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octoberfranklin a day ago

Flinging spacejunk pollution into orbit is extremely simple if you have rockets.

Iran has lots of rockets.

Iran also has basically zero of their own satellites in orbit that they care about.

Spacejunk is a highly asymmetric tactic.

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bhhaskin a day ago | parent | next [-]

They don't have that many rockets that are capable of orbital flight let alone an ASAT capability.

Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except Both cars are invisible most of the time. They’re moving 17,000 mph. The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges. If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles.

Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part.

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octoberfranklin a day ago | parent [-]

> Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car

Um no. Imagine rendering a highway unusable by driving a semitruck full of tire spikes down it and dumping them out the back.

No precision required.

	▲	m4rtink 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Um, no - if you do this on suborbital trajectory you totally obliterate a bunch of empty space for the <10 minutes until all your garbage falls back. If you actually manage to make it into an orbit (with a much much bigger and much more expensive rocket) you will most likely do the same (eg. not hitting the intended satellite) with the added bonus of littering random orbits over time and hitting random satellites. And if you want to say "they will deny orbit for everyone!" - well, good luck without far too many orbital class rockets for anyone of their size to have. Not to mention Starlink orbits being (as alterady state so low they are self-cleaning), GPS orbits being far too high to even reach, let alone to saturate with garbage & same for GEO sats.

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yehoshuapw a day ago | parent | prev [-]

they do have satellites. I'm less sure about how much they care about them - but they are not cheap

	▲	octoberfranklin a day ago \| parent [-]
		That's my point. They have so few that sacrificing them would be irrelevant.