by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

Maybe all you so-called geniuses could have paid attention to the realities of space before designing systems that are so reliant on “clean” access to same that terrible things will happen if that fantasy land is disrupted?

I’m referring to recent hyperventilation over a Russian satellite that is behaving in “mysterious” ways on-orbit.  I assume this refers to the satellite moving around, rather than behaving like a communications, spy or navigation satellite ordinarily would.  That’s a guess, since the details have not been published, but I bet it’s a good guess.

Well, so what?

Decades ago it was evident to me that it would take almost nothing, technologically, to really hose satellite systems.  You see they’re traveling at great speed, because they have to in order to remain in orbit.  This means that something else that travels in the opposite direction simply has to hit it to destroy it, and it could be the size of an ordinarily bolt — which makes for some very, very cheap and easy “kinetic” ordnance.

May I remind you that something in LEO (low earth orbit, e.g. the ISS) travels at about 17,000 miles an hour?

A geostationary satellite (typically used for communications) must be placed almost exactly 22,236 miles above the equator — and must be exactly above the equator, so it moves at the exact same speed at which the earth rotates.  With 1 degree of separation this means there are exactly 360 “slots”; we now have less than 1 degree separation, by the way, so there are more (current technology allows for ~1/4 degree of separation.)  To remain in that orbit the satellite must travel at almost exactly 1.91 miles/second or close to 7,000 mph; a geostationary satellite travels slower than one in low-earth orbit.  (Yes, I know this sounds wrong but it’s not, and it also is invariant with the satellite’s mass.)

The point of all of this is that colliding with something, even a very small something, that has a differential speed somewhere between 14,000 and 34,000 miles an hour is going to produce a lot of pieces and making something “tough” enough to withstand such a collision without being destroyed yet is light enough to both be lifted into orbit and contain a useful payload is simply unrealistic.

Further, if you think that any nation that has the ability to launch things into space hasn’t figured this out by the time they figure out the basics of orbital mechanics (e.g. how fast a satellite has to move in order to stay in orbit!) you’re dumber than Maxine Waters.

As a result anyone who thinks that “if the flag goes up” in any sort of real conflict where the attacked party has the ability to launch things into orbit they will not immediately blind the other side by what amounts to throwing ball bearings and rocks into their opponent’s satellites at 35,000 miles an hour you’re even more stupid.

Yes they will.

By the way should such a thing happen it would be quite bad.  Of the debris produced nearly all of it would be in an unstable orbital regime and its orbit would decay and fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.

However, not all of it would do so quickly.

The counter to this is that it’s called space because, well, it is.  Spacious, that is, and as a result the odds of any random piece of junk intersecting with your orbit is tiny.  The problem, of course, is what happens when it’s not-so-random.

There’s quite a bit of “space junk” up there already; anything from the size of a grain of sand to a paint fleck to things of materially-larger size, all the result of man being up with various missions, both manned and unmanned.  Most of the larger-size pieces have been mapped and their orbits are known (Russia and the US have quite an interest in that, as you might imagine) but an “event” that created thousands of additional pieces all at once could be rather challenging.

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