. . . seems like knocking them out would be useful in a large war. I'm watching Moonraker right now to check.

If it's a military or spy satellite, it most likely is equpped with a small explosive charge. It's better to blow it up than have some other country looking over the technology. It also prevents it from being recovered should it ever fall back through the atmosphere.

Looks like they got rid of the tensioning rod.

It will eventually just boil down to sending large bombs into space to either blast debris farther into space or closer to Earth so it falls back through the atmosphere and burns up/crashes. We're almost captive as it is.

>the map also puts LEO to Mars surface at 9.5km/s,

And that's only if you pretend aerobraking doesn't exist.

With aerobraking it's only 5km/s max. Including landing.

I’m glad they shared that. I was disappointed when the webcast ended after insertion. I figured they would at least show deployment this time since they are new satellites.

You somehow have to slow down at Mars.

Either you need a lot of propellant for that which you also have to accelerate towards Mars in the first place, or you need a big heat shield.

If you insist on a modular system for the station, but you want to utilise a heatshield anyway because that's just far less mass than propellant, then you need to cluster your modules closer than on the ISS. You then can build the heat shield kinda like a surfboard.

As others have said: the ISS predominantly tough us to put as many systems on the inside for ease of maintenance. This and non-toxic cooling fluids. Because stuff will leak.

But when you engineer your way through all those steps and problems and try to optimise things you quickly realise you actually want something like Starship. Big volume, easy to build, integrated heat shield, enormous tanks.

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> Or, well, not actually watch it. I guess you will have larger problems to think about.

That would be a terrifying thing to see from orbit. My guess is that it would look pretty cool if you could get over the existential crisis that it probably just caused you.

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https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/ might be your best bet.

Getting them back alive is still being worked on.

I watched a documentary on space junk at least 5 years ago and it was already OOC. So we will probably neglect it, a tragedy will happen, we will ignore it, and then try hail mary solutions and fail because our leadership are idiots. We can’t even keep the planet clean and you want us to clean up space too!!??

Could space junk be repurposed/recycled in space to help build bases?

Love that movie.

Basically every country agrees not to fuck with each other's stuff. The cost of getting mass to orbit and the rather limited intel that little robot can gather makes it work.

Well before we see Moonraker level satellite theft, we have to contend with the much cheaper "let's just shoot them down" option. This capability is currently only within the reach of countries that already have an active space program or are aligned with a country that does. The worry is if two smaller nations decide to try it to get the upper hand in a conflict.

A treaty. Enforced by the signatories. There are only a handful of countries with launch capability, even fewer that can put large numbers of satellites in orbit, and even fewer that can put up a moon base. This is basically saying we need to make rules and get China to follow them.

Those deorbit rather quickly.

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Great, more space trash when this billionaire toddler gets bored with the idea and abandons it.

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who is going to enforce the rules? the space marines?

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