Veritasium recently did a video on this subject, not one of his best, about objects “dropped” from orbit as a weapon with a high destructive potential. The destructive part is easy enough to understand, but I don’t get how the objects would be released and “fall” from an orbiting platform. Wouldn’t the rods just continue to orbit? To make them fall, you’d have to cancel out all or most of the orbital velocity. If you just fired them downwards, they’d still go sideways and you’d have a harder time aiming them. What am I missing?
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> To make them fall, you’d have to cancel out all or most of the orbital velocity.
Bingo. You would deorbit them the same way you would deorbit a space capsule or the second stage of a rocket for example. They no longer have enough speed to stay in orbit so they fall back to Earth.
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