My Apartment Manager is not a News Thread, #2

[Labster]

Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

tl;dr: Modern satellites run (or, rather, used to run) unpatched code. The researchers showed how to take over a simulated satellite's computers, and separately take over its thrusters.

Why it's here: Just where does "space" start, and who owns it? The Silver Millennium (whose leader believes in Love and Justice and thus wouldn't get along with a particular someone who had a lot of political power in 2017), maybe? And what kind of leverage could they bring to keep their independence?

Generally space starts at 100km up, more by convention than anything else.  Property ownership was traditionally given "from hell to the heavens" -- but essentially it's kind of inconvenient if a different person ends up owning Mars every few seconds, due to the rotation of the Earth. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits parties from claiming ownership of celestial bodies, outside of their own facilities on those bodies.  Basically everyone with a space program signed that one 50 years back, but of course the Moon Kingdom isn't bound by this... and honestly the US and Russia and China are probably going to decide they're not bound by it either in a decade or three.

Low Earth Orbit is generally governed by physics more than anything else, since Kessler syndrome is bad for every participant in Earth orbit.  Geostationary orbit is "crowded" because it's a thin band at a particular altitude, but that band is huge, and "close" might be tens to hundreds of kilometers apart.  Satellite breakup here would be harder to deal with in GEO, where LEO would fix itself faster with natural orbital decay, so extra caution is necessary.  Again, mainly regulated by the fact that no one wants to lose their expensive toys and face lawsuits from other people who lose their expensive toys.

Selenostationary orbit is apparently not a thing -- apparently any tidally locked body cannot have a synchronous orbit, because it lies outside the body's Hill sphere.  And lunar orbits beyond 690km are generally unstable due to Earth's gravitational influence.  It would make a good boundary.

In 2017, no one can get the the moon without alien tech.  Threats to independence aren't a problem until threats can actually get there.