A submarine comes by, says hi by torpedo, bye. Woe!

blub °Oo.

China already has a ground based laser array for military purposes (blinding more or less permanently spy satellites). Some think it could be upgraded to hard killing satellites, which I don't think is yet possible (the amount of energy to burn a sat is also enough to ionise air and thus waste and disperse the laser's energy), but with something heavily constrained by heat dissipation like an orbital datacenter, that last array could overload it and fry it...

	▲	fc417fc802 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> the amount of energy to burn a sat is also enough to ionise air and thus waste and disperse the laser's energy Why would you use a single beam? Place them far enough apart that they don't begin to converge until the atmosphere has thinned out.

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XorNot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes because when your infrastructure is Earth based, your staff is Earth based and your customers are Earth based, your company's legal registration and owner are Earth based, it would be absolutely impossible for a government to enforce any type of jurisdictional control if your datacenters were in space.

And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...

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simondotau 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy many hundreds of satellites (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner).

	▲	XorNot 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner) really think about that statement when discussing deliberately avoiding government jurisdiction... (perhaps also consider that it is not the case that no one can damage a lot of satellites in orbit, but that up until recently no one has had any incentive to build the number of interceptors you would need to do it. But how viable is a space-based datacenter business if you decide to try and pretend you're untouchable, and one of the _many_ governments which operates anti-satellite weapons simply shoots one of your satellites? The debris field from ASAT weapons tests has been of considerable concern everytime they've been used - and given the proximity of useful orbital slots for such a service, the number of intercepts required to render a constellation completely inoperable is going to be _far less_ then the number of satellites). (in the vein of motivation too: it is well within the power of most well-funded governments to build laser systems would would degrade or destroy orbital satellites, but again, no one has had considerable motivation to do so till recently) (and of course all of this is - again - competing against the simpler option of simply arresting the people on Earth, or interdicting their ground stations)

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LargoLasskhyfv 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As I understand it the idea is to have many of such sats. Literally clouds of them.

Not necessarily in orbits which are easily reachable for current ASATs, nor 'economical'.

For now...