Hello Gerald! For sure. To be honest the Kessler syndrome was an afterthought and I may be overestimating its impact. I think the far more relevant danger is active measures against a launching or landing craft. Things like fuel dumps (you are totally right in that it doesn’t make sense to take fuel from Earth up into LEO, I was more thinking about bringing fuel from some other much-lower-energy gravity well like the moon) would probably be better placed in Lagrange points.
I mean you can replace all this with “airline travel”. Already nations can shoot down airliners that travel within hundreds of kilometers of top end air defense systems like the S-400. So if a one of the central European nations decided to make anywhere they can hit a ‘no fly zone’, and they had nukes so no one can invade, they could de facto ban air travel in Europe.
This is true for a lot of technologies—ultimately this planet is small.
Hello Gerald! For sure. To be honest the Kessler syndrome was an afterthought and I may be overestimating its impact. I think the far more relevant danger is active measures against a launching or landing craft. Things like fuel dumps (you are totally right in that it doesn’t make sense to take fuel from Earth up into LEO, I was more thinking about bringing fuel from some other much-lower-energy gravity well like the moon) would probably be better placed in Lagrange points.
I mean you can replace all this with “airline travel”. Already nations can shoot down airliners that travel within hundreds of kilometers of top end air defense systems like the S-400. So if a one of the central European nations decided to make anywhere they can hit a ‘no fly zone’, and they had nukes so no one can invade, they could de facto ban air travel in Europe.
This is true for a lot of technologies—ultimately this planet is small.