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Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

What's going to be there to defend after low earth orbit is saturated with shrapnel from the first battle?

Creating a Kessler cascade is almost impossible for the Starlinks in 340km orbit. It's possible but very difficult for the 550km orbit. 550km orbit technically takes a few years to naturally deorbit, but ASAT weapons create small debris and eccentric orbits, drastically decreasing the deorbit time.

Fascinating. How would a country defend against this sort of attack?

With a stockpile of their own anti-sat weapons and the threat of MAD.

Starlink doesn't need defending. It's too low to cause Kessler, and big enough that the loss of a small number of satellites is inconsequential.

It's a different story for pretty much every other satellite, though. GPS, for example.

You also avoid Kessler with geosynchronous orbits anytime soon because everything out there is all doing the exact same orbit and thus the relative velocity is very low. It also helps that the orbital shell is so huge.

Is there any literature on what kind of attacked are possible apart from ASAT & cyberattack on satellite?

no silly, that's the space shield!

Might a Kessler belt of known quantities eliminate or make harder launch from some areas more than others? (Essentially a space shield?)

The Kessler Syndrome is a phenomenon in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit increases due to space pollution, causing collisions between objects to generate more space debris, increasing the likelihood of further collisions.

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

It'll just bring in a whole new meaning to the term launch window. Not only do you have to wait to launch your new thing for the orbital mechanics to work to your favor, but you'll also have to wait for the opening in the space shield to align as well.

Kessler syndrome is about orbits becoming unfit for satellite to stay on them.

On the short periods involved in a launch, you'll need many orders of magnitude more trash on orbit. It's quite possible that it's not viable at all to launch that amount of stuff from Earth.

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