Nobody is pretending to build or defend anything positive in space. Efforts like Starlink are blatantly and publicly a synthetic aperature radar constellation for military use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk about how critical satellites have become to people's lives only to conclude with "Now we're taking out the satellites other countries depend on."
this should end well
or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission
are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?
Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.
never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere
railgun microSD
but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
Been there, done that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
They'd drop their film back down to earth.
U.S. spy satellites were returning film payloads to Earth as late as 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
I mean isn't space X testing satellites with sat to sat lasers?
In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.
More than testing. That is their primary on-orbit link method for Starlink satellites as of 2.5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming...
Neutrinos
Gravitational waves
The British seem reduced to their historic state of piracy to restore the empire:
“disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space”
Not even pretending to be building and defending anything positive in space.
What a bizarre take.
Nobody is pretending to build or defend anything positive in space. Efforts like Starlink are blatantly and publicly a synthetic aperature radar constellation for military use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Its OK for the UK to be strong
In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk about how critical satellites have become to people's lives only to conclude with "Now we're taking out the satellites other countries depend on."