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How would the end of satellite service impact your life? (beehaw.org)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Lately I have been thinking a bit about how commercial and governmental satellites impact my life, so that I'm mentally prepared for life if they end service. This isn't a doomer post, it's solar punk or whatever. Practical.

The first time I remember interacting with a commercial satellite was in the late 2000s when I got a device with GPS. I don't entirely know how satellites are involved in my current cellphone, but I know it does use them for GPS. Never had sat TV or sat Home Internet.

The internet would still exist, people would have less access though especially in remote places
Weather Service would be impacted, I think? But much of that is also done with radar.
I don't know anything about air traffic control! Does that have satellites?
Those ugly TV dishes would still be ugly, but maybe they could be ugly spider plant planters or something.
I don't care about how nations spy on each other, but it's funny to me that would be impacted.

What about your individual experience? What about the world experience am I missing?

*edit 1 Apparently it would mess up crop rotation in a lot of places and environmental monitoring would be broadly impacted.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I guessed you were thinking nukes. They do pose a risk in space, but it's not intuitive to neither understate or overstate it.

A nuke generates a high pressure shockwave, emits a concentrated blast of particles, and an EM pulse:

There is no air in space for a pressure shockwave to form, so that's a non-issue
While it blasts particles at high speed, we already have a high speed nuclear explosion source of particles: the Sun. Satellites are shielded against that, or they wouldn't last a day.
The EMP is more concentrated than normal EM variations around the Earth, but the effects depend on the length of a conductor, its orientation in the EM field, and the distance from the source: a 500Km long power line wire is more likely to end up with a potential differential that might fry it, than a 0.1Km wide satellite. The intensity of the pulse at 35,000Km, would be 4900 times lower than at 500Km, so a nuke at mid LEO would not be likely to impact geostationary satellites, or vice versa.

At LEO, an average sized nuke could wreak havoc with a bunch of satellites, and fry power lines on the ground. Most electronic devices however, have some kind of case shielding them, particularly the most EM sensitive parts like radios. Cell tower antennas would be more exposed, so that could be a problem. Fiber is completely unaffected, so the backbone of internet would go on as usual. Data centers... it would depend; some are built out in the open, others in nuclear shelters.

A more uncertain aspect, would be the impact on Van Allen belts. They're full of highly energetic particles from the Sun, that everyone tries to avoid as much as possible. A longer shift and exposure to a stream of particles, could take down some satellites.

Another aspect to consider, is that fusion explosions have no theoretical upper bound. With the technology we have, it's hard to make them smaller (so the issue with fusion power production), but there is no upper bound, all the way to the Sun and beyond. Someone potentially "could" create a planet killer... but they better be on another planet (or the Moon) when it goes off.

From a "conventional" point of view, placing nukes in orbit has the issue that it shortens delivery times to less than half: instead of "launch, ascent, travel, descent" it becomes a simple "wait until it's in position, descent". Nations might want to preemptively strike that kind of satellites.

For reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for the thoughtful and informative response. Yes, you have more or less nailed what has me thinking about this.

At LEO, an average sized nuke could wreak havoc with a bunch of satellites,

From a “conventional” point of view, placing nukes in orbit has the issue that it shortens delivery times to less than half: instead of “launch, ascent, travel, descent” it becomes a simple “wait until it’s in position, descent”. Nations might want to preemptively strike that kind of satellites.

So yeah one scenario I'm concerned about is that certain very stupid dictators and CEOs are going to very stupidly launch nuclear armed satellites, leading to LEO warfare which ends sat service.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

putting nukes into space is quite unlikely, even taking into account the current clusterfuck of the US government.

it's been thoroughly studied since the 1950s, for obvious reasons. the practical considerations put it somewhere between "not feasible" and "gigantic pain in the ass".

nuclear weapons need maintenance and upkeep, which the US military is already not terribly good at. a large part of this is that during the Cold War, maintaining nukes was seen as an important job within the military. in the past few decades, if you want career advancement in the military, you'd want to go to Iraq or Afghanistan for actual combat. working with nukes has become somewhat of a dead-end, career-wise.

satellites in LEO have a finite lifespan - the tiny bits of atmospheric drag mean they need to spend a bit of fuel to maintain altitude. after the fuel runs out they're de-orbited, usually into the south Pacific (one of the most believable theories about the purpose of the X-37 space plane is refueling CIA spy satellites). doing that with nukes would be extremely expensive, as well as environmentally catastrophic (though of course the current government would only really care about the former)

and on top of all that...the US simply doesn't need nukes in space. there is the "nuclear triad" of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed bombers, and nuclear-armed submarines. that was established during the Cold War to ensure the US had the ability to strike back at Russia, even if Russia devastated the US with a first strike.

the more realistic scenario in my mind is Kessler syndrome - a satellite-on-satellite collision creates debris, and that debris takes quite a while to fall out of orbit. in the meantime, it can create a chain reaction by colliding with other satellites. space is big, but LEO is much more crowded than it used to be, particularly with Starlink satellites, and those are cheaply manufactured and don't always have reliable thrusters to allow them to move out of the way of any debris.

In the first half of 2024, satellites belonging to SpaceX’s Starlink fleet performed almost 50,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres.

if it did happen, Kessler syndrome wouldn't have much of an immediate impact, but instead a longer, slower-burning one. launches of new satellites into LEO would become less frequent due to the increased risk, and higher orbits (GPS and geosynchronous satellites) would be more risky as well because they would need to pass through the debris cloud. so existing satellites would continue to work, but as they aged out and needed replacement, those replacements would be less likely to happen.