Excellent summary, thanks for that.
One thing to add is that Starship should enable 400 satellites per launch:
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-president-teases-starship-s...
One thing to add is that Starship should enable 400 satellites per launch:
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-president-teases-starship-s...
A point of clarification, submarines are the only nuclear platform with "undisclosed locations." It is trivial for a nation-state to observe the construction and fitment of a fixed ICBM placement, or track the movements of a truck/rail mounted launcher.
I'm sure U.S. at least tries to keep track of Russian mobile launchers, but to which degree it is successful we wouldn't know for sure. And pretty certain Russia would have problems live tracking launch vehicles (if the USA had any).
Put a 100 tonne tungsten rod into space (cost ~$10m), or more likely some cheaper metal. Maybe 10m long with 25cm radius. Stick a cold gas reaction control system, maybe some gridfins and a guidance package. Put it in orbit, Put some ablative on the leading edge. Once in orbit the cold gas system slows the weapon to put it on target. The gridfins and cold gas thrusters control the guidance. The gridfins wouldn't work for long before the burnt off, but recessed cold gas thrusters could continue to work. Ionisation and intense heat would stop any optical sensors or outside guidance, so aiming it would be problematic.
A kinetic warhead with a mass of 100tonnes going at sub orbital speeds (say 7000m/s) would have 2.45x10^12 joules, which is around 0.58kt of tnt. If I remember correctly once it is going past a critical speed the penetrator and target act like fluids and the rod would penetrate a depth based on the relative density of the two materials time the length. Tungsten is about 6 to 12 times as dense as rock, so it might go through 60 to 120m meters of rock.
Non-nuclear, pretty hard to detect or stop. Competitive in price with cruise missiles. Accuracy could be a problem.
Using starship to launch rods that immediately come down on people instead of loitering in space sounds like a much safer use.
I call the opposite, it is extremely easy to detect and track their orbits, a single personal computer can probably track them all and calculate the potential strike point over points in orbits.
Any attempt to deviate from an existing low earth orbit is extremely energy intensive. It also can't strike anywhere - it can be more than 24 hours before its in position over the location it wants to be.
The orbital period for low Earth orbit is closer to 1 hour than 24, and you further reduce that to only a dozen or so minutes by spacing out rods over the orbit... Much like starlink satellites.
Keep in mind an orbit does not cover all of the Earth surface. And unless the target is on the equator, there is no low earth orbit that can maintain it's path over a target consistently.
But for detection, Is that actually easy? I don't know much about it, would it be done optically, or is there a better way? Are there concealment strategies? How about say painting the satellite black?
Fun to think about but I also hope they don't build these things.