It's been quietly brewing in the background for a couple years with accusations out the US about Russia and China secretly testing systems to intercept and sabotage US satellites either temporarily or destroy them permanently.
Kessler trashes LEO and yes, "space tourism" because that means bare orbital joyrides and those would become unacceptably hazardous for a tourist attraction. But it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits, or for leaving if we, or more likely a non-human probe wanted to leave Earth's orbit.
So, no Starlink, but you'd still have COSPAS SARSAT in a reduced form, you'd still have geostationary telecoms birds, space telescopes, and various other things.
> it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits
GEO is one of the few orbits we could actually one-shot trash for generations. (Well, any high-altitude orbit is. But GEO is special. If a random high-altitude orbit gets trashed, you can probably do fine with a slightly-different trajectory.)
No. The reason this can't work is that "trashing" an orbit works by a long chain of random collisions which also put debris into different orbits at roughly the same altitude. The debris from a smashed StarLink for example goes into a thousand different orbits with a variety of different directions but all at a similar altitude to the StarLink and so they'll collide with other StarLinks and similar LEO birds. For LEO that works, so many of these orbits are also occupied, the cascade happens - but for GEO all of the similar orbits are empty except the one everybody uses. Orbiting Earth in exactly 24 hours but say North-South, or at 14° is fun but pointless, all of the GEO birds are in the exact same orbits because they're "hovering" over a specific point on the equator by travelling at the same speed at which that point rotates, that's the whole reason to be at that expensive altitude. So your trash almost invariably goes somewhere empty and makes little difference to anything.
I'm thinking of someone intentionally trashing an orbit. I still think ASAT is more econmical. But if you wanted to dump a bunch of sand around an adversary's GEO arc, I believe that's doable. It's not really feasible in LEO outside cartoonishly-aimless evil.
Indeed. Ace Combat 7 (a great game) already explored this. Both sides destroy each others communication satellites at nearly the same time and it creates utter chaos on the battlefield. Had one side succeeded and the other failed, it would have been game over for that side. That seems the most likely space weapon to me, though IANA military expert by any means.
Worktrees aren't about filesystem cost. A clean copy that shares objects is what you want when handing repo access to agents and secrets live in the main tree.
LLMs defaulting to old patterns for new standards is the same bootstrap problem as Stack Overflow answers lagging behind spec changes. The training data always looks backward.
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