The cost would be insane. And it wouldn’t be near 30min, you’d need lots of teams to reach this, driving the cost further up. Need to rotate them on a regular basis. And soldier without gravity for months at a time are definitely not fit for combat.

The whole kinetic strike concept is 100% complete idiocy.

There is zero merit and zero gain from lobbing pole sized object at terrestrial targets, and I blame people having negative understanding of orbital dynamics for the whole concept getting popular in the first place.

Problems are:

1) You pay every single Joule of impact energy (and more!) in rocket fuel for getting the thing up there in the first place, which is an abysmal deal.

2) You can't actually "drop" anything from orbit once its there, you have to accelerate it while being trivially observable (and trackable) from earth by 30 year old radar technology.

3) You could literally do the same thing by launching purely kinetic ballistic missiles at targets. Non one ever does that for a reason-- its difficult, expensive and ineffective at the same time. Basically the only benefit is demonstrating that you could have delivered an actual nuclear payload in the same way.

Kinetic strikes sure. It seems like space marines would be incredibly easy to shoot down. They would be on a ballistic re-entry and must slow down without extreme g-forces before they reach the ground.

> Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.

Dropping steel rods from orbit didn't seem so crazy. But I've never seen a detailed evaluation of the idea.