HN Reader

> The trio is pitching a plan to deploy 400 to 1,000+ satellites for missile detection and tracking, with a separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers to neutralize threats. SpaceX will mainly focus on the sensing satellites, not weaponization.

I have a strong suspicion that SpaceX has been deploying and testing the sensor platform for a while now. The payload mass trend of the starlink satellite had large jumps in the most recent two iterations (doubled twice).

200 kill sats is laughably little. The Earth is rather big and they will be uniformly distributed, putting closest sat at almost 1000km from target while whole boost phase of a solid fueled ICBM is 350-400km. So there's no chance it could work. It will take tens of thousands of sats, like Starlink.

  >subscription model

Nothing about this is really new, except perhaps that it's being openly acknowledged.

For military aerospace the usual rule is "lose money on the product, make money on the service contract."