Protecting hundreds of low-Earth-orbit satellites from destruction seems a laudable idea, and the Pentagon wants to do just that. But the scheme could backfire, by shutting down civilian and military communications and impairing GPS signals.
The Pentagon is concerned that a high-altitude nuclear explosion or an intense solar storm could fill near-Earth space with charged particles, crippling the operation of many satellites. It has proposed a plan called “radiation belt remediation” to clean it up. The idea is to swamp the charged particles with very low-frequency radio waves. That would create wave-particle interactions that encourage particles to precipitate and fall…
