I had to read this a few times to make sure I understood properly, but the Trump admin wants to spend a metric fuckton of money on a group of IoT systems that will keep space missiles pointed at basically every country on earth (including the US). Aside being the stuff of cartoon villains, once this is begun in earnest why on earth wouldn’t every other nation do the same? And what’s stop stop hackers from penetrating any one of the “system of systems” used to make this thing work and launch a missile or two?
This is gonna lead to bebop levels of space debris.
As if Starlink wasn’t already
The second key is, in order for it to be viable, you need enough of them in space to actually have the impact that you need.”
This is the part that makes Golden Dome non-viable IMO. Golden Dome is attempting the holy Grail of ballistic missile defense: boost phase intercept. The idea is that the missile is slowest, biggest, and easiest to detect and track immediately after launch. Golden Dome is attempting to place the launchers in orbit.
The problem is every satellite takes a predictable path, so the launching country could just wait until it’s not overhead and launch. This means you need a bunch of satellites in a spaced out orbit so there’s always one over the launcher. And you need that for every potential launch site. And most nuclear capable countries have road-mobile ICBMs, so you need enough to cover the whole country. The launching country could just knock out a satellite to punch a hole through your defenses and then launch in the brief window. So now you need redundancy. But every redundant satellite you place can be countered by one extra anti-satellite missile. Anti-satellite missiles will always be cheaper to build than satellite-based interceptors. China has 110 nuclear ICBM silos in one field in the desert. Are you going to be able to shoot down 110 missiles launched at the same time from the same area?
The author makes it sound like Reagan-era Star Wars was infeasible but now it’s fine because of technology. I really don’t think the fundamental economic issue has been resolved. It would take these satellites becoming much cheaper to deploy or some kind of counter to an anti-satellite missile.
To be fair, you don’t need it to perfectly counter China and Russia to have value. There are other countries that have nuclear capabilities or ambitions, who don’t have thousands of ICBMs. Those countries are also less likely to have anti-satellite capabilities, as well.
