/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14753673
You are fundamentally not understanding the space involved, but also mostly how incredibly weak hall effect thrusters are.

Dividing the LEO surface area into 40,000 plots gives you a maximum interception distance of around 80km.
Assuming that you detect the ICBM launch immediately, you have less than 5 minutes to intercept during boost phase, and about 30 minutes to intercept during late mid-course/terminal (this is for effectively maximum range) after the re-entry vehicles (and potentially decoys) have separated from from the payload bus.

We can estimate that at the higher end, starlink sats have a thrust of 0.03N (it could be as low as half of this based on what we know).
With a mass of 227kg for the lightest starlink sat, this means an acceleration of
0.00013 m/s2.
That means over 30 minutes the starlink sat could change position by 210m with a total deltaV of 0.23 m/s
Of course plane change maneuvers are nowhere near this straightforward in reality.

If you performed the plane change maneuver at the perfect time, aka a quarter orbit away, with an impulsive burn (IE infinite acceleration) with an interception time of ~25 minutes, it would require ~ 100 ms deltaV for a total inclination change of ~0.7°.
Obviously the Starlink sat cannot do anything close to an impulsive burn, even for only 100 m/s deltaV.

For a boost phase intercept the inclination could be much larger depending on the acceleration of the ICBM and the warning time, with 5 minutes warning the deltaV increases to ~300 ms, with 1 minute as high as 1500.