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.
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.