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Rev

This is absurd. A government report starting from the assumption that satellites are not hardened against radiation. Satellites are hardened by design. In space they have to deal with a tough environment. They might fail with a direct powerful solar flar, but that is something that packs a huge amount of energy, apart of them they can deal with the nasty radiations coming alongside the solar wind otherwise they would not work in orbit.
– FluidCode
Commented Feb 16 at 19:30
2

Satellites are indeed hardened against their expected rad doses. Which are nowhere near the doses on the y-axis on that plot. Totally different regimes.
– Jon Custer
Commented Feb 16 at 19:37
1

One thing to consider is how efficient Starlink has been in Ukraine. Due to their numbers, civilian swarm sats would be very difficult to counteract with traditional kinetic-strike ASATs. Not nearly as much with out-of-design-specs radiation/electromagnetic overloads.
– Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
Commented Feb 16 at 20:12
There's another angle to this kind of attacks. It seems it will also produce the highest EMP on earth, based on the Soviet "Project K" tests. So, if anyone were to do this, they'd fry much of the ground telecoms on their own country, or whichever country they'd fire this above, which would almost certainly be considered an attack by the latter. I suppose the only way to avoid that is to do what the US did in Starfish Prime and fire it over the (biggest) ocean.
– got trolled too much this week
Commented Feb 16 at 21:17
2

@userFromEU2 Regarding Satellites are hardened by design -- Many are not, and that includes SpaceX's Starlink satellites. Space-hardened avionics (which includes computers) are massively expensive and massively archaic: Several hundred thousand dollars for half the computing power of a late 1990s Macintosh. There are plenty of replacements should one of the Starlink satellites experience an avionics hard failure. The Ingenuity helicopter flew 72 flights on Mars (5 flights were needed to be deemed a success), with no hardening whatsoever. It used COTS avionics, including the computer.
– David Hammen
Commented Feb 17 at 2:12

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