I don’t believe that Russia has the means to selectively destroy many satellites. And as Musk recently put it, we can launch satellites more quickly and cheaply than Russia can launch weapons to bring them down.
That’s a dicey question. We can absolutely build dinky little low-orbit routers like starlink quickly, but modern spy sats, from imaging to sigint, are multi-ton, billion-dollar pieces of equipment. They definitely can’t be replaced as fast or as cheaply as they can be shot down.
And as soon as you do start breaking them, the massive debris clouds (especially in geostationary and LEO) will make replacing them dicey anyway.
Russia (probably?) still has the ability to launch half a dozen Soyuz rockets a year, which means they’re more than capable of shooting down any satellite they want. But that’s kind of like saying Belgium has the ability to sink any warship they want. Technically true, but not if they want keep being a country.
As for “almost 150 F-35s”, the statement is perhaps misleading.
Makes sense though. Russia only has some 30ish of their SU-57s, which they claim is their F35 killer. They can’t come out and say those planes would be outnumbered 50 to 1 even if they weren’t mostly designed to turn tax money into new dachas.
That’s a dicey question. We can absolutely build dinky little low-orbit routers like starlink quickly, but modern spy sats, from imaging to sigint, are multi-ton, billion-dollar pieces of equipment. They definitely can’t be replaced as fast or as cheaply as they can be shot down.
And as soon as you do start breaking them, the massive debris clouds (especially in geostationary and LEO) will make replacing them dicey anyway.
Russia (probably?) still has the ability to launch half a dozen Soyuz rockets a year, which means they’re more than capable of shooting down any satellite they want. But that’s kind of like saying Belgium has the ability to sink any warship they want. Technically true, but not if they want keep being a country.
Makes sense though. Russia only has some 30ish of their SU-57s, which they claim is their F35 killer. They can’t come out and say those planes would be outnumbered 50 to 1 even if they weren’t mostly designed to turn tax money into new dachas.