just need to fall, they would need to shed 30,000 km/hr of velocity.

[ceejayoz]

The Pentagon probably won’t mind dumping that velocity into a building.