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Russia warns United States: use of SpaceX for spying makes its satellites a target
(www.reuters.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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I'm pretty sure that starlink satellites are orders of magnitudes more expensive to manufacture and deploy than the weapons that can target them.
Really? You can put up 50 starlinks at a time for tens of millions of dollars, whereas asats need a more expensive an maneuverable kill vehicle and a launch for each one with lots more complicated targeting and maneuvering. It's pretty hard to track and follow something down moving so fast through space and hit it. Plus Russia just doesn't have the launch capacity to put up that much mass to orbit.
Not to mention that SpaceX has designed things so that they can piggyback starlink deployments on the back of other commercial launches. So, for example, AT&T pays them $25 million to launch a new telecom satellite, and they toss in another dozen or so starlink satellites along with it.
AT&T pays for the majority of the launch costs and starlink benefits from it.
How do you know that? You're launching an entire rocket to kill one satellite, that can't be cheap.
Yes, it is probably expensive, but a satellite is probably even more expensive, and not just by a little.
I don’t think it is… one of the satellites cost USD 250k in 2019. it is likely cheaper now.
There have been Anti Satellite Weapon tests (for example from China) to see if it is feasible. The cost for such an attack would be much much higher than 250k (we are talking multiple millions)
They do have more equipment on them now, so it's possible they've gone up in cost.
Hmm you made me think and if they use their reusable rockets tech and maybe some other similar things, it may be cheaper in the end because they save a lot of money in places where others don't
I doubt it, not at the rate they throw them up.
Maybe, but one of the best traits about Musk is he's willing to throw money at this regardless of profit. So he's gunna keep throwing up more of these satellites, while Russia's rocket supply is only going to get harder to resupply for the foreseeable future.