What about lasers? Since even if it just heated up the satellite it could cause damage since they have no way of cooling.
And whether with lasers, missiles, or whatever - targeting a US-based satellite network that is near & dear to the Pentagon would be an extreme escalation. Especially after the Russians warned that any hacking of their satellites would be seen as justification for war.
This is before considering the effects of atmosphere between a ground based laser and the satellite. This will make dispersion much worse.
Lasers that bounce off the moon are an expensive way to make a small crater.
I have no doubt a military could build a weapon that could use some form of EMP pulse to completely destroy my cell phone if it were an equivalent distance from a ground-based attack site, in an environment where it wouldn't be simply destroyed. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised there's some researchers who could put something together from their test bench and bits lying around in the lab in a day or two. Doing it to a hardened target is going to be much harder.
It seems not totally out of the question. My calculation yielded an aperture requirement of 1cm for a blue-ish laser. Which yields a 50m beam at the height of a starlink satelite
> Directed Energy Weapons. China likely is pursuing laser weapons to disrupt, degrade, or damage sat- ellites and their sensors and possibly already has a limited capability to employ laser systems against satellite sensors. China likely will field a ground-based laser weapon that can counter low-orbit space-based sensors by 2020, and by the mid-to-late 2020s, it may field higher power systems that extend the threat to the structures of non-optical satellites.
https://aerospace.csis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/201901...
Here is a more academic article discussing the risk from ground based Satellite Laser Ranging systems to optical sensors, specifically when they are imaging the area near the SLR. I'm guessing the power required to damage structure vs optical sensors are probably orders of magnitude different.
> This density is 100 times the damage threshold of 106 J/m2, and will damage the pixel unless the laser light is filtered. In this case both the pixels and the filter may be damaged.
(There is a caveat to the above statement based on timing probability being very low)
> ...it may field higher power systems that extend the threat to the structures of non-optical satellites
Just conjecture?
Lets pick lamda so 1.222lamda is 1000nm (blueish light). Then by smal angle approximation, the size of a beam at 500km (starlink height) is 500km * 1000nm / d
Say we want our beam to be 50m wide. That gives an aperture requirement of 1cm.
Huh, that seems reasonable. So in a vacuum, it could perhaps be done. Atmospheric effects would make this worse ofcourse. And a 50m beam is not going to dump much heat, but it seems somewhat plausible in the near future.