FAA Considers Canceling Certain Circling Procedures

[denverpilot]

Yes, but does anyone, including the USA, even have the capability of going after satellites at this point?

The more likely scenario for major multiple GPS satellite outages or damage is solar flares. The Sun wins in scale, when it comes to tossing large amounts of mass and charged particles at our atmosphere.

But to answer your question...

Kessler Syndrome.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

All it takes is enough debris at the right speed and altitude and anything at that altitude means it’ll be hit by some of it eventually. And those things bounce off and hit other things. And so on, and so on.

That’s why we shot down one of our own that was already de-orbiting, so the test crap would fall into the Pacific, and to prove we could hit something and also SEE it well enough to target it. But we didn’t want to contribute to the space junk problem.

We’ve been working on seeing stuff a long way away with radar instead of optical solutions used in the 50s-70s since PAVE PAWS started.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAVE_PAWS

The Chinese? Not so much. They did the same on orbit and made a mess. Lovely debris “cloud”.

Debris on orbit is a serious problem. Think rocket plus pipe bomb as an ultra-simplistic scenario. Or just ram something bigger and break it into pieces.

“We” pay a lot of folks to keep an eye on all the existing accidental debris. Purposeful debris would be a nightmare. And it doesn’t have to be THAT well targeted. Just a decent crossing orbit at a different speed, or same speed and a good angle at the same altitude, and wait.

The total GPS system is fairly robust. The individual components are extremely fragile.

Going to take out the entire GPS cluster? Probably not. But someone could put some serious coverage holes in it on the cheap.

Of course you’d have to go after both GPS and GLONASS to really make it an effective attack, and by the time you do that — you’ve garnered the wrath of a couple of countries, who will turn your launch facilities into rubble not too long after your games.

All of whom are also watching what you order and build with good old fashioned paid off spies. Probably get lucky with intel and turn the palace into said rubble before the rockets are fully assembled. All depends on how good the secrets and lies are.

“We” wouldn’t be hearing about anything stopped pre-launch on TV. Whether it’s already happened or not.

Luckily the Venn diagram of number of people smart enough to do it, hide it, and who have a reason to do it, and who have the resources to do it, is a small intersection. The human intelligence bell curve helps immensely. The resources problem adds a huge barrier to entry also.

Be happy there’s a lot more idiots than smart people. And not enough money for most crazy or dumb people to use to make stuff like that and execute on such a plan. And few people that smart are so mad at others they’ll risk being killed for it. The technical details, even with the help of the intelligence curve, aren’t as hard as most people think.

“Can” someone do it? Yes. Would they? Only a very small number of nut-bags each generation could even hope to convince them to.

 

[nibake]

The human intelligence bell curve helps immensely.

So is this an insurance policy or just a happy coincidence? Lol.

All joking aside, thanks for the interesting info. It has always seemed to me like ground components would be more vulnerable to attack and it has never seemed like a good idea (yes, looking at you Cirrus) to back up a GPS receiver with another GPS receiver and not have alternate means of navigation. Granted, I know that the Garmins can still receive VOR's and ILS's, but it sounds like there are those in the FAA that would be all to happy to have WAAS GPS replace those entirely.