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Comment by tomatowurst | Hacker News Reader

What the US Space Force might be actually planning if they had unlimited budget, would be a permanent space station with unmanned drones and missiles in several sub-carrier types permanently hovering over a hostile country.

You control the sea, air, land, and finally space. You would have complete dominance that would render ICBM's moot.

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I know this wasn't your point, but because of how orbits and the Earth's rotation works, you can't "hover" above any country that isn't on the equator. At best you can do a highly elliptical orbit that gives you maximum hang time above the target area -- but would also put you maximally far away from the ground if you wanted to deploy anything out of the station. Any realistic scenario involving putting things at specific places on the ground from space in a timely manner involves either flying it from the equator, or using a constellation to ensure persistent coverage.

I'm afraid that with rockets becoming more and more affordable, especially if Starship becomes a thing, the US army will do their own version of Starlink but instead of communications satellites it'll be weapons. It doesn't even have to be anything fancy, anything kinetic that can make it through re-entry will be able to do a lot of damage anywhere. Think a payload of tungsten or depleted uranium bullets, targeted to land in an area; I'm fairly sure they would impact with as much energy as from a gun, like the A-10 Warthog's.

Rods from God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

you can, however, orbit 2 or 3 molynia orbit satellites that accomplish effectively the same concept of persistent coverage over a certain geographic area. The orbit would be calculated to put the long dwell time of the apogee of the molynia orbit of each satellite over the target area.

this is far more useful for anything that is sigint/communications based, or space based radar, than anything as a weapon.

Although not to the same level of accuracy as "hovering" over a specific longitude along the equator as in geostationary.

The constellation idea sounds even more effective than the "hover" idea of the GP. With a constellation you could achieve "coverage" over large parts of the earth and essentially attack any country at a moment's notice. I think military higher-ups have been aware of this potential since the days of the space race. It's a big reason why the weaponization of space has been a geopolitical taboo for many years.

Like the “Brilliant Pebbles” concept by Edward Teller and Ronald Reagan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

Thanks for the info. Hadn't ever thought about it - makes sense.

There is a weird hole where nation-states would love something with the rapid, global deployment capabilities of a nuclear tipped ICBM, but without the nuclear payload for fear of a MAD type retaliation. "Prompt strike" I think is the term. The trouble is, you'd want to be able to deploy such a weapon, but also be very, very clear it's not a nuke, just like a single building sized bomb or something.

Perhaps that's a use case for some type of space based directed energy weapon if you could somehow minimize the atmospheric losses to maintain effectiveness.

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