Starlink's success in Ukraine amplifies interest in anti-satellite weapons In a report published earlier this week, the Secure World Foundation, a space-oriented NGO, warned that in the past few years there's been a surge of interest in offensive counterspace weapons that can disrupt space-based services. "The existence of counterspace capabilities is not new, but the circumstances surrounding them …
No.
If we assume that the modus operandi of such a laser is to try to use light pressure to slow the satelite without causing any physical damag, so that it de-orbits sooner than it otherwise would, the problem with that (from the laser owner's point of view) is that it's slow.
On te other hand, if the idea is to physically harm the target sufficiently that the target becomes inoperable, then debris is still going to be caused (yes, tiny droplets of vapourized metal and whatnot do count as space debris, as even though their individual kinetic energy might seem low, there will be a LOT of them. Essentially, you'd create a situation where everything in low earth orbit is being continuously sandblasted)
And building lasers sufficiently powerful to do either, and working out how to get the beam through Earths atmosphere with sufficient power to get the job done is a very hard problem. Moving the anti-satelite gear into orbit doesn't work because even though atmospheric power losses aren't an issue, you still need a lot of energy to power the thing. Good luck with creating a power plant for the sattelite thats both powerfu eonough to get the job done, and dmall/light enough to be practical to launch.
And, of course, if your anti-sattelite weapon is itself a sattelite, then it can potentially be targeted by unfriendly anti-sattelite kit. So you'll be needing many of them (quite aside from needing several simply to be able to attack sattelites at every potential altitude/inclination that you may want to attack), so those power plants, and the weapon itself had better be cheap. Solar power as an energy supply for this - you're just making your weapon a bigger and easier target, both for unfriendly actors and random space junk.
hitting sattelites with large EMP blasts to disabe their electronic without causing physical damage might work, so you'd need something like a high-powered narrow beam radar/microwave projector, but (a) you wouldn't want to heat the target up too much, because that could cause debris, (b) I'm not sure on this, but I suspect that if it isn't already possible, someone would soon come up with a way to harden their sattelites against EMP's, and (c) - still sizable power reuirements, and the pros and cons of having your anti-satellite system on Earth or in orbit..
"as even though their individual kinetic energy might seem low, there will be a LOT of them:
at 30km/s the kinetic energy of small metal fragments is nothing to sneeze at either. Heck, things as small as paint chips are a hazard (a much smaller one, but still)
Satellites that have been serviced, and had parts retrieved and returned for earth for study showed _lots_ (many thousands over a few years) of impacts from such debris, including paint stripped from Space Shuttles by the highly reactive, if extremely tenuous, atomic oxygen at those altitudes.
Most of the debris, of course, had impacted solar panels, which tend to be most of the surface area of earth-orbiting spacecraft. While that may have degraded the output of those arrays, it didn't do sufficient damage to affect the missions involved.
And this is exactly why anti-satellite attacks are such a problem. The only way it currently works is if the country (organisation) launching the anti-satellite attack has nothing in the same orbit.
We would very quickly reach a point where the orbits became unusable due to the amount of debris as even small pieces become hugely destructive.
Then we get into a vicious cycle of satellites being put up quickly and cheaply to survive a short term in orbit before themselves become part of the debris field.
Yes the LEO debris will eventually decay into the atmosphere but not at a rate that would make the orbit safely usable after a few attacks.
So with currently technology, it is probably self-defeating except as far as we know, Russia does not have the equivalent of Starlink so they have nothing to lose. It all depends what else is vulnerable in the same orbit.
As far as I am aware there is not currently viable lasers that can reach LEO and EMP is a bit out of Goldeneye.
A directed-energy "solution" to constellations of communications satellites could degrade service, but replacements could be launched faster than they could be knocked out. Unless, of course, the Chinese hired SpaceX to shoot down their own satellites with another constellation, this time of killer sats. I wouldn't put it past Mr. Musk to accept a sufficiently lucrative offer.
The only saving grace in such an idiotic war would be that the satellites are for the most part, orbiting at altitudes used by not much else, so the immense cloud of debris the destruction would create wouldn't be likely to affect other spacecraft.
>so the immense cloud of debris the destruction would create wouldn't be likely to affect other spacecraft.
Unless you use explosives to inconvenience the target - at which point half the debris goes into higher orbits.
If you can arrange to disable them with a hammer then they will safely remain in the same low orbit.
Physical destruction on thousands of LEO satellites of one internet provider that are interdispered with thousands of other (some your own) ISP satellites isn't practical.
The weak point in these systems are the ground stations to the terrestrial backbones and the likely lack of interoperability of them between ISP's. That's where you attack. If you knock them out, yes, maybe the system can be designed to allow reconfiguring user terminals to be used as low bandwidth ground stations but the system would be severely degraded.
Don't forget next gen Starlink sats are supposed to have laser links to communicate with each other.
So presumably as long as one ground station is present somewhere on the world, they can still provide a service. No doubt it may be degraded service due to a lack of ground stations, but it should be better then nothing.
The idea of re-configuring the user terminals as "ground stations" if they are also given a land ISP connection is intriguing. It would certainly add resiliency if SpaceEx did that and spread 10,000 such user terminals around the world connected to the Internet via local fiber.
You sorta beat me to it. I wanted to say that I have no beef with ASAT systems as long as they result in de-orbiting all the components of the satellite. There is enough junk floating around in space as it is.
Just think of poor Endor and all the shit left in orbit after the Rebel Alliance blew up the second Death Star....
as long as they result in de-orbiting all the components of the satellite
But I think it's safe to assume that certain countries/leaderships won't give a **** about leaving crap flying around. In fact, I suspect some would see filling an orbital layer with flying debris as a positive thing as it will mean they'll need to take out less sats directly. With 2400 sats in Starlink, it would take a lot of effort to remove all of them directly, but if you can create enough flying debris taking out a few dozen - and the debris takes out the rest - then "job done", network denied to your enemy. The fact that the layer is rendered useless for anything after wards is just a bonus - like indiscriminately scattering mines if you are forced to retreat on the ground.
>But I think it's safe to assume that certain countries/leaderships won't give a **** about leaving crap flying around.
You would hope this style of "satellite winter" features in western military thinking and planning, as you can be sure China will have planned for this eventuality and still be able to effectively co-ordinate forces in the absence of satellite communications..
"Satellite winter" might be a prefered option if one party is not capable of much space activities in the first place. They may just deny to the world what they themselves are not capable of using.
Russia may fit the description as a nation which may not mind a satellite winter. Of course they will piss off alot of people, including their big southern neighbour, China if they did something to create that.
Just think of poor Endor and all the shit left in orbit after the Rebel Alliance blew up the second Death Star....
3 things.
1) The battle fleets were not in stable orbits, being engaged in powered manoeuvring.
2) The inhabited point of interest is actually one of the moons of the Endor gas gaint, which will help clean up any loose space-going trash and make it very unlikely for stable orbits to develop
3) The inhabited moon has an atmosphere, which both acts to de-orbit nearby small items, and protect the surface and anyone living there.
and finally and most importantly.
Science does not apply to Star Wars. Its Space Opera, not science fiction.
It is impossible to destroy thousands of satellites in orbit, and would be very very difficult to jam them over an entire country. But you don't need to do that, because it is much easier to listen earthside to figure out who within your borders is talking to those satellites since they communicate on known frequencies. This would be easy to do with drones.
Sure, you'd need a lot of drones but that would be orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to deal with the problem in space. And you may not really need all that many drones since once enough of the populace hears about someone they know disappearing during the night after a drone was loitering over their place fear will keep the rest in line.
The only way they'd be able to operate would be to set up the antenna for a few minutes for a few quick messages then shut it down, like how resistance members used radios sparingly in occupied Europe to avoid Nazi radio detection vehicles.
Starlink is only effective in Ukraine because Russia was completely unprepared for it, and with the sanctions they will have a tough time getting enough drones to effectively monitor - and they are increasingly using up all their guided missiles (with very little ability to build more again due to sanctions) so they'd have to lob mortars at random in the area which they are already doing anyway.
But there may be a thousand times as many ground stations as satellites. How many drones were you planning on using? How many targets, one at a time, are you planning to throw expensive precision-guided munitions at?
No. I think the chinese analysts have got this one right. Starlink-like systems make existing anti-satellite weapons obsolete.
The US drones Ukraine is using cost $6000 each, including munitions, and that's at US DoD markup prices. How many of those can you afford before you have launched ONE satellite of your own? It will always be more efficient to deal with the problem on the ground.
And like I said, you just need to make an example of enough people by either disappearing them or blowing them up, depending on whether it is a war or business as usual autocracy, to scare the rest into line so you won't have to deal with very many uplinks that way until almost all the rest are taken down voluntarily.
I agree they make existing anti satellite weapons obsolete, because like I said in the original post you can't possibly kill that many satellites. That just means you need a different strategy to deal with them is all.
>But there may be a thousand times as many ground stations as satellite
I think we're conflating the ground stations upon which the system depends with the client terminals used by end-users. Starlink depends on a relatively modest number of ground stations.
The exact numbers aren't public but regulatory filings for Starlink and Oneweb indicate a satellite-ground station ratio of at least 10:1 but probably more like 100:1. Even more vulnerable are the Google-hosted backend services that actually run the network, and the handful of SpaceX offices running the show.
There's no point blatting the satellites on orbit, because that's hard and expensive. If the conflict is hot enough you're thinking about doing that you'd blat the easily located civilian infrastructure underpinning the network on the ground, and save your ASAT capabilitity for the infrastructure that actually matters, like GPS and AEHF and Skynet and so on.
[Though of course at that point we're basically at Doomsday anyway so this is all moot]
This cuts the other way, of course. Large nation states already have ubiquitous, secure satellite communications. From a strategic standpoint Starlink and its like do not provide much - if any - incremental uplift in capability, and their vulnerabilities are manifold. For the foreseeable future they're almost entirely militarily irrelevant. It's only relevant in Ukraine because of Russia's combined incompetence, unwillingness and inability to strike beyond the relatively limited conflict zone. That constraint would not apply to a hypothetical China or USA in a conflict hot enough to warrant attacking space infrastructure directly. But, again, see also: Doomsday.
>you'd blat the easily located civilian infrastructure underpinning the network on the ground,
They have satellite-satellite links, you only need an individual satellite to be in view of a ground station for optimal bandwidth.
blatting a ground station in a nearby NATAO country might lead to a serious self-own for the blatter
> Chinese government for breaking a de-facto moratorium on anti-satellite weapons that had been in place since 1985
And before that the Outer Space Treaties which said that space should not be militarised and that no country should claim sovereignty to the "space" above it.
All well and good in the 1960s when no country had much of a capability to deploy space weapons, or to prevent satellite over-flights of its territory. In much the same way that territorial waters were limited by the range of cannons and their ability to enforce a 3-mile limit.
But times change. Both in the capability to knock out satellites and thus to enforce claims of sovereignty and also in the capability of satellites to "invade" another country's sovereignty. (Do we really want the entire world's internet to be routed through the USA? an thus be subject to USA-ians' laws?)
There might be ways to avoid a situation of mutual satellite destruction. However, it seems to me that as soon as any country develops the ability to hit ground targets from space, then all bets are off and it will be only a matter of time before a proxy war in space becomes a reality.
At that time, we should be grateful for all the international fibre optics.
PR mainly: Ukraine's telecoms and internet is refreshingy diverse and robust. Starlink has been good PR for Musk but hasn't seen much use on the field not least because the dishes are big and warm enough to provide targets. Where communications have been shut down by the Russians (southern Zaporizhia, Kherson, etc.) the Ukrainians are going low-tech: you can do packet internet on SW, it's not fast but it's robust and very difficult to locate.
Ukraine's ability to prosecute the war doesn't depend on secure command&control links between military units.
It depends on meme-worthy videos of tractors capturing tanks being uploaded to Tik-Tok, featuring on American breakfast TV and the US public not getting bored.
You're such a cynic…
Actually, I was chatting to a Ukrainian friend of mine who, after showing me the photo of another friend of his who has died in the fighting, said that, where they can the Ukrainian army is making use of the Starlink's. They're just not much use in covert operations.
US scientists previously criticized the Chinese government for breaking a de-facto moratorium on anti-satellite weapons that had been in place since 1985 with its 2007 anti-satellite test [PDF]. US pique about the perils posed by the debris proved short-lived: In 2008, the US Navy shot down its own spy satellite with a missile.
Of course, important to note the US ASAT operation was against a failed mil-sat launch that was on the cusp of re-entry and they wanted to ensure it couldn’t be picked over if it landed in China or somewhere equally unfriendly. As a demonstration of capability, it was pretty responsible and the debris burned up within a year.
The Chinese ASAT test was on a target at 800km. The remains are still in orbit and posing a threat to other traffic, including the ISS, which stands between the debris cloud and re-entry.
Systems like Starlink have huge military potential beyond just communications. The US military is actively working with SpaceX to develop and exploit this potential, turning what is a useful tool to provide Internet to out of the way places into a full blown weapons system (or at least a key component of one). As such it is a de-facto "Space Based Weapons System" so naturally countries that are likely to be the target of US weapons are interested in countering it.
(Other uses for Starlink type systems include surveillance and anti-missile systems.)
I suspect that the Chinese are furiously looking for software exploits in Starlink firmware they can use to their own advantage. After all there are bound to be bugs in the code and by design they can't be air gapped from the internet. So I suspect that will end up being Starlinks weakness.
... in a Universal State of Command in Control
And interest in countering rival nation's space systems is only expected to increase.
And interest in AIgents countering rival nation's space systems is only expected to increase at rates bordering on the exponential rather more than just substantially is something to pay due concern and fitting tributes to at every possible conceivable available opportunity
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