>The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) fused all of the 570-kilometer monitored overhead telephone line with measured currents of 1500 to 3400 amperes
>The EMP from the same test caused the destruction of the Karaganda power plant, and shut down 1,000 km (620 mi) of shallow-buried power cables
And that's a 300kt explosion at 290km altitude, above the middle of nowhere in 60's Kazakhstan. Really puts things into perspective. Such a test would be devastating to the modern infrastructure.
Boris Chertok (of Rockets and People fame) also wrote that the radio communication was interrupted by another test in the series (K-5) for about an hour, at the distance of 500km from the test site.
> This unexpected “Starfish belt,” which lingered for at least 10 years, destroyed Telstar 1, the first satellite to broadcast a live television signal, and Ariel-1, Britain’s first satellite.
TIL. I wonder what type of effect a “space nuke” would have on modern constellations. I would assume they have better radiation hardening now, but I’m not sure to what threshold that matters.
What are the odds a country gets pissed off by spacex and tries the shudder the constellation.
The odds that a country (with the right tech) gets pissed off at SpaceX is approximately zero because Elon seems to be fine playing along with the Russian/Chinese governments to prevent it. The odds that Starlink and other satellite constellations are destroyed in the beginning of a global war seems to be about 100%, even if there are no nukes used terrestrially.
There're fables about USSR satellite which is basically bucket with nails and explosive charge. In case of war it'll be blown up and nails will destroy everything in the orbit.
This bucket of nails isn't related to a USSR satellite, but was theorised by Arthur C. Clarke.
>2 For the origins of Clarke’s “bucket of nails” argument; Clarke gave the speech “Where is Mankind Headed?” on May 25 1983 for the Reader’s Digest Worldwide Editorial Conference. In the conference’s summary “Memories of Monaco,” Clarke’s speech was described as follows: “After dinner, Arthur Clarke, the noted British science-fiction writer, spoke on ‘The Militarization of Space.’ To put nuclear war into perspective, he quoted a chilling statement from Carl Sagan: ‘A full-scale thermonuclear exchange would be the equivalent of World War II, once a second, for the length of a lazy summer afternoon.’ Clarke went on to
demonstrate that there’s no security in technology, concluding that the only defense is to prevent weapons from being used. Thus, the problem is political, not military. At one point, he described how a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar laser weapon system could be destroyed by a bucket of nails,” see “Memories of Monaco from Reader’s Digest Worldwide Editorial Conference,” May 21-28, 1983, Folder 4, Box 144, Arthur C. Clarke Collection (Acc. 2015-0010), Air and Space Archives, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 14-15.
Wouldn't attacks on Starlink be so asymmetrical that we'd want the enemy to try and shoot them down? They'd go bankrupt trying. We launch 60 satellites per Falcon, and who knows how many per Starship. Meanwhile the bad guys have to use a whole launch to take out one/few Starlink satellites.
I kind of don't think Starlink would be a big target at least until they have satellite to satellite comunication; if they get multiple hops in space communications working and especially it can be used from end-user to end-user without spaceX ground stations, then satellites become a target. Otherwise if you want to disrupt communications, the SpaceX ground stations are in known (or knowable) locations and easy to target.
But, if you did attack the satellites, I suspect you'd do something MIRVish, so assume 10ish strikes per launch, and there's some number of strikes less than the fleet that ruins the orbits for everyone for a few years.
If it's one-missile per satellite, that could be true. Even at that rate, without the need to orbit, I believe a plane mounted missile could reach up to a Starlink satellite. However, there are a lot more effective ways. A cloud of debris it could take out whole orbits. An EMP could take out giant swaths of satellites within a certain radius. A software based attack could knock out the whole constellation.
You’ve commented this twice. I’ve never read about any technology approaching this. Lasers are in tests to defeat small, slow, low altitude drones.
If anyone could shoot down an entire satellite constellation with lasers then that would mean all air defense is solved. Planes and missiles are much slower, closer, and larger than Starlink satellites.
Here's the DIA publication[0] that briefly goes over space and ground based laser threats on pages 9 and 10. Here's the non-proliferation association also warning about ground based ASAT from RU and CN[1]. If they're doing it it's safe to assume US is also doing it.
I think you're probably thinking of the lasers on ships and planes, which would have limited power. Stationary ground based systems don't have the same constraints and are more of a threat for asat.
I'm sure there's a lot of things the military has done once or twice at immense cost in controlled settings. They (or you?) said a superpower can currently take down Starlink with lasers. That's just not true, and the fact that technology demonstrations have happened doesn't make it true.
That's why the whole weaponisation of space is stupid. Because it's easy to take out satellites by setting off a nuclear bomb at high altitude, it creates a band of charged particles, trapped by the earth's magnetic field, which pretty much destroys electronics.
That would only happen in the context of a large scale war between major world powers. If the US ever gets into a shooting war with China then our communications and reconnaissance satellites will be among the first targets.
If individual missiles are used to take Starlink satellites down, it would be quite an expensive affair. Probably should save those missiles in a war for something else.
I know ground lasers can be used to blind satellites, but I've never heard of a successful test or even a back of the envelope calculation that shows one could be destroyed. Do you have a reference?
I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but the LHC is directly tied to the ripple in our timeline that brought us onto the path for systemd being developed not even 1 year later. Surely I'm not the only person who realizes this.
edit because I'm within my edit window: Video generally refers to videotape or recorded television signals. In the 60s, this would have been captured on film stock. Video would have been prohibitively expensive and the resolution would have been terrible for documentary purposes.
What was the damage on the ground? The article mentions streetlights in Hawaii went off, but as I understood that was just because the light was so bright.
a lot is made of MAD, but it has to be remembered that both sides' own people (scientists, soldiers, generals) were largely and painfully aware that thermonuclear war would have likely been excessively disastrous, regardless of whether the other side could shoot back. This was already fairly clear after bombing Japan, to people who had the right information, but over the subsequent 20 years it became widely understood. While politicians saber-rattled, their own subordinate hierarchies often recoiled in horror. When even scientists start going "well, we probably shouldn't learn more about that", you know you're on the edge of existence.
it will accelerate a huge amount of matter from the lunar surface into Moon's orbit as well as beyond the grips of the lunar gravity. It may make Moon's vicinity hard to navigate, and if set "correctly" that explosion would probably result in a lot of that matter hitting the Earth.
Meta: At present the comment¹ by redis_mic mentioning this is downvoted to [dead]. HN's mob censorship system is completely broken.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27869119