What conditions would prevent the possibility of human-made satellites orbiting a habitable planet?
I'm looking for something that would prevent humans being able to establish the use of satellites on an alien planet, but also would not prevent humans from living on the planet, or life developing on that planet.
Humans must also be able to arrive onto and leave the planet, not necessarily at any point in time, but have the availability to do it at least on occasion (i.e. they're not stranded on the planet).
It's not absolutely necessary that satellites cannot be physically in orbit, but rather there could be something that affects how the satellites work, meaning that they cannot reliably be used for transmitting information.
I did think of solar flares as a method of disruption, but as far as I'm aware having solar flares often and strong enough that it would consistently disrupt satellite communication would require the planet to be orbiting (or close to) a star unstable enough that life could not reliably reside there, though I may be wrong.
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The planet could have wildly inconsistent gravity.
Gravity on Earth is non uniform, though it's hard to tell because of the variations are slight.
But if this planet had a large super dense mass (from a foreign body impact?) in one area then you could have a spot where the gravity is much higher than the rest of the planet.
This would affect satellites in two ways:
- Orbits would be hard because the higher gravity would pull the satellite off course and degrade the orbit rapidly.
- The atmosphere would be pulled in very tight over the anomaly, and balloon out elsewhere. The satellite passing through the expanded atmosphere would experience drag and have its orbit degraded.
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