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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These don’t actually exist and the details about their design would be confidential, so there isn’t a lot of info available about them. However, there would likely be some set of thrusters on the satellite and/or rods to ensure that the rods get pushed out of the satellite in the proper direction. The rods wouldn’t need to go straight down; they’d just need to fall at an angle where their downward movement combined with their momentum from the orbit results in them falling on the proper target.
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