The three companies met with top officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon in recent weeks to pitch their plan, which would build and launch 400 to more than 1,000 satellites circling the globe to sense missiles and track their movement, sources said.
A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers would then bring enemy missiles down, three of the sources said.
People in one forum speculated about Trump’s “Golden dome” fantasy a few months ago. I did a calculation on the back of a napkin. My result: not 1000 or 200, but about 9000 interceptor vehicles are required for good coverage. Very lucrative contract, very impractical system - they’ll drive the US bankrupt doing this.
And what will a nuclear-armed adversary do? At first, they might do an atmospheric nuclear detonation high over their own country - to get a little privacy. After that, a small number of missiles will launch on flight paths not leading to the target - to create gaps in the sensor and interceptor network by detonating near them in space. Maybe a few minutes later, the main attack will follow. When approaching the target area, the vanguard of the main attack will detonate in atmosphere to ionize air (turn it opaque to radar). Nuclear weapons do not need sensors to navigate or communicate, they use inertial navigation and remain silent. Interceptors need to see and communicate, which can be denied with nuclear weapons.
End result: an advanced attacker will have to spend about 10 minutes to penetrate this defense. It only buys more time to launch a nuclear counter-attack (which could be launched anyway, based on mere observation and early warning).
Satellites are bound by their orbits to spend a lot of time in useless places from the viewpoint of defending a location. This kind of a system makes the defending side over-invest in infrastructure, which is not economical.
Wannabe feudal lords come for military power, as they always have.
Omg its just like Moonraker
I’m GLAD we ELIMINATED FOOD SAFETY INSPECTIONS so we could Afford THIS!
Hey now. Some of us may get sick or die, but at least we’ll have an overpriced yet somehow super cheaply made satellite security system operated by a ketamine addict.
Wait…
MAGA supporter: I see nothing wrong here.
But none of this gets to the most jaw-dropping part of this. Musk and Thiel propose making this network of hundreds of surveillance and attack satellites into a subscription service that the Musk/Thiel/Luckey consortium would own and the Pentagon would subscribe to. Not only is this crazy and absurd but it goes without saying that in no normal time would anyone at the Pentagon be okay with the US not owning the hardware at the center of national defense. We’ve seen how this goes with Starlink, where Musk routinely threatens to turn the system on or off based on his whims and opens up separate lines of communications and perhaps deals with adversary leaders like Vladimir Putin.
Of course Musk and Thiel and Palmer freaking Luckey would use this opportunity to not only get apparent no-bid contracts to build this unworkable mess, they’d get permanent parasitic access to government funds just to keep it going.
No part of this makes any strategic sense.
Forget the grift. Letting degenerate corpos have full ownership and control of a global network of attack satellites sounds like a fast track to the Cyberpunk timeline. Why would they not turn it on their masters when they have outright stated they think they should rule the world?
How do YOU like subscription fees US Government? Shitty isn’t it? Then they raise prices on you later and further enshittify. Go ahead, come back in a decade when I told you so. I’ll wait. Or you can just strap Musk to the outside of one of those rockets and launch it. I prefer that much more.
Once these fascists are in jail, it will be important to nationalize spacex, starlink, and this bullshit if it ever happens.
Once these fascists are in jail
We’re in the dogshit timeline, we don’t get to have nice things like justice. :/
Not with that attitude.
he already has turned off starlink at the behest of putin once, he would do it every single time putin demands, like during ELECTIONS, WHICH some of the voter machine uses apparently.
Makes no strategic sense for the government and for America!
Makes perfect sense if you’re billionaires who want to cripple the government and make sure it can never actually stand against you ever again. 🤕
It’s already clearly established that profits come first. This would be a US Defense System… until someone pays more for it not to be.
No. that would be taxpayer dollars. taxpayers will pay for this fraud.
the dude that can’t even keep four wheels on a fucking truck is gonna do wut?!?!
He is gonna leech tax money for a product that he will never deliver.
It’ll be done by next year
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Or a product that he will have built using tax money, and that he will instead use to hold the world ransom.
Don’t worry, he’s also got the help of *checks notes… Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey!
Don’t people feel good for supporting the original Oculus Rift now? I’m so glad the godfather of modern VR is an absolute pile of shit and always was!
Guiding drones to a target is the killer app for VR headsets
He must have watched that pile of shit movie Toys.
So the pentagon is gonna bend over for the sunshine train too? You guys are really fucked if that happens and so are all of us.
🤮
Shedletsky needs to shut the fuck up. All that bitch did was work on Roblox. Yeah, you really built the modern world you fucking chump.
A lot of engineers don’t realize that there is earned expertise and skill in other fields…or that the consent of the governed matters.
And this is why multidisciplinary education is important.
Cops get the benefit of beating people up, engineers get bragging rights for an alleged superiority.
Wrong.
Musk plans to take a bunch of money and not deliver.
One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as “a departure from the usual acquisition process. There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.”
Following in the hallowed (retch) footsteps of Dick Cheney and Halliburton’s no-bid contracts to “rebuild” Iraq.
It’d be a shame if the targeting software got corrupted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Never considered the pros of Kessler syndrome. Also I guess alien defense?.. speed bumps.
project insight?
You mean to pay him to have someone else use it, right?
Because he’s got the cerebral capacity of a cloud of fart particles, and half the personality.
