Space industry lacks workers needed to rebuild satellites lost in war: report

But markets can make doing those things financially worthwhile.

>> People have to do that.

Companies can train people too.

They can hire people they can train. They chose not to, instead (whenever possible) whine for visas so they can steal trained professionals off less developed countries

And yet people don't, because it would reduce quarterly profits. So one market (for equities) does kind of magically prevent workers from being trained, by not allowing rational participation in another market (for workers).

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic (because you want a $5k car and they don't exist in your market) or serious (because you want a $5k car from China which they do actually sell at that price).

Broadly speaking, sure. But you’re not trying to rebuild every single one. At this point you’re in a war, things move faster, and there are a million unknowns. Under the given scenario, it appears that satellites have lost their usefulness akin to tanks in Ukraine. It’s not a matter if you can build satellites, merely if you can stay ahead of your adversary. At present the U.S. can launch more and faster mass to orbit. I’d be more concerned about that than anything else in the provided scenario.

SpaceX has >11,000 satellites whipping around the planet. They increased the number of LEO sats by nearly one order of magnitude in bit more than 5 years.

So apparently the culture, expertise and infrastructure do exist to do these things.

I have to disagree Newport, RI. is a hot bed for this kind of development and I’m sure there are other places not mentioned on HN.

Here is a trade school that is actively training the needed workforce.

https://www.iyrs.edu/

The US absolutely should expect for their industry to get hit in a conflict like that.

China knows that the general attitude towards war in the US population is strongly skewed by the fact that they haven't had to deal with the fallout of war on their home turf in recent memory. To the US, war is currently something that happens somewhere else, not at home.

In a conflict, it would just be smart to correct that attitude immediately, and China has the means to do so. Many data centers, major refineries, large industrial targets, and important pieces of the US' supply chain I'd expect to not last the week.

Also China is not going to sit there, taking a beating, and let the US keep the support base that allows them project power overseas (including attitude to war) when it is within China's means to severely cripple the US' ability to do so. China has the home-turf advantage, allowing them to fight the same war for cheaper, guaranteeing victory even if the US retaliates in kind.

Will there be a conflict over Taiwan though? I strongly suspect that if China started blockading Taiwan tomorrow, no other power would do anything about it, because there's no realistic path to win that conflict. It might just get handed over with no shots fired.

There'd be meetings, and negotiating tables, and strongly worded threats, and sanctions, but eventually some agreement would be signed for the transfer of Taiwan.

Planning only/mostly for a limited conflict when both parties are well armed, large industrial powers is pretty short sighted (not to mention both nuclear powers).

Conflicts escalate in unpredictable ways across history because once you start it's really hard to stop sometimes.

The US has grown used to been able to enter a war on its terms and exit on its terms and against the people they've been fighting since Korea that's been entirely possible because they can just leave and the combatants on the other side couldn't really do a lot to the US once they'd gone.

China isn't that.

I presume "anti-satellite campaign" means hundreds of anti-satellite missiles launched into LEO / MEO, at which point we do have a serious problem

They are small until they are blown into a million pieces.

Depending on the density of debris in LEO it might be very difficult to launch through to the higher orbits.

China destroyed a sat with a laser years ago. Not disabled - destroyed. It created a bunch of debris.

Is there any infrastructure of which this is not true? Every country, not just the Great Powers, has a large amount of installed plant which is the result of decades, in some cases centuries, of capital accumulation. And which modern weaponry can destroy in a matter of minutes. It's just easier to destroy than to build, and literally no industry has the capacity to rebuild as fast as a war breaks - if they did, most of those workers would be sitting idle in peacetime.

Compare the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2: Germany was trying to destroy merchant shipping faster than the Allies could build it, and failed; not because the subs were hunted down (though they were) but because the US refocused a humongous amount of industrial policy on building Liberty ships in a matter of days per hull. That was a massive national mobilisation, it would have been impossible to do so for more than a handful of capital plants, and it certainly wasn't going to be maintained in peacetime.

Edit to add: Though to argue a bit against my own point, satellites are perhaps uniquely vulnerable, even to nonstate actors. Lasers get better all the time and a satellite inherently needs to pass over other countries to do its job. Much easier targets than, say, electrical grids which can be defended by the internal-security garrison.

I think your parent commenter's point is that the satellites are used to detect launches. No satellites == no early warning == temptation to launch preemptively.

I think once satellites are in pieces while orbiting it’s not just a workforce problem to be solved.

Most American military planners assume that if China invades Taiwan they'll use smaller "tactical" nuclear missles to do things like destory carrier groups to test the will of the US on MAD. Predicting, probably correctly, that the US will not respond with a full scale nuclear strike in response to the destruction of a military target just because nuclear weapons were used.