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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'm laughing at how many bots wanted to share their trivia with you after this post
If they're heavy enough, it doubles as a space fountain.
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
Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...
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
Of course it is. That’s why they didn’t really care at first if Russia was using it in Ukraine. I thought the military had their own constellation but maybe not.
And in that respect, it was a deviation from the propaganda of previous eras, which did in fact frame efforts as building and defending positive things in space.
Its OK for the UK to be strong
If you take a look back at history, literally everyone would disagree. A strong England has done unimaginable damage to almost every other society on the planet.
Any strong empire, nation or person in power has.
With great power yadda yadda
Let me clarify.
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.
[delayed]
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 at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.
Why does a banking app require GPS?
GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.
[delayed]
It doesn't. They're making shit up.
To track you
Data collection and targeted advertising
- The UK is an island nation
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
Security - checking your not accessing it in UK one minute and australia the next minute
Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation
It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.
Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.
That’s beyond about 90% of the population.
not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity. I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website
It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.
In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.
In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.
Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?
All of that can be handed via your bank's website, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a Cheque.
The UK's largest export is banking (i.e. money laundering).
Not a strange thing at all. London sees itself as the competitor for the finance capital of the world. Why would you think it's strange?
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cutting-edge-timing-techn...
I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends.
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
This is not an attack. The satellites aren't being damaged.
one step closer to star wars
Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?