Iran has lots of rockets.
Iran also has basically zero of their own satellites in orbit that they care about.
Spacejunk is a highly asymmetric tactic.
Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except Both cars are invisible most of the time. They’re moving 17,000 mph. The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges. If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles.
Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part.
It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space. On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one. On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/spacex-lo...
And any weaponized junk schrapnel a DiY iranian ASAP missile would deploy would be sub-orbital and would all come down in a couple minutes.
Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible.
> On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS
GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know.
You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon.
