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The John Batchelor Show

#LEO: Inevitable militarization of Low Earth Orbit and the Earth Moon System. Henry Sokolski, NPEC.

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

News, Arts, Books, Society & Culture

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

#LEO: Inevitable militarization of Low Earth Orbit and the Earth Moon System. Henry Sokolski, NPEC.
1958

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm John Batchew with Henry Sikolsky, my colleague.

0:04.5

We've been on Earth with small modular reactors using 20% enriched uranium.

0:10.8

Now we're going to low Earth orbit.

0:13.1

LEO, it's called affectionately by the geeks.

0:16.0

And the news there is both Blue Origin, its New Glen Rocket, and Starship for test number seven with its

0:23.3

super heavy, have been postponed till next week. So, what are they doing? They're experimenting with

0:30.5

a heavy lift booster reusable. Why? To get cargo into low Earth orbit. Henry, Lower Earth orbit is not militarized yet.

0:40.6

Will it be?

0:42.4

Well, I'm not sure.

0:45.2

That's the way I would characterize it.

0:47.6

I think the way to think about large constellations in Lower Earth orbit is that in the face of possible anti-satellite

0:58.7

threats like lasers that are based on the surface of the Earth, direct descent, and even satellites that maneuver, they call them rendezvous satellites that could defuel damage

1:16.2

or move out of the proper orbit.

1:20.4

Against all these threats, the argument that has been made by our military is that if we

1:25.6

have enough small satellites in the thousands in

1:33.1

lower orbit, it would be very difficult for anyone to disable the entire system, and then

1:40.1

therefore as a passive military defense against anti-satellite activity, which is present.

1:47.0

So you could argue that things are militarized to the extent there's anti-satellite problems

1:52.6

already, but that the small satellites that have large numbers in low Earth that will constitute a military defense.

2:03.8

I think that's going to be something that Trump administration is going to question,

2:10.6

and it's already begun.

2:13.0

I think President-elect Trump in his September

...

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