A "House of Cards" is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It's also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.
Wouldn’t an event like this potentially cause mass disruption of GPS/GLONASS satellites?
I’m surprised no one has considered this as a potential terrorist threat vector. How difficult would it be to send a balloon/large amateur rocket up to start the domino effect?
GPS Satellites are MUCH further away then LEO. GPS orbits around 20,000km, LEO is 400km. There is no way a non-nation state can get there, let alone the difficulty of actually intercepting those satellites. It’s physical possible, of course, but not easy.
Iirc, gps satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, so it’s impossible to reach with amateur rockets or balloons. But they could absolutely fuck up the leo satellites