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.
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The internet would still exist, people would have less access though especially in remote places
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Weather Service would be impacted, I think? But much of that is also done with radar.
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I don’t know anything about air traffic control! Does that have satellites?
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Those ugly TV dishes would still be ugly, but maybe they could be ugly spider plant planters or something.
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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.
Which satellites?
- GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, are separate constellations for geolocation and time synchronization, located at around 20,000Km
- Geostationary TV and radio transceivers, weather and geosurvey satellites, at around 35,000Km
- Spy and surveillance satellites at eccentric orbits
- LEO satellites, telescopes, space stations, StarLink and friends, at up to 1200Km
Given the distance-squared rule, it’s hard to imagine a large disruption to most satellites, particularly the ones on higher orbits.
Cellphones depend very weakly on satellites, just for a rough geolocation estimate and maybe time sync. Otherwise, they depend on cell towers, and are using WiFi hotspot data for precise location. Car navigation could be impacted, in phones that wouldn’t support any of the geolocation constellations left.
Internet, 4/5G, and WiFi, are 99.99% terrestrial, even in remote areas.
Weather predictions would definitely get impacted, the terrestrial predictions based on patterns and radar, is what gave us semi-random estimates 40 years ago.
Air traffic is incoporating GPS services, but doesn’t fully deprecate VOR, ILS, magnetic, visual, or even celestial navigation.
TV dishes are pointed at geostationary satellite groups, they’re far away and hard to impact… except when it’s raining or snowing. A good layer of thunderstorm clouds can wreak havoc with Sat TV, both at the emitter and the receiver.
Spy satellites are the least likely to get impacted by anything, they are more likely to have good shielding and weird orbits.
Thanks for this really informative response. The distinctions in altitude was an unknown-unknown for me. I was aware of the concept of “geostationary” but I didn’t have the word for it.
Given the distance-squared rule, it’s hard to imagine a large disruption to most satellites, particularly the ones on higher orbits.
If it isn’t clear already, I’m under-informed on this technology. As I read about the pollution caused by Space X and others, and as nuclear powers begin weaponizing space, I am trying to understand what the consequences might be.
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:
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.
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.
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.
That’s an interesting question. On an individual scale it would probably take a while before you see any significant effect. A lot of apps like Uber or Doordash would probably be completely out. Amazon and other delivery services would also be completely out, they are 100% reliant on GPS signal. On a global scale most freight and major transportation services by boats or planes would be highly disrupted. Yes you can navigate a ship or fly a plane without GPS, but the entire system is reliant on GPS and transponders which are linked by satellite connections (IIRC, don’t cite me on this). This means we would go back 50 years but with today’s traffic, so good luck with that!
For communication satellites, many remote regions would be completely cut off from the rest of the world, but most cities wouldn’t be impacted at all.
One thing that we don’t often think about is weather forecasting, it is highly reliant on satellite imagery and it has been for a long time.
And I for one would probably be out of a job… Most of my job consists of analyzing satellite and drone imagery. Modern drones need GPS signal to plan autonomous flight missions, so we would need to rely on our very inacurrate manual flying skills.
Anything that uses GPS time (many devices use GPS as Stratum 0) would break. For example stock exchanges that use RF would become out of sync.
This includes traffic lights and various other quality of life improvements that rely on LTE and 5G connectivity. Also all mobile data would be depreciated.
Many wars that involved any precision munitions would stop.
Many air gapped facilities use GPS time as opposed to NTP which includes powerplants nuclear safe guards, and industrial systems will start to become depreciated.
Many wars that involved any precision munitions would stop
Unlikely. They’d just use lower precision munitions, with more “collateral damage”. ICBMs with multiple warheads, are an example of such munitions.
The absence of GPS would collapse the world economy.
What about your individual experience?
I probably wouldn’t even notice.
I’m super curious about @jam 's perspective, as my go-to for solarpunk info. I haven’t considered this before, so I’m trying to wrap my head around the implications.
There’s a lot of news and programming on the radio and TV I would not have seen in the 70s and 80s without networks using satellites to bounce signals across continents and oceans. I’m pretty sure there were phone calls I could not have made in those decades without satellites.
I’m not sure if we have enough intercontinental cables across the seafloors to handle all the traffic if satellites didn’t exist – heck, I’m not even sure if networks like BBC or NBC still use satellites to send their tv/radio signals to distant lands. The thing is they used to and I’m sure it mattered to me in ways I didn’t particularly notice at the time.
A quick search didn’t find great references (so many links on current satellite tech that the old tech seems buried) , but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar#In_service and maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_I
Edit: comm satellite firsts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communications_satellite_firsts
