What kind of drones are you thinking, other than just good ol' missiles?
Anything even remotely drone shaped would have to be covered in so many aerogel reentry tiles and thermal insulation I'm not sure there would be any usable weight left for a payload.
There is no difference between these and higher satellites. It still super expensive to get them down because have to stop orbital speed. If anything, VLEO is worse cause they are going faster. Not to mention the cost of getting into space in first place. Plus, need lots of satellites to support dropping things anywhere on world.
Also, it is rare to have anything that needs 30 min response time. Most things can be handled by local resources or wait for an airplane. Good example is that the US is working on hypersonic missiles and deploying them around the world.
You are missing the forest for the trees. This is an aerospace vehicle capable of flying in the air indefinitely. How many drones can you fit on a vehicle? How many vehicles can you fly at once? 60 miles is already reachable by the cheapest and most deadly weapon class of short-range drones. And now all they need to do is fall down. At freefall that is 140 seconds until it reaches the ground.
The drones would burn up. The satellites are in space and moving at space speeds. If the satellite drops anything, it stays in orbit and slowly decays. Dropping anything requires a large rocket to get out of orbit. The payload would still be going fast and deal with re-entry.
Also, the article doesn't say that they are at 60mi, just that VLEO goes down to 60mi. The satellites are likely to be higher because there is less drag.
But I don’t understand the point. Satellites already fly indefinitely and can drop payloads of kinetic energy weapons. Why all the complexity of VLEO and drones? What could you that’s impossible with other, simpler, already-extant weapons systems?
I mean... okay, but no matter how much you believe in it, it doesn't make any sense. This would offer no advantage over conventional satellites for this application (ie it would be similarly terrible for it).
That's, ah, a huge 'all' :) They'd be moving at about 8-10 kilometres per second. The vehicle is not _really_ 'flying in the air', it just looks a bit like that. It's in orbit at terrifying speeds. Your 'drones' would require very extensive heat shielding. They would not be at all cheap. And why use this rather than a normal, cheaper, less complex LEO satellite? Or an ICBM. If you want to arbitrarily drop heavily shielded gadgets on someone's head at silly speeds, the normal tool is an ICBM (the gadgets usually contain a nuke, not a drone, mind you).
It doesn't seem terribly practical as one? The 'drones' would still have to re-enter, at, well, impressive speed. So you're not talking about terribly practical drones; more something like an ICBM warhead.
Even if this were practical, why use weird expensive highly-visible VLEO satellites rather than conventional LEO satellites? I can't see what advantage the VLEO stuff would give you here.
