Nope. And I can say this with more authority than almost anything on HN.
> Trump & Elon literally discussed it on X a few weeks ago
One, they discussed a lot of things. Two, they discussed capability. As I said, any launch system provides this capability theoretically. But (a) the capability is based on the faulty premise that pre-positioned orbital interceptors are superior to stealthy ground-based ones. And (b) it’s going to be true for any cheap space-launch system. (I say cheap because economies of scale mean cheap and frequent are virtually redundant.)
This entire theory comes out of people with no military background, no political experience and no aerospace engineering training wanting to feel special about being “in the know.”
If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
This is a tailor-made conspiracy theory for someone who substitutes doing the damning math for connecting bits of string between people and tweets. If you have any domain experience or connections, it’s trivially excludable. That’s why I can shoot it down (hehe) with unique confidence.
> If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
Boost phase interception using a constellation of several thousand hypersonic glide vehicles circumvents the plane-change problem; I'm sure you know that. I'm sure you also know that the reason nobody has seriously pursued such a solution before is because putting tens of thousands of interceptors into orbit is absurd.
> Cost of launch is the only recognized limitation
That’s how you read “in principle” and “in theory”? The cost of launch is used, in the third bullet, to justify not analysing the idea further. Not as the “only…limitation.”
As your source says, even a working space-based boost-phase interceptor is trivially defeat-able with “primitive” ASAT capabilities.
Brilliant pebbles are a fucked concept. You’re citing a no-math NAS paper for good reason—it’s good to speculate about it in case we learn something new about how gravity works. Barring that, it’s well-recognised nonsense.
