Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield.
Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called “zone-effect” weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems.
Analysts who haven’t seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defense and other vital needs.
If the satellites are destructively attacked this could change. Debris could be thrown to unpredictable orbits, which could destroy other sattelites, and get the ball rolling on Kessler syndrome.
LEO is like…. 1/10th of actual orbit… there’s zero chance that happens.
You’re probably right, but I’d really like to not have anything blown up in orbit.
More worried about the tons of shrapnel falling down to earth and not burning in the atmosphere.
These satellites are designed to fully burn up on reentry. There is effectively zero chance of that.
On the flip side, the aerosols created by burning satellites destroy the ozone layer.
But it won’t be a uniformly higher orbit, because there’s only one event where energy was added to the fragments. The perigee will still be in LEO and anything that’d raise the apogee to a point where the new orbit would be stable for a decade would require so much energy that it’d vaporize the satellite on impact.
It doesn’t need to launch to stable orbit to date another orbiting satellite.
No. Just pointing out that a collision in LEO physically cannot create a situation where we’re locked in on Earth for more than a decade or two. The orbits will still have a perigee in LEO. They will still decay. The debris will still burn up eventually. Kessler syndrome is impossible in LEO. And in higher, larger volume orbits, it’s overblown, because we don’t even have enough mass there to create a notable debris field to lock ourselves in with.
A Kessler cascade is one of those things that people read about and it sounds really scary and plausible and happening, like, in a week cause Starlink exists. And that’s where the thought process stops and the Chicken Little everyone has in their brain takes over.