Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • February 4, 2026 1:53 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

It was not the success the US hoped for.

As the article notes the CCCP were the first to use such a highly elliptical orbit, and they learned a few things that with hindsight should have been known or suspected before any satellite was put up in that orbit.

Firstly that in effect the orbit was “to high” thus had the issue of distance and noise both natural and man made.

1.1, The distance made any signal at the antenna a lot lower than would be received in a near or low earth orbit. Thus quite a lot lower compared to “natural noise.

1.2, Natural noise from the earth would be much smaller than background noise from space. As the antennas were actually “electrically small” for much of the EM Spectrum then in use a lot of space based natural noise got into the antennas at all but very high frequencies that were not used for very much by the CCCP. They had decided to use “Over The Horizon Radar” based in the HF bands and any Ham radio operator from the time can tell you about “The Woodpecker”.

1.3, Another issue was “jamming umbrella’s” it’s something that humans witness first hand at night on roads and similar. Put simply If you are standing on top of a hill several miles away, if I shine a narrowly focussed bright light in your direction you are effectively blinded. Whilst I can carry on using low level lights pointed directly at others I want to communicate with in the field I’m operating in, you can not see what I’m doing.

1.4 The basic physical design of the satellite was not very good. The spin stabilized system causes all sorts of problems when you have to “de-spin” the comparatively physically large antenna array. In effect it causes any signal received to be modulated by the rotation correction system. More modern systems that use spin stabilisation do it in a different way.

Thus these satellites whilst they gave a lot of information it was a sort of “third prize” as they did not give the level of information that was hoped for.

It’s why in part SpaceX / Starlink are putting thousands of satellites in as low an orbit hight as they can make them commercially effective.

For one it makes them quite difficult to jam as the Iranian’s have found thus were getting quite up tight about a couple of weeks back. Likewise Starlink ground terminals are small and can use very low power and tight “phased array” signals that make them inherently “Low Probability of Intercept”(LPI) made even worse for the Iranian government by the types of modulation used.

It’s known that Musk is looking into other LPI technology some of which will work in ways that the current 3GPP GSM design committees are looking at for future 6G systems.

Fun information apparently Hellon Rusk want’s to put up close to a million satellites into low earth orbits. More than a hundred times the number he’s already got in operation currently, regardless of the very real risks involved.

Supposedly to put AI-In-Space… It’s actually a very bad idea, as the heat from the work involved will be at best difficult to radiate off and well the shear physical mass involved will make such “Data Centers in space” very problematic for the very very short life time they will have.

Clive Robinson • February 4, 2026 2:57 PM

And I get told I’m “rate limited”… So we try again…

All,

Left the links off my above for Iranian Gov getting it’s “nickers in a twist / bunched up” and “Hellon Rusk’s million AI satellite news,

[1] Iran complained to the UN ITU but appears to be unaware that as far as International Law is concerned, what Starlink is doing is in “international waters” thus the Iranian’s and the UN have very very limited legal options… Likewise their technical options are not good either and any attempt by them to jam the satellites puts the Iranian Government on the wrong side of any potential legal argument.

https://www.france24.com/en/iran-jammed-starlink-get-around-it

[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-eyes-1-million-satellites-for-orbital-data-center-push?test_uuid=04IpBmWGZleS0I0J3epvMrC&test_variant=B

Clive Robinson • February 4, 2026 4:37 PM

@ Anonymous,

With regards,

“Rather, did you mean the Soviet Union?”

I’m guessing you are younger than 40 or American educated.

Have you actually read what a cosmonaut had written on their space helmets in blood red writing above the visor, or on the side of their space craft?

Try typing

Cosmonaut CCCP image

Into DuckDuckgo or other search engine according to “legend” it first appeared on Yuri Gagarin’s space helmet painted on by hand at the last moment.

Or go to,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCCP_(disambiguation)

Clive Robinson • February 6, 2026 3:16 AM

@ VE3OAT, Tony H., Anonymous,

With regards,

“If we are going to write CCCP, shouldn’t we also write
Kosmonavt?”

That rather depends, and it reveals a problem about Current AI LLM and ML Systems, that few are currently talking about.

Consider why I wrote,

“Try typing

Cosmonaut CCCP image

Into DuckDuckgo or other search engine”

I did if for the good reason that is, the search engine results will be based on,

“What is on the Internet statistics”

Which is increasingly an issue with “LLM assisted search engines” (it’s an issue that is getting worse very quickly though few are talking about it).

In this case it will statistically mostly not be Russian and less so in the future as Russia closes it’s Internet off from the world as it sinks into further “Authoritarian Paranoia”.

Which means you have to follow what would be,

“Common english language usage at the time”

However there is an issue with language use with place and time…

You need to use “language that was common” in the period of the time you are trying to find results for and the place it was typed in as well.

Hence my use of CCCP (think ASCII) and pointed out,

I’m guessing you are younger than 40 or American educated.

As I’ve noted before I have an interest in “Industrial Archaeology”[1] and have done since I can remember. As a knowledge domain it covers from the times and places when things transitioned from artisanal individuals into working collectives and later into the various stages of what we call manufacturing and later still engineering.

Part of that is knowing the “cant” or “jargon” of the trade in the place and time of the generation of documentation. Otherwise you get at best “second sourced” not first hand information[3].

[1] when I was more mobile I used to be seen around the places,

Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society (GLIAS)

‘http://www.glias.org.uk/

And similar could get you access to.

And quite a few places that access was… lets say “surreptitious” which when a teen was fairly easy to get away with as Nick Catford used to remind me. Because you just got put down as an “annoying kid” by security and other “guard labour”. The best reply to “What are you doing here?” was almost always “What else is there to do around here?”[2] Hence sending the guard labours mind down a well worn pathway and set of responses.

[2] As I’ve pointed out in the past the best way to lie is to tell the general truth as it can only be questioned not disproved… And the best way to use the truth as a lie in a reply is in the form of a question to the person who thinks they are in the dominant or interrogational position because a question is never an admission (providing you stick to generalities not specifics). Do it little by little as it starts to shift their short term memory before it has even a remote chance of becoming a long term memory which you then in effect take control of. Also as it is the quickest way for you to turn things on them with the old “You’ve been asked XXX but you don’t answer, so why should I treat you any differently?” to break their rhythm/tempo. You can then go on to “up the argument” calling them dishonest etc but always in the form of a “general question”. Remember,

“Questions, questions never answers”.

[3] This second hand source issue is one of the biggest reasons for Wikipedia being wrong and when it comes to historical accuracy it very often is. Second hand information especially that made by academics is almost always coloured by their perspective and frankly in some knowledge domains little more than “story telling”. Worse it’s something that comes up so often in what is quaintly called “Forensic Science” it should be stripped of credibility, because as I’ve pointed out on many occasions “science it ain’t”.

Clive Robinson • February 6, 2026 7:35 AM

@ lurker, 76Y, Robin, ALL,

With regards,

“Isaac Newton would like to know how they’re going to get it off the ground.”

Sir Isàac knew in theory, and NASA thought out a way to do it practically…

The idea is very simple, it’s a focused pulse jet that using a steel dome could lift more than two thousand tones as a “lift platform.

The pulsing jet to drive it well they are small nuclear bombs, that are injected into the dome and explode at the focal point. The dome acts like a car headlight in that the omnidirectional energy output of the bomb gets focused into a broad beam and lift happens as a result. Things are steared by slightly moving where a bomb will explode thus changing slightly the direction of thrust.

Yes it sounds like SciFi but some one with more technical knowledge told me the theory is sound and that the materials side was practical abd NASA had tested a much scaled down version using conventional high explosives and over the very limited trial it functioned more or less as expected.

They also told me that as with the Pluto Engine, using nuclear energy to provide heat for an engine was not exactly a good idea for the environment or living things in it.

A few years back in Russia they had a strange unaccounted for explosion at a navy proving ground. Shortly there after radiation detectors all over the place especially in europe showed very elevated abnormal readings.

On balance it was thought that Russia had been testing a prototype missile with a Pluto like engine like the 1950’s US “Supersonic Low Altitude Missile”(SLAM),

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile

Everything went quiet on the “9M730 Burevestnik” nuclear-powered cruise missile. Then Putin had a press conference and well,

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russias-burevestnik-nuclear-powered-missile-is-a-very-bad-idea/

Is what Putin has claimed about the 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile real or Propaganda?

As a historical note, Putin rarely makes technical style statements that can be shown to be untrue… though they have on occasions been shown to be “too bleeding edge” or unreliable at best, or just too expensive, so don’t go into production that we are aware of.

It was the same with the “Space Race” Russia would trumpet success to the world, but failures got covered with dirt not glory. As the US did it’s stuff publicly every little setback or fault became political ammunition. It is said that it was this going on in the 1950’s that gave rise to Kenedy giving his 1961 special address and later in 1962 his now famous speech at Rice University, he said,

“We choose to go to the Moon… not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/we-choose-to-go-to-the-moon-read-jfks-moon-speech-in-full

However that was over the average age of US Citizens ago. Now both Russia and the US have pulled away from nuclear disarmament treaties, in part because China was never party to them.

I guess we will have to just wait and see what happens. As the faux chinese curse has it we are very much people who “live in interesting times”.