AWACS can be shot down by near-peer adversaries. And satellites travel in known orbits and have no capacity to evade. It's well known at this point that nations that can make current-generation fighter jets can also shoot down satellites.

Making a fighter jet is way harder than hitting a satellite with a few grams worth of kinetic projectile (or, more accurately, letting the satellite run into a field them).

I wouldn't bet on any nation not being able to pull that off. In fact I can think of some teams of university students who could probably hit a Starlink satellite if you gave them some funding.

Any nuclear armed adversary could knock out a whole hemisphere of starlinks with a single missile.

The AWACS for an F-35 in terms of providing an air picture is less necessary. They are still command and control and provide services which may not be radar related. They have lots of people that can process data and taskings. So don't let the idea that they are being used with an AWACS mean they require an AWACS.

And for the space discussion, nothing is as real time as a fighter's sensors airborne, it's pretty bad how long some data can take to reach a platform that can use that data. The military has a problem right now with distributing data real time, they are working to solve that problem. You can find a lot of articles on the ABMS. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2336618/adva...