🚀 go-pugleaf

The Lunar advantage is mass, Henry.

If you want a 'hard' satellite, you can do three things - stealth it
(which is pretty ridiculous for a comsat, but not neccesarily for
a weapons platform), give it defenses (a hard problem), or armor it -
design the components to be rad hard, put it in a Faraday cage, and
wrap it in a lot of inert mass.  The Moon has a real advantage when
it comes to shipping inert mass to an Earth orbit, in terms of energy.
This doesn't do them any good unless they have a full industrial
economy there, though.

Taking out a radiation hard satellite with a nuclear weapon, particularly
one that is behind several meters of lunar regolith, isn't all that
easy - no blast effect means either a *big* bang is required (which will
annoy the people whose territory over which is was detonated, never
mind the commercial comsats), or a very close hit.  The very close hit
is basic orbital mechanics, but assumes no counter measures on the
launcher, launch site, etc.

This is all handwaving anyway, since a good analysis involves knowing
the launch costs from earth and the moon *after* that functioning
lunar economy gets put in place.  I'd *love* to have reliable
instances of such figures, truly I would.

Graydon