Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Russians In Space...Well, Maybe Not Much Longer || Peter Zeihan" video.

Building a ground station for a satellite network costs maybe $25M dollars. It would not surprise me if Russia has enough pull worldwide, to build some of these stations in various parts of the globe that would give them even better contact scheduling than they have now.
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Exploration is not commercially viable at this point. No material is valuable enough to make the trip up and down the gravity well worthwhile. There's a reason that the only thing we trade with space is modulated photons. On the other hand, there's still a market for station-keeping fuel in Geostationary orbit. Back when it cost $10k to move a pound of goods to GEO, the market value for station-keeping and end-of-life graveyard boosting fuel was $3B-$4B a year. It's entirely possible that within 10 years or so, we could research a way to get fuel out of asteroids. $3B-$4B a year would be a healthy market to pursue. Unfortunately for that business model, now that Elon Musk has entered the market, the cost is down to something like $800 / lb to GEO. This drops the max revenue from $3B-$4B to $300M - $400M or less, which is unlikely to be enough to capture, return, and deliver fuel from asteroids to every satellite in GEO. If instead of modulated photons we wanted to deal in bulk photons (Space Solar Power), that might be possible, and might even be profitable if the power satellite floated from one time zone / market to another, delivering power at peak prices. Rectenna farms for receiving power are currently prohibitively large and expensive, though.
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Interest in cleaning up "space junk" (including debris from shattered satellites) is climbing a bit, but apart from auxiliary propulsion units to haul end-of-life satellites into junkyard orbits, it seems to be mostly in the thinky-talky phase. Imagine a B-17 raid over Germany. Imagine the flak, the fighters, etc. Now imagine that instead of all that debris crashing to the ground, it stays up there in the air for the next several centuries or more. Now imagine that debris traveling from one airspace to another, shattering the planes in those airspaces, until all of the airspace over every country is full of flying debris. This could easily happen in space, where you have satellites instead of aircraft. It's known as "Kessler Syndrome". People worry about a single satellite's destruction setting off this cascade. Without a robust junk removal program in place, the United States stands to lose the most from any space warfare, be it in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Orbit (MEO, where GPS lives), or high orbit (Geostationary). The worst part is, Russian spacecraft are in what's called a Molniya orbit, as Peter pointed out, which swings from Low to High so that it spends as much time as possible over high-latitude Russian territory. This traversal means that any debris cloud from a shattered Russian satellite could potentially move through just about all of the orbits we care about.
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@will201084 Satellites can be taken down with a standard missile launched from a boat. It's incredibly vulnerable. No one wants to cause Kessler Syndrome, though. The US stands to lose the most from it, in fact.
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@doujinflip Staffing and maintaining it costs about $5M a year. Security? Not sure, possibly another $5M. It's not trivial, but it's not impossible either. (I'm taking 2010 numbers, adjusted for inflation.)
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"Deep Space satellite communication systems" What, so the Russians can't bring their reinforcements in from Mars? Please use terminology correctly here, you sound silly.
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@uhliuv Mars has already been conquered. It is entirely inhabited by robots, who are controlled by an esoteric organization located in Pasadena, California. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's not.
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@CoffeeAndPaul Is the US Coast Guard still publishing the offset factors that make the difference between commercial and military resolution?
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Is this from the spy novel you're writing?
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The first instance of real "space warfare" might well be the last for decades. "Kessler syndrome" describes a cascading effect, where debris from one shattered satellite, traveling with a differential velocity measured in several kilometers per second, causes a chain reaction of shattered satellites throughout many or all of Earth's orbitals. Cleanup of space junk is only in its infancy -- we're just now getting tow trucks to haul defunct satellites into junkyard orbits. Lasers might be able to deal with junk in the 1kg-10 kg range (provided we can track it properly), but even smaller chunks are considered "Lethal Untrackable Debris". While the launch of the tow missions is promising, the laser approach has been discussed for decades without much progress made. This is interesting, I'll do a deeper dive on it.
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