The classic idea is to release them in the same orbit, but in the opposite direction. Any that hit will do so at orbital velocity, and as they will come around again and again they’ll have multiple chances to hit even with poor aim.
Right, but that takes a lot more energy, because you not only have to get the impactors up, but you have to get them to orbital speed.
It’d depend on how high up your target is. For low earth orbit, the orbital speed is the vast majority of the energy. Anyone who’s making any serious effort at rocketry at all can get the height. As you get higher, though, the potential energy rises and the kinetic energy at the top decreases. For a geosynch satellite, say, an opposing orbit might make sense (though would inflict a lot of collateral damage on everyone else’s satellites, too).
I was watching the news at the dentist office this week. They had a segment where a reporter visited one of Google’s data centers. The reporter had to scan her keycard 6 times and do a facial scan.
Well, usually in such a hypothetical the target is a military satellite, and in a war a tactic of “destroy all the assets you can” is pretty common. Especially when there’s nothing alive there to be killed.
Not sure why somebody would blow up an orbiting “data center”, but presumably their reasons would influence how much is the way of collateral damage they card about.
Destroy all of the enemy’s assets you can, sure. But preferably without getting every other technological nation in the world into the war against you, too. Plus, of course, probably some of your own assets are up there, too.
We had a similar thread in November when Google announced a moonshot project to explore datacenters in orbit:
Here is the announcement:
Which also has a link to their whitepaper that outlines the challenges (radiation, heat, cost, networking, etc.). It includes cost projections as well.
Google’s strategy here is to use a single project or goal to further development in multiple areas. Even if the goal ends up failing, the hope is their is collateral innovation.
In any case, datacenters in inaccessible places like space or the ocean will be running commodity HW for common use-cases. It could be tasked with batch processing corporate data overnight, for example. The cutting edge stuff would stay local-ish.
To be fair, a typical non-datacenter Google office has badge scans at most doors and elevators.
Are there office buildings that don’t require badge scans to go between areas? I thought that was standard in any business that needs information security.