Now I have to read this as "retrograde geostationary" sounds like "standing still backwards".

That doesn't make sense. A geostationary orbit, by definition, cannot be retrograde.

No, but it could be the same height and going the other direction. But I'm not sure why that would be something you want to do?

>An orbital informant satellite in retro-GEO however would be able to pass by all assets in GEO every 12 hours.

Yeah I got my wires crossed for a second about how it was supposed to stay stationary if it was orbiting opposite Earth's rotation.

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It's for monitoring other satellites & debris in & near geostationary orbit. The US has satellites that do the same thing, but they are in prograde orbits so it takes a long time for them to catalog everything in GEO.

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This is terrifying. Many years ago a proposal was made on how to rapidly destroy every satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Launch a "moon probe" that will do a flyby of the moon, but the return trajectory would enter a retrotgrade geosynchronous orbit.

Once the orbit is entered, it simply gently blows up a payload of a million ball bearings. You now have a million pieces of debris going in a counter orbit at very high speed. It will destroy every single satellite in that orbit in 12 hours.

The idea is that a nation that did not depend on geosynchronous orbit could "level the playing field" against a nation that did make use of that.

Doing it in retro would make it near impossible to safely catalog anything. They just want to have the threat of it being there looming.

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It has the same velocity as geostationary objects, just in the opposite direction.

They probably mean just above or below GEO. Such a satellite, equipped with radar, would catalog all satellites & debris in GEO every 12 hours.

Well above or below wouldn't work. If you mean further out then that'd be a bad idea since that's where most graveyard orbits are and if you mean closer in then sure that's possible but positions of GEO satellites do not require space-based detection. There is really no point in doing this unless you were operating like gssap

Above as in higher altitude, not a different inclination. If space based detection isn't necessarily, why does the US do it?

"More accurate tracking and characterization of man-made orbiting objects." You can do a lot more at ~0 relative velocity versus ~6 kps though

Not necessarily. Taking multiple measurements from different angles can be more useful than sitting still and staring at it all day.

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RPO is not a static operation Edit: to expand, that article you sent says that gssap conducts RPO meaning it moves along the belt as you mentioned. Since it is so close it can actually look from more angles in a safer manner than a retro orbit

It would be the same orbit but in reverse direction. So it would see everything in Geosync fly by at double velocity every 12 hours. Really good way to survey everything in geosync and possibly to attack them.

One imagines that the launches for such a vehicle would experience a series of mysterious failures

Like exploding into a million pieces the second it gets into retrograde geostationary orbit? Oops, didn’t mean to, sorry bout your gps system

note to self: add "ball bearings taking out all modern conveniences" to things to worry about at 2 am

Point taken, though I believe the GPS is in MEO with multiple inclinations/planes.

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I mean before it even gets out of the atmosphere. US says, huh, bummer about that.

i find spacex to be concerning also

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It’s basically driving the wrong way on the busiest freeway on (above) earth

Yeah the article seems misleading on this point. A retro-GEO orbit is silly, but what it actually says is “orbital informant satellite in retro-GEO.” This makes a huge difference as the informant satellite would be just outside of GEO and would just fly close to the actual GEO instead of in it. That way it could take a peeksie at the stuff in GEO and do a more rapid check on the things in it.

those are in LEO tho?

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You're getting tied up in an earth orientation reference frame. Geostationary satellites orbit the earth with enough velocity relative to earth to sit over the same spot on the ground. Which means it has to orbit the planet once every 24ish hours. In an inertial frame, that's significant amounts of velocity. Going in the opposite direction means it will be traveling quite rapidly over the ground and still maintain a stable orbit at that altitude (or semimajor axis).

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |ASAT|Anti-Satellite weapon| |GEO|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |MEO|Medium Earth Orbit (2000-35780km)|

|Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |Starlink|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |apoapsis|Highest point in an elliptical orbit (when the orbiter is slowest)| |periapsis|Lowest point in an elliptical orbit (when the orbiter is fastest)|

^(7 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 18 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8169 for this sub, first seen 20th Oct 2022, 22:18]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

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That’s correct, they aren’t really a major concern for space junk because they’re in quite low of an orbit, meaning Even if they explode, most of the debris will burn up in the atmosphere

Not to mention they're designed to have short life spans and continually be replaced.

It’s so simple! Maybe you need a refresher course: it’s all ball bearings nowadays!

Then it should be "retrograde orbit at geostationary orbit altitude" or something

Yup. GPS is not geostationary.

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Lol. That's like shooting a shotgun 300 yards away from a group of toy army soldiers and saying you're going to hit every one of them. There are more than 500 satellites in either geosynchronous and geostationary orbits. No wonder no one did it.

Orbital mechanics are so much harder than what science fiction makes it out to be. Hence why countries are still failing to reach orbit at all. Much less these perfect rendezvous required to knock a satellite out of orbit.

Geostationary means the same point on earth is in the same spot, or more specifically the satellite is in the same spot in the sky all the time relative to earth. Geosynchronous means the same spot is in the same position at the same time every day. Usually geosynchronous orbits require some amount of inclination and with inclination and retrograde orbit would make it really difficult to intercept anything as you'd be in a different plane from your "target" in every orbit. Further decreasing your odds of intercept.

where i live there is a ball bearing factory that has been a staple of the city for like 100 years and there's an actual display in the library commemorating them with like this elaborate shadow box thing

my adoptive dad used to design ball bearings and he had a lot to say about them

https://softsolder.com/2017/05/07/relics-of-the-empire-bearing-samples/

picture for reference

The constraints on a geostationary orbit are fairly tight. It's not a wide open orbit, but rather a very narrow line around the earth. The further from dead center, the more fuel they must use for station keeping. They like to stay dead-center because it keeps them in the same place in the sky and reduces the amount of fuel they must expend.

Even dead center, there is drift for several reasons, so fuel must be consumed; just not very much.

The fear is that an enemy will enter the orbit very cleanly, going the opposite direction.

When there are millions of BB's flying at them at 14,000 mph, that's a lot of damage from even one hit. Worse, the entire orbit becomes useless for anybody for many decades.

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They are in LEO, one of the lower orbits in LEO too.

How so?

Thank you! I was stuck on that too. I feel kind of dumb now.

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The odds of a collision between an antistationary (BS term, but I'm sticking with it) satellite and another in geostationary orbit are very low. Even though everything up there is in the "same orbit", that orbit has a cross-section of hundreds of miles.

If everything in that orbit were immovable, the antistationary satellite would still be able to avoid it all. Geostationary isn't actually a static orbit. Due to effects from the moon, sun, tidal forces, and plain old voodoo, a geostationary satellite's orbit will incline over time. This requires that it be equipped with thrusters for station keeping purposes.

Should the new satellite fail, there'd be an ongoing effort to track and predict its position and adjust the orbits of other satellites to ensure no risk of collision. (Since geostationary isn't really a stable orbit, anything up there has to have maneuvering capabilities to stay put.)

The real problem is the possibility of one of the satellites up there getting splatted by a passing space rock. It's incredibly rare (I don't know if it's ever happened to anything in GEO or LEO), but would cause the issue you describe if it happened to the new satellite. If it happened to anything else up there, the debris field would slowly be pulled out of GEO and only return every couple of decades.

Not sure it's worth the risk....

Try fitting that into a click-baity headline! =]

specifically elon, i guess

the whole thing feels like an ego trip and yeah i get it, i guess i would be all out there too if i was rich, but there's a lax-ness that is concerning on his part

That's like putting a group of toy soldiers in a perfect straight line and hitting all of them with one bullet.

> Orbital mechanics are so much harder than what science fiction makes it out to be. Hence why countries are still failing to reach orbit at all.

Apart from one country that still uses medieval measurement units, I've never heard of a spacecraft failing due to wrong orbital calculations. They aren't done on a blackboard like the guy in Don't Look Up did, but they aren't particularly hard to do.

I do this professionally, I work in a company that controls satellites in geostationary orbit, the error in orbit determination calculations is in the order of magnitude of ten centimeters or so. You can think of it as an "inverse GPS": it's possible to determine the position of a satellite in orbit from ground measurements the same way GPS allows us to determine the position of something on the earth surface.

I've been hanging out with aerospace engineers for a few years. But, even with basic physics you need to remember: all velocity is relative to a point of reference. When dealing with orbits it gets so complicated that we have to be mentally agile enough to accept that there are many useful reference frames that all make sense depending on what you're observing. Most humans default to thinking in terms of ECEF reference frame so it can be hard to think of other frames and how the relative numbers are affected.

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I've always wondered who is designing this stuff. Something so innocuous that everyone uses . . . .

Thank him for his service for me

Altitude, geostationary orbit:

35,786 km (22,236 miles)

Altitude, Starlink orbit:

550 km (340 miles)

Prepare that fetzer valve with 3 in 1 oil and gauze pads

he died of COVID 😥

but he would have liked to hear something like that . . .

. . . and would then launch into an hour diatribe about the uselessness and temporary nature of current objects that we use everyday, his favorite topic

seriously tho, ball bearings are serious business and there's no such thing as a perfect sphere

It's ball bearings ..."all the way down".

> The idea is that a nation that did not depend on geosynchronous orbit could "level the playing field" against a nation that did make use of that.

The Venn diagram of "countries that don't need geosynchronous orbit" and "countries capable of launching spacecraft" contains no overlap whatsoever, even before getting into the fact that a country which took out the planet's geosynch satellite network wouldn't level the playing field as much as get leveled by everyone else on it.

I'm sorry for our loss.

I've honestly always assumed these people are genius. It sounds like he had all the passion I imagined, I'm so happy to hear he enjoyed his time here. Man, such an uplift to me that I shared a temporary stay on this planet with him -- I really needed to hear about him.

Seriously, what a massive impact

Wow, that's way different from a satellite that's at Geo-stationary altitude but going backwards. Thanks for clarifying.

Isn’t this what happened in the movie Gravity with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock? But it was shrapnel that destroyed the shuttle and ISS?

i was adopted when i was 19

i had never known "dad" before and there he was lol

the kind of guy that built a seaworthy canoe for a church thing when they were just looking for painted props haha

thank you for your kind words, i needed to hear those, too

Yup, I was initially very confused at the idea, but then I realized what they were talking about and was like oh that is way different than what most people would assume it to be

That’s almost certainly true - but that’s only one angle on the original theory

The other angle is that a country which believes it’s adversary would be more disadvantaged by removing satellites, may choose to do so, again to level the playing field

Imagine you went to war, and both you and your enemy have an Air Force, but you can somehow stop all aircraft flying in the conflict zone. If their Air Force is much stronger than yours, you may choose to forego your Air Force in exchange for the greater prize of denying your enemy theirs

This gave me the hilarious vision of satellites tripping on ball bearings on the floor and falling on their asses.

>my adoptive dad used to design ball bearings and he had a lot to say about them

I know you're talking about the entire mechanism, but the first thing that popped into my head was just the spherical bearings. "Hey Johnny, have you figured out what our next bearings are gonna look like?" "Yes, I was thinking about perfectly spherical balls of metal, just like our thousand previous designs."

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Until China takes Taiwan, if that ever happens.

Edit: y’all are right, no country would ever try to take over another country with valuable manufacturing centers, never.

This isn't a case of the "new satellite failing", but rather the new satellite deciding to self destruct an hour after it arrives. The entire point of the mission would be to deny use of the entire geostationary for everyone.

If a satellite has several tons of ball bearings and simply releases them, they will over a day or two spread over the entire orbit.

There has already been a two confirmed debris collisions in geostationary orbit, with another 20 suspected. This was a case where it wasn't intentional. Imagine 3 or 4 tons of steel balls intentionally released into that same orbit on purpose.

I used to think of him as Heinlein's "D.D. Harriman" (The Man Who Sold the Moon) in real life. But the more he shoots his mouth off and pulls silly stunts, the more I think of his Mars ideas as the Ultimate Doomsday Prepper, with plans for an out of this world bunker - on Mars.

To be fair, he did more than anyone else to push acceptance of electric cars, to take them from boring to desirable. He also moved the launch business to re-usable and closer to commonplace.

But when he opens his mouth, it can make it hard to remember the good things.

So if I'm not mistaken, according to what you've just said, the toy soldiers are lined up so precisely that one bullet taking them all out isn't unreasonable. I know, it's not really that bad, if only because the bullet would be deflected by the first collision and you said 10cm. But the cloud of retrograde ball-bearings sounds like it might really be devastating.

Nobody - not even the Inscrutable Unfettered Evil Yellow Peril - is going to wipe out the entire planet's telecommunications, including their own, in an attempt to "level the playing field" against the United States. The scenario is entirely ridiculous.

History has shown people do much worse things

The relative velocity at GEO altitude but in the opposite direction would be around 6km/s with very brief observation periods which would make determining anything about an object difficult. Going 'with the flow' so to speak would take longer to see everything but relative velocity is lower and longer observation periods, which makes determining an object's orbit much easier.

What you're suggesting isn't something trivially done like magically temporarily stop all aircraft flying for a strategic leveling. It's more akin to permanently destroying Geostationary orbit functionally forever.

This is more like the Matrix's "Let's blot out the Sun forever to get an advantage against the Machines" level decision. Maybe useful for this one battle, but then even if you win, you are worse off than just flat out losing conventionally.

It is, but there’s always the possibility that a country finds itself in an existential war

If they believe this decision could be a factor in the life and death of themselves and their people/families etc then it’s not beyond question that they do it, on the basis of “if we don’t do it, we definitely die, if we do it, we probably die, let’s worry about the consequences later, if we don’t die”

They don’t have to use this weapon, even - but if you have it you can decide whether or not to use it. If you don’t have it, you can’t.

I very much doubt it would ever be used - I generally agree that any country with the ability to develop and deploy it, is probably advanced enough that they don’t really feel that they need it… but that won’t necessarily stop someone developing it “just in case”

There are numerous countries who have enough nukes to wipe out the majority of the world’s population, weapons that exist solely for retribution if they’re already dead… this satellite is several steps below that

If they consider the conflict to be an existential war (a fight for their lives and country’s existence), why would they care what happens in future? If they don’t do it, they stop existing and don’t give a shit. If they do, then maybe it’s a problem to worry about later, if they even live that long

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You really think that if we were (actively) at war with Russia right now that Putin wouldn't strongly consider doing this?

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It's Mutually Assured Destruction lite. Sure, Kessler Syndrome in GEO is less instantly lethal, but the point about MAD isn't for half-measures. You go big or you go home.

If you suffer an existential threat, you don't merely inconvenince future generations by making weather satellites more inconvenient. You threaten to kill everyone in nuclear hellfire to prevent existential threats.

I know that We^TM are always intrinsically sane and They^TM are always intrinsically not, but no, Russia would not destroy most of its capability to communicate internally in the event of a war with the west because that would simply hasten their already-assured defeat.

China definitely isn't going to do it out of the blue like people panicking over this story seem to assume.

But if you haven’t yet reached nuclear hellfire, perhaps you do this as a statement while pointing out that it’s a symbol of your willingness to go nuclear if necessary

Overall the cost of this weapon would be pretty low, I’m just saying that I can see why a country might want it in their back pocket

But what if you need ones that are exactly 3.7654mm in diameter? You're going to need Johnny then!

Handwringy what-ifs over applying the conduct of genocidal superpower wars to other situations is silly.

If things got to that point, nothing they could do would confer any advantages because the nukes would be flying anyway. If things didn't get to that point, scenarios like "how about we destroy global telecommunications and meteorology, because that totally won't completely screw us too" aren't going to come up.

I don’t see why we would assume the nukes would be flying - nuclear warfare involves various levels of escalation (See: Able Archer or the Cuban Missile Crisis), this could feasibly be one of them

Don’t tell me my business boy, I’m checkin’ the luggage!

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You already said the scenario is a "we stop existing or they stop existing" war between superpowers. If you think that wouldn't go nuclear I don't know what to tell you.

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You are either facing an existential threat, or you aren't. MAD isn't about winning, it's about making everyone, including yourself, lose.

If you aren't facing an existential threat, you don't destroy something valuable to neutral and allied nations permanently just to get some temporary advantage or "to show you are serious". Destroying common resources permanently only pisses off others unrelated to the conflict and is guaranteed to escalate the conflict and push it closer towards an actual existential threat, making it more likely for everyone to all lose under MAD instead of simply threatening to push the button to get the enemy to back off.

If you are facing an existential threat, MAD with nukes is the best option. You don't need a "symbol of your willingness to go nuclear". You just show off your nukes, and then show a red button and threaten to press it. No half-steps, especially permanent half-steps like Kessler Syndrome GEO, because that just pisses people off and makes it more likely that you have to press the button, which you don't want to anyways because you will still die.

You can be facing an existential threat without yet being at war

Again, see the USSR response to Able Archer - they believed that NATO was escalating to nuclear war, but they didn't immediately mash the nuclear button

This... seems off. I'm not saying it won't work - but it's definitely not as trivial as just setting off a shrapnel bomb a bit above geosync orbit.

Orbital space isn't as crowded as it seems - it's quite high up and the amount actually occupied by satellites is infinitesmal.

Plus which, if you set off an explosion on top of the geosynch orbit, only a very minor fraction of the debris will remain in geosynch orbit. Most will be propelled to a higher or lower orbit. And the debris that do end up in geosynch orbit will have very low relative velocity to the other satellites, since they share the same orbit.

Plus, it's difficult to get a killshot on a satellite unless you're aiming for one. You can nick a solar panel or a make a hole in the casing, but to render the satellite inoperable, you'd have to punch through one of its vital systems - for example - the CPU, a comms antenna, or the battery array.

Which - especially on one of the larger milsats - makes up a small fraction of the total satellite mass.

This sounds like the kessler syndrome scare again.

If that did happen what makes you think the Taiwanese wouldn't sabotage/destroy their semi conductor production lines?

Make that "in a retrograde orbit at geostationary orbital altitude."

How do you adopt an adult?

So like the movie Swordfish but in space?

Oh great, we can add "Intentional Kessler cascade" to our "Global Thermonuclear/biowarfare Worry sheet."

Seriously, vandalism at a planetary scale.

Spacex's satellites are intentionally short-lived and have a useful life of just five years. If someone went to the enormous trouble of knocking them all out, SpaceX could just launch a barebones service replacement on the next satellite full of replacements they were going to launch anyways.

Honestly, part of why I'm reluctant to commit to using Starlink is because it sounds like it has very high operating and maintenance costs for that reason. Sure, Musk has made space launches cheaper. Cheap enough to intentionally use short-lived satellites for long-term static services? I don't know....

Most orbits don't have to be extremely precise. A satellite will pass overhead a few seconds earlier or later over time. They correct the drift when it gets bad enough, but it's not a deal breaker, moment to moment if it's early or late.

But the geostationary orbit does need to be fairly precise. There are millions of dishes that point to the location. The further it is from its exact slot, the more it will drift across the sky. That's undesirable, so they try to keep it right on the centerline of the orbit.

The bad guys would not so much "explode" the vehicle, as unzip it, releasing the millions of balls, letting orbital dynamics do the work. over a few hours they will spread out. Getting hit by one one at 14,000 mph could be awful.

Considering a small fleck of paint actually made a small divot in a Space Shuttle window, imagine what a ball bearing weighing 1/10th of an ounce will do at 14,000mph

You can fit about 3.5 million 1/8th inch ball bearings in 1,000 pounds. That's a lot of debris released all-at-once.

This is essentially boiling down to the logic of mutually assured destruction. A reasonable party would rather not see his country get turned into a glass crater because he launched a first strike. But there's always the danger of some nutjob Putin or Kim who decides that having another five years in office is more important to them than the lives of every man, woman and child on earth.

Of course, what do they care? If they lose, they won't live long enough to see it, while if they win, sure the world is wrecked, but hey, they survived and kept hold of power, and that's the really important thing.

It's similar logic to MAD, but a clear step down

But in any case, MAD never stopped countries from wanting nukes, why would it stop anyone from wanting this?

Haha right??

3.8mm? You've gone mad johnny! Mad!

War is a zero sum game. As long as your opponent is more dependent on those orbits than you are it is a net benefit to make them unusable.

So my initial reaction is, you have satellites, which do station keeping, and ball bearings, which do not. So after the initial blast, the vast majority of the debris should be kicked to a different orbit, and no longer a "threat" to the current orbit.

That said, I'd imagine debris kicked off into the lower orbits could pose a serious concern to future satellite launches.

I agree that the initial impact will be quite devastating, but it won't disable the entire orbit.

No need for a real blast. Just unzip and release them. Orbital dynamics will spread them out. Combinations of sunlight, magnetic fields, jostling with each other will spread them out over a period of days.

They might do like SpaceX does with Starlink. Rotate the vehicle slowly and then just please the payload. A very slow spin will impart enough delta-V to cause them to slowly spread out.

Station keeping tries to keep these satellites within 0.15 degree of their slot. That's about 60 miles worst case. Releasing a few million ball bearings could be awful, especially since you get "another shot" at a collision with any specific satellite every 12 hours.

There have been two confirm hits by space debris on geostationary satellites already with another 20 suspected. That was because of accidents. Now imagine several tons of debris specifically put there for that exact purpose.

How is that an existential threat? No massive waves of nukes were fired out of their silos, no bombers entering Soviet airspace, no invasion crossed the borders. Impending threats yes, but not like they had their territory violated.

(EDIT: Misread it. Regardless, the USSR perceived an existential threat by NATO, and responded by threatening existential defeat for NATO by readying their nuclear weapons for launch. They didn't want to actually fire them until they have confirmation of nuclear war, and this is behaving in a manner consistent with MAD.)

Even if the USSR interpreted the malfunctioning early warning systems as an actual nuclear attack, and thus existential defeat is imminent, and behaved in your scenario by Kessler Syndroming GEO as a "symbol of their willingness to go nuclear" (pretend for a moment that Kessler Syndroming GEO is actually viable in the 80s), only find out that this was due to technical glitches and aggressive drills, what they would have done was escalate the scenario by destroying NATO assets, increasing the likelihood of leading to an actual nuclear war, which will be the lose condition for everyone.

What the USSR did in reality in response to believing that NATO was escalating to a first strike nuclear launch was more in line with the usual MAD response. They readied their nuclear arsenal (knowing that NATO would realize what they are doing), and prepared to fire back in the event of a nuclear strike.

Again, no one wants to activate MAD. It's purpose is that once a nation acknowledges existential defeat, it has the option to bring everyone else to hell with it in the hope that the threat of doing so is enough to avoid existential defeat in the first place.

Deploy a heavily magnetic satellite to help clean up our messes maybe?

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If you want to have the option to destroy GEO satellites at a moments notice, this would be the way to go. Adjust the orbit slightly and you've got a kinetic missile impacting a satellite moving in the opposite direction at a relative velocity of 14,000 miles per hour. You'd probably leave the entire GEO belt unusable for a few decades, but if the shit truly hits the fan on Earth, maybe you don't care.

Tons of telecommunications satellites in that orbit along with many other mission critical birds. Here's a list. https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=10

Always have a knife in the dark

To not anger the people that just took over their country...

Worth noting that China has been developing space debris clean up programs in recent years.

Well hopefully not exactly at Geo altitude, otherwise it’d be very short lived

Even space ball bearings at ultra sonic speeds cannot ruin a truly heartfelt soup.

How long would it take for those ball bearings to become 'shooting stars'?

It's retro grade. They are talking about using the moon for a gravity assist to do it in the paper.

Just spitballing but could we release dust or gas in geosynchronous orbit to slow down the balls? Wouldn’t interact harshly with objects going in same direction due to same relative velocity and small mass.

> It will destroy every single satellite in that orbit in 12 hours.

It will also deny GEO for the next 100.000 or so years for every power, including the one doing the destroying.

But it won't be in geostationary orbit.

It will be at the same altitude, as geostationary/geosynchronous orbits, but it won't be either

That's why LEO constellations are important.

Much less centralised, much more robust by being a swarm

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ELI5 what’s a retrograde geostationary orbit? Online search is either similar article or wiki, which isn’t helpful.

Ball-bearing induced Keppler Syndrome

Every country on the planet would be pissed at the one who launched that.

everyone who uses GPS in their car, or company that uses GPS time stamps (google for one)

GPS has literally become a mission-critical piece of human life.

(and by GPS i'm referring to all the positioning systems, not just the American system, they would all be wiped out)

Good analogy btw.

Through the same legal process of becoming a legal parent of a child, just with someone who's already independent rather than dependent on the state. You pick up the relevant papers at the courthouse, fill out the information and go through the submission process and eventually see a family court for a judge to sign off on it.

A lot of step-parents do it or sometimes people do it so their inheritance is passed on to a person and not the state, there are some heartwarming compilations of the former on youtube.

"Hey Johny, we need some 3,7654 mm bearings."

"Yeah, I was thinking of a design with perfectly smooth orbs with a diameter of 3,7654mm."

"Johny, you're revolutionary."

The reason it doesn't sound destructive is because you missed the part where the debris are being released in a retrograde GEO-altitude orbit (which isn't harder to reach than regular GEO). Which means they would still follow a GEO-like orbital path, but going the opposite way (impact velocity will be 6 km/s or 13400 mph).

To make an american metaphor, it's like driving thousands of motorbikes the wrong way on a nascar race course, without allowing the cars nor the bikes to deviate from their race trajectory.
Sure, you probably won't hit all the cars on the first lap, but by the end of the day....

Where I live the Council lets businesses sponsor roundabouts (quirky little UK nonsense with roads).

My favourite one on my way to work every morning that never failed to give me a chuckle was sponsored by an office supply company called Go Faster Stationery.

Taiwan is an island of capitalists who seethe every morning when they wake up

a way better sentiment than "live laugh love"

in my case my adoptive parents got a lawyer, they filed the paperwork and i was adopted (along with my younger sisters)

once the adoption went through, i got a new birth certificate with my adoptive parents listed as my legal parents rather than my biological ones

Seems like this is exactly what they are attempting. Nothing else makes sense.

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A satellite in a prograde GEO circles the Earth at the exact same speed as the Earth rotates so stands still over the same point of the Earth, which is very usefull.

A satellite at the same altitude (i.e. same apoapsis and periapsis) in a retrograde orbit circles the Earth in the exact REVERSE speed of the Earth's rotation, so it will pass over all points on the ground under its orbit two times a day, which is pretty much useless (specifically the "exactly two times a day" part is useless).

Somebody else explained this was meant to actually be a little higher than GEO orbit and going in the opposite direction, so its purpose was to watch the satellites in GEO orbit rather than anything on the planet Earth.

PS: Think I've posted this as answer to the wrong post, but the point still stands.

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No, all the things in that analogy are big and close together. It's not even mosquitos in a stadium.

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Watch Gravity twice, once for the thrill ride, then again for the orbital mechanics comedy.

Magnetism doesn't have the range, and most satellite stuff isn't magnetic anyway (steel is heavy)

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Laxness like perfect execution, over and over and over again?

Elon has his personal flaws, but SpaceX is not one of them.

Yup. Thank you. That's what I was missing

Yeah if you can get a bunch of ball bearings going retrograde, you will rip up the entire orbit like a shotgun blast that keeps on going.

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That is exactly the problem with anyone doing that orbit retrograde, with anything.

They also don't generate new debris upon impact that will keep crossing the race course forever, so...

That aptly describes project development where I work!

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Okay, I can understand where you are coming from. In some science communities, we end up with shorthand definitions for concepts that diverge from common definitions. There's even a term for this phenomenon: "jargon." When dealing with aerospace people, the rough properties of orbits are grouped into orbital planes. We don't really have a more generic term for the orbital plane where it requires little energy to maintain a stable progression that matches earth's rotation. In the 1960's we might have called it the "Clarke Belt." But I have never heard any aerospace person use that term. We all refer to it as the "geo belt" because that's the altitude where the biggest advantage is it is easier to remain stationary over the ground. You can also be stationary over the ground at any other altitude given enough energy. If someone is talking about the science or engineering of orbits, "geostationary" really only implies an altitude that exhibits some beneficial properties and not the more understood use of the word "stationary."

In this article, the author is using the term as in-community jargon. To differentiate this type of satellite motion, the author chose to qualify it with the term "retrograde" which implies an inverse motion.

In fact, I am currently working on a mission that will orbit the planet in the geostationary belt, but it will intentionally not match the rotation of the planet for most of its mission life.

Maybe as ASAT tech and other non-traditional mission profiles become more common, the community can eschew the "stationary" part of the term to better describe that orbital plane.

Also, don't let an aerospace person hear you refer to geostationary and geosynchronous as the same. I also made that mistake early on.

Probably no more than a few decades. Orbital dynamics would spread the items to other orbits. There's always be more there we'd like, but in a decade the density would lower enough to be manageable.

If you were in a struggle with an enemy that really depended on those satellites and you felt you could manage without them, you might strike such a blow to gain an advantage in that war.

I'm not remotely suggesting it's a good idea, but it's certainly one that I'm sure various powers have evaluated doing, or worried about being done to them.

Sand works too, at orbital speeds. Just sayin.

I understand what you mean about drifting above or below the ring but it would still be going pro-grade with respect to the spin of the earth.

Definitely the paper is saying this proposed satellite would be retro-grade. That would reduce visit times for spying on other satellites and other less nice things.

Kessler cascade. One is destroyed and there is a ton more debris to take down the next one, and so forth.

I think I used the wrong terminology.

By "higher" I meant with a higher Apoapsis and Periapsis, so an orbit further out than GEO.

It's not possible to have an orbit fully above or below "the ring" (I presume you mean the orbital plane) - the best you can do is an orbit which is part of the time above and part of the time below, i.e. with an orbital tilt.

This makes sense if you think of the methaphor were you are rotating a bucket full of water at the end of a rope: if you try and make it go higher in relation to the hand which holds the rope you'll find it just goes down at the other end of the circle, making inclined circle, half the time above that point and half below.

The very same effects that keep an object in orbit by pulling it towards the Earth also pull it down when higher and up when lower, effectivelly forcing the orbit to be in a mathematical plane that includes the Earth, though a plane that can be different than the normal orbital plane.

Shitty part is that we ALL benefit from at least SOMETHING in that orbit. Weather, internet, TV. Sure two of those are just entertainment but those weather satellites keep people safe, are used in education, and assist serious research in atmospheric and geographic sciences.