Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield.
Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called “zone-effect” weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems.
Analysts who haven’t seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defense and other vital needs.
No. Just pointing out that a collision in LEO physically cannot create a situation where we’re locked in on Earth for more than a decade or two. The orbits will still have a perigee in LEO. They will still decay. The debris will still burn up eventually. Kessler syndrome is impossible in LEO. And in higher, larger volume orbits, it’s overblown, because we don’t even have enough mass there to create a notable debris field to lock ourselves in with.
A Kessler cascade is one of those things that people read about and it sounds really scary and plausible and happening, like, in a week cause Starlink exists. And that’s where the thought process stops and the Chicken Little everyone has in their brain takes over.