cyberCrank wrote:
Electromagnetic guns, high-energy beam weapons, and kinetic-energy vehicles are items used for such things (ground-based and Space Weapons research continues in the guise of Star-Wars type programs).
** but these will not determine the outcome of this "peaceful" area51 board

**
rofl.
High-energy beam weapons? Kinetic-energy vehicles?
So in other words, some form of laser, or bullet/non-explosive missile?
A laser would be an extremely expensive 'solution' to the satelite 'problem'. First, targeting it would be next to impossible. Second, the amount of air acting to diffuse the beam would require phenomenal amounts of energy to over come, and then you need to have sufficient power to do some damage once it had left the amosphere. The easiest way of accomplishing this would be to reduce the size of the beam, which of course makes it far harder to target something important with. The difference of a thousandth of a degree on the ground could move the beam by hundreds of feet on the satelite.
And talk about light shows, these would be noticable for hundreds of miles around, possibly even during daylight. Any idiot would notice this going on.
As for the missile/bullet... well no bullet would ever reach that height, let alone with sufficient force to disrupt a satelite's operations permanently; and a missile would again be kind of obvious.
As for the electromagnetic gun... another, frankly ludicruous solution. There's no way to focus electromagnetic fields at an object, so creating a field would disrupt everything within a few miles. And of course, to combat this, the satelite could simply be wrapped in an electromagnetically-conducting medium (eg, tin foil) which would immediately dissipate any low-frequency eletromagnetic waves. Naturally, this would cause problems for communication, but the communications dishes could be mounted externally.
Oh, and these 'Star-Wars' type programmes are, to no-one's surprise, crap and do not work.