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by nutjob2 6 days ago
> You can shoot it down with a missile.

Obviously a bad idea, but frying it with some sort of high powered electromagnetic pulse would seem the smartest option with plausible deniability.

I wonder if the US already has such weapons in orbit.

4 comments

X37-B it's a tiny robot space shuttle launched by the military.

Why WOUDLN'T one of its possible payloads be an electronic warfare package? Go up to an adversarial satellite, do some signals intelligence capturing things, have a jamming package, or a stronger EM output to fry circuits.

> frying it with some sort of high powered electromagnetic pulse would seem the smartest option with plausible deniability

Realistically, how many people could do this ?

This is not something individuals should be doing.
But it's also not really plausibly deniable if there's only one actor with the means and motive to do it.
If you gave me a million dollars, I could do it. Someone else would have to aim it, but it shouldn't be that hard to do.
From what distance? I would have thought $1M wouldn't go far
I assume that satellites have protection against that - because of solar flares.
Kessler event oops, you know. I guess I know someone with several disposable satellites, I wonder if they could be bothered (but I guess not)