. . . not cheaply, at any rate.

We had a bit of a snafu down Panama-way. This was back in the 70s. Seems there were electronic failures that ended up grounding 75% of the fighters at Howard AFB. After about a month of systems checks and troubleshooting, the fault was finally isolated, and it was incredibly cheap to correct.

When taking off, the fighters were flying through the ComSat beam at the end of the runway. The choice was simple:

a. move the ground station (ouch!)

b. take off the other way on the runway

Now, I'm not going to pretend to know the parameters of the up-link signal, but, while the down-link is relatively weak (footprint pickup and amplification) I understand it was hot enough to fry a few circuits in the aircraft (this is a powerful, direct signal aimed at the satellite). I will, however, say that the up-link signal would be nowhere near as hot as the implied EMP.

Dan