The satellite part of the Starlink system is practically invulnerable to physical attack because there are so many satellites in different orbits. Hitting them all would require a prohibitively large number of rocket launches. Not to mention that attacking US satellites would probably be an act of war.
The best way to attack the system might be to hack the user terminals, which Russia apparently already did to Viasat terminals located in Ukraine at the start of the invasion.
SpaceX is now in direct opposition to the Russian military and is going to be attacked just as Viasat was. They need to especially make sure that the command and control systems for the satellites are bulletproof.
I wonder if existing anti radiation missiles would be able to lock onto Starlink user terminals. If not, I expect that feature will be developed soon. It's well known that the US military has been investigating using Starlink so I'm sure other militaries have been thinking about countermeasures.
Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution.
> Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine,
Sounds like something to take with a pinch of salt.
I find it hard to believe that Inmarsat, Iridium etc. are no longer functional in Ukraine.
Edit to add:
(a) Given all the Western journos broadcasting out of Ukraine, I think it is almost certainly a fact that Inmarsat, Iridium etc. are still functional because its kind of standard kit for warzone correspondents. All the "senior correspondents" the major news orgs are sending out to Ukraine will have cut their teeth on Inmarsat, Iridium etc., and will be comfortable with its use and operation.
(b) Twitter post from Iridium boss saying they've stopped shipments to Russia but have no intention of stopping shipments to Ukraine and/or stopping service over Ukraine. "Shutting down service over Ukraine would stop Ukrainian use and aid orgs as well."[1]
Rather than deconstruct whether Elan's tweet is an ivory-tower Truth, or talk about a few (very specialized, niche) alternatives...maybe his tweet should be interpreted as an "urgent personal safety warning" to Ukrainian Starlink users? Those folks could be a lot closer to "clueless noobs" than to "SIGINT sophisticates". Mr. Musk might prefer that they not be added to the death toll - whether via cutting-edge homing missiles, or just well-armed partisans with cheap radio direction finders and "human rights are for sissies" attitudes.
The personal attack on Musk is unwarranted and violates HN norms. I'm working with an aid organization on the ground in Ukraine desperately seeking Starlink. They currently have mobile internet but expect it lose it soon.
If Musk were posting here this would count as a personal attack. Instead he's just someone in the news, about whom commentators might freely make observations. I don't think anyone has been flagged for some of the fairly bizarre observations made about certain national leaders recently.
The Thai submarine thing - that was a poor decision on his part.
But the technical things you mention, like the stop sign “rolling stop” - I think that’s a bit slippery. Where I live, 2mph is definitely considered stopping. I would not think twice about going 2mph through a stop sign, as long as that gives me enough time to evaluate whether it is safe to proceed or actually come to a complete stop. And if it bothers you that much, you could always have put it in “cautious” mode or whatever it was called.
As far as full self-driving goes, have you seen recent versions? It is seriously impressive. Still not level 3/4 SAE so I guess it’s technically a lie, but they are working hard to make it less of a lie. It would be nice if they were more upfront with their customers about what capabilities exist today, vs what they hope to achieve in the near future.
These comments don’t help Musk at all. This just increases conviction that the Musk boosters must be ignored because they clearly have their own definitions of basic things like “stopping” and “lying.”
None of this is commentary on the underlying tech. Obviously Tesla is impressive, obviously SpaceX is impressive, obviously Musk is impressive. But none of these should absolve him/his companies/his supporters from basic obligations toward truth - especially when introducing potentially dangerous technologies to “the commons” like public roads.
He said "parts" of Ukraine. He didn't say all of Ukraine. I think it's probably highly likely there are some parts of Ukraine without Internet and using Starlink would be the only way to get internet.
Traditional satellite phones, with 800ms latency and data caps, are not in the same category as the unmetered broadband access provided by low orbit Starlink.
Not trying to pedantic (OK maybe a little), but the tweet is clearly mentioning "communications systems" not unmetered broadband access, and there's a huge difference between the two.
Use all the bold type you like, make it size 200 if it makes you feel better, but I will simply re-iterate:
Which "parts" of Ukraine would that be that don't have the view of the sky required to get Iridium, Inmarsat etc. working ?
Last time I checked, Starlink required a view of the sky too. ;-)
To be clear, my issue is not with Starlink per-se, but with the claim "the only non-Russian communications system still working" which should be taken with a significant pinch of salt as it is effectively impossible to believe.
Particularly so given the public Twitter statement made by the boss of Iridium that clearly states they are still live over Ukraine, still shipping kit to Ukraine and have no intention of doing otherwise.
Oh, it is just Musk doing his publicity. Unless we have seen proof of no other communication satellite being able to provide communications, I wouldn't believe his word.
Anything topical (tragedy or not) is a good opportunity to publicize the Musk brand: from little boys trapped in a flooded cave system, to promising "ventilators" during a deadly COVID outbreak
> The satellite part of the Starlink system is practically invulnerable to physical attack because there are so many satellites in different orbits. Hitting them all would require a prohibitively large number of rocket launches.
What about lasers? Since even if it just heated up the satellite it could cause damage since they have no way of cooling.
That's far easier to do (lower power needed to cause major damage) against satellites which have optically sensitive parts pointed toward the Earth. Starlink satellites probably don't.
And whether with lasers, missiles, or whatever - targeting a US-based satellite network that is near & dear to the Pentagon would be an extreme escalation. Especially after the Russians warned that any hacking of their satellites would be seen as justification for war.
Lasers have rather short range because of dispersion. The 'beam' widens over time. This is not a limitation of the laser or the lens, its a feature of physics and the wave-like nature of light.
This is before considering the effects of atmosphere between a ground based laser and the satellite. This will make dispersion much worse.
Do you think these findings from the Defense Intelligence Agency are overstating capability?
> Directed Energy Weapons. China likely is pursuing laser weapons to disrupt, degrade, or damage sat- ellites and their sensors and possibly already has a limited capability to employ laser systems against satellite sensors. China likely will field a ground-based laser weapon that can counter low-orbit space-based sensors by 2020, and by the mid-to-late 2020s, it may field higher power systems that extend the threat to the structures of non-optical satellites.
Here is a more academic article discussing the risk from ground based Satellite Laser Ranging systems to optical sensors, specifically when they are imaging the area near the SLR. I'm guessing the power required to damage structure vs optical sensors are probably orders of magnitude different.
> This density is 100 times the damage threshold of 106 J/m2, and will damage the pixel unless the laser light is filtered. In this case both the pixels and the filter may be damaged.
(There is a caveat to the above statement based on timing probability being very low)
I think these are trying to overload/damage the sensors on a satellite. Rather than damaging the body of the satellite. Makes sense, given that the sensors are made to be more sensitive.
The math here is doable. Approximately the inner angle of the cone of light comming from a laser beam is 1.22 2lamda/d (source: airy disk wikipedia). Where lamda is wavelength and d is the aperture.
Lets pick lamda so 1.222lamda is 1000nm (blueish light). Then by smal angle approximation, the size of a beam at 500km (starlink height) is 500km * 1000nm / d
Say we want our beam to be 50m wide. That gives an aperture requirement of 1cm.
Huh, that seems reasonable. So in a vacuum, it could perhaps be done. Atmospheric effects would make this worse ofcourse. And a 50m beam is not going to dump much heat, but it seems somewhat plausible in the near future.
So the question of effectiveness depends on how easy it is to pump kilowatts of laser energy at a satellite, and how much of that energy reaches the satellite based on dispersion from distance and atmosphere. Needs to be calculated. My guess is that since countries have tried creating laser defenses, someone knows.
Also bear in mind that satellites must be radiation hardened to function at all, because they're already in a high-radiation environment.
I have no doubt a military could build a weapon that could use some form of EMP pulse to completely destroy my cell phone if it were an equivalent distance from a ground-based attack site, in an environment where it wouldn't be simply destroyed. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised there's some researchers who could put something together from their test bench and bits lying around in the lab in a day or two. Doing it to a hardened target is going to be much harder.
It seems not totally out of the question. My calculation yielded an aperture requirement of 1cm for a blue-ish laser. Which yields a 50m beam at the height of a starlink satelite
Lasers that bounce off the moon come back to earth as a few detectable photons, not as a beam of light that you’d recognize without very specialized equipment.
"...is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions"
So destroying a subset of satellites might create enough debris to cascade-destroy the rest of them. But that would not be limited to SpaceX satellites, and would effectively lock-out human species from accessing space for some time.
Kessler syndrome is kind of a middlebrow concern people love to bring up because they heard about it one time, but I have yet to see any argument that it is a realistic problem for Starlink based on real calculations. The number of Starlink satellites is large compared to previous constellations, but still tiny compared to space which is of course vast. The low orbits used by Starlink are automatically cleaned up by the atmosphere. And even if there were debris clouds in low orbit it wouldn't lock out space access as it would still be possible to launch into higher orbits. The probability of collision is negligible if you're only passing through.
It makes more sense in their case, as they have a couple more magnitudes more orbital infrastructure. So much more stuff to hit and much much more mass to cause trouble.
for a brief period, it might even work as an ICBM defence shield for the whole planet. Imagine every single rocket aborting due to debris for 1-2 years( a guess)
You're underestimating how huge the surface area of the sphere these satellites are orbiting, and how little material they have. Even if you somehow blow them all up, they won't shield you from ICBMs.
And if the debris field somehow was dense enough to provide such a shield it would block out enough sunlight to cause the death of most life on the planet I suspect.
If you blow up all the Starlink satellites, the little pieces start reentering the atmosphere most preferentially in very short order.
Kessler syndrome is more complicated than just "satellite debris bad". At the altitudes the Starlink satellites are at, it is a near non-concern. There is a causal link there... we can afford to put up lots of little satellites at that altitude for that exact reason, and that's exactly why they are where they are. That it's also less energetically expensive to launch is just a bonus.
It seems that there's a threshold that would have to be hit to trigger that process. Do we have any idea whether starlink satellites, whether intact or as debris, would be anywhere close enough to that threshold to trigger the runaway process?
It could be true that the phenomenon exists conceptually, but that were nowhere near remotely close to triggering it, and that people are vastly underestimating the size of space.
Say the earth is a smooth featureless sphere and there are 36000 basketballs bouncing around, and say they all broke into 100 tennis ball size fragments. You’d still never expect to run into a single one. And that’s on the surface, there’s a lot more space up in space.
By some time you mean some hundreds of millions of years, it’s not plastic in earth/ocean or uranium which degrades relatively quickly in comparison, there is not much of degradation in orbit.
Well, I heard by from someone, but I stand corrected, nasa [0] says:
Debris left in orbits below 370 miles (600 km) normally fall back to Earth
within several years. At altitudes of 500 miles (800 km), the time for orbital
decay is often measured in decades. Above 620 miles (1,000 km), orbital debris
normally will continue circling Earth for a century or more.
You wouldn’t need anti-radiation missiles, you just need to detect the radiation using some kind of sigint system, then plot those points on a map and attack them conventionally.
I seem to remember that during the Crimea invasion, Russian used a similar tactic: they used sigint to find Ukrainian cell phone signals of soldiers hiding in the forests, tipping off the defenders’ locations.
I'm not sure if there are enough presently up to take out a Starlink plane, but there are definitely some already up and at the ready, likely by at least Russia (and likely also the US).
That would also take out Russia's own satellites. And satellites belonging to their potential allies. So, probably not the best move.
And guess which company is best positioned to re-launch a crazy amount of satellites in a very short time. Russia would have to allocate a lot of resources it does not currently have to keep up with SpaceX.
Same orbit or not doesn't matter, what matters is distance, and things in different low orbits (most satellites) are all pretty close to Earth and hence each other when orbits line up. They definitely can't just move satellites away, as satellites have very limited manoeuvring capabilities, and changing orbit takes a lot.
The EMP of Starfish Prime [1], the detonation of a nuclear bomb at 400km altitude (the altitude of the ISS), knocked out streetlights over 1400km away in Hawaii. That means it could have damaged satellites up to at least 1800km altitude (but this was in 1962), which is almost all of the low Earth orbit altitude range. With enough nukes you could probably wipe out Starlink's satellites, but with the way they're spread out, I think you'd wipe out most other satellites too.
I thought there was very little (negligible, even?) fallout from EMP weapons, as there isn't a lot of heavy elements to get irradiated up high in the sky.
IMO the motivated state wouldn't go through the trouble to attack sites physically when they could just DDOS spacex's public IPs. It isn't like their IP address blocks are a secret, and it wouldn't be that hard to narrow it down to the ones that route to Europe.
This misses the point. The aim is not to take out Starlink. The aim is to take out the people using Starlink on the assumption that some of them at least are involved in the coordination of the defence of Ukraine. Using Starlink, or any other satellite uplink in an active warzone is essentially painting a target on your back. Doing so may very well be worth it if you are involved in the coordination of the defence of your nation, but its probably not if you're using it to read HN.
Eh, I think of the menu of options, taking out Starlink in Europe with a DDOS has a high probability of providing value for Russia and is safer to execute compared with the theoretical attack of getting locations out of a starlink ground station. Even if they managed to gain access to the ground stations, they would then need to wade through a proprietary stack and hope that what they have access to actually has useful location data. SpaceX apparently operates on cells that are "5 miles in radius" hexagons, though people on reddit claim to get service up to 15 miles away from home. In any case, I could see a world where the ground station only knew what one of those cells a person was in, and the whole exercise of breaking into a ground station would have been for nothing.
I think we're talking at cross purposes. I (and presumably Musk) am talking about the Russian's targeting the starlink receivers / satellite dishes. These are (theoretucally at least) detectable using the same type of radio triangulation techniques used since WWII. Using one of these puts you in danger of attack if you are somewhere near it. And by attack I mean having a missile launched at you, being shelled, or having men with guns turn up on your doorstep. Hacking is not required.
Presumably if starlink users are accessing services over the internet, starlink has to peer with other ISPs somewhere. So the assumption is if you can fill up all the pipes where SpaceX peers to other networks, then Starlink is cut off from the internet.
I wonder how hard it would be to hit them though. They don't have full control over the air. Su-35 aircraft have been getting shot down. Are they still firing cruise missiles? How accurate are they? If it were trivial to locate them and take them out, wouldn't they have done that already?
The working theory is that massive corruption and yes-manning has led to Russia’s armed forces being a paper tiger.
If someone at the top says “we need to restock 1000 additional cruise missiles”, then the person under that grifts a little and says “we need to stock 950 additional cruise missiles”, and you follow that down the chain, you might end up with 500 instead of 1000 missiles. Same would go for things like vehicle maintenance. And it might be more invisible too, like ordering cheap tires instead of quality one’s.
By all accounts, they are frequently running out of fuel. Which is the most basic, obvious, and also quite readily available in Russia. How bad can an invasion go if you run out of fuel on the way to your initial target?
I have heard rumors, that some troups just sold off fuel on the black market before the invasion started. Whether that was just corruption or planned sabotage, no one of course knows.
I believe the ground stations are located in NATO countries so Russia better not try attacking them...
Attacking ground stations could degrade or deny service to nearby areas with the current Starlink system. But V2 will be able to route signals between satellites in space in areas where ground stations are missing, so that won't work in the future.
Missile launches, not rocket launches. And it’s not prohibitive, hundreds of missiles have been launched in Ukraine so far. Modern missile defense systems double as anti satellite weaponry, even ignoring debris clouds.
But, I imagine the real attack here, if sufficiently motivated, would be much simpler. Bomb gps satellites, destroying time syncing functionality on the satellites.
The missiles launched in Ukraine are not remotely capable of hitting a sattelite. Modern missile defense systems do not fire a single type of missile. In the US case only the most expensive/fairly rare missile is capable. It undoubtedly costs far more to destroy a Starlink satellite than to build and launch one.
Governments have far more money than most private businesses.
I never said they fired a single type of missile. US missile defense systems are frankly not cutting edge and lag behind Russia and China, and will for multiple years.
Missile defense systems have significantly more existing infrastructure than exist for rocket launches. The question in wartime is ‘what capabilities are you getting rid of, and for how long?’ In the case of starlink, the question is complicated both by reaction to the creation of so much space trash and the piggybacked approach SpaceX has taken to get the satellites up there.
This is feasible. Again, I doubt it is the right satellite attack strategy, but it is not absurd.
> US missile defense systems are frankly not cutting edge and lag behind Russia and China, and will for multiple years.
This may be true for ground based anti-aircraft systems or maybe you're thinking of the recent buzz around anti-ship and hypersonic missiles. But for missile defense this is quite false. The Aegis system and THAAD are as good as it gets. US doctrine always focuses heavily on missile defense with the assumption that they would have air superiority for offense.
I have contrarian views here based on the impact of hypersonic missiles on missile defense.
In the media they're primarily pitched as offensive weapons. However with China breaking the heat-seeking problem for hypersonic missiles they have very interesting defense implications. Midcourse interception becomes much less vaporware and much more feasible. Existing technology to neutralize missile defense (e.g. by launching a larger number of smaller missiles prior to terminal phase) are less viable with (marv) hypersonic missile defense systems.
I think we are in a two to three year periods where due to defensive capabilities there is an extreme asymmetry. I think consequently you will see Russia, China, and NK (who have likely been given advances here by China) become more aggressive.
It's not invulnerable at all. If anything the concentration of satellites at one altitude makes it more vulnerable because debris would spread out (think of "spread out" in a "shotgun" way) and threaten the other satellites of the constellation. These satellites move at speeds of kilometers per second, all it takes is putting something in their path to obliterate them. That could be a missile with or without ("hit-to-kill") a warhead or the debris of another satellite.
(Edit: keep in mind that Starlink operates on dozens of different orbital planes all at the same inclination and (approx.) same altitude that all intersect twice over the course of an orbit (which takes approximately 90 minutes). Pieces from the debris cloud would be at risk of hitting another satellite at every intersection at a high relative speed. It's not a low risk of damage once but a low risk of causing damage again and again until the debris has decayed enough).
If "Russia" (Putin) would like to disable Starlink satellites, I would guess that he easily could. If he wants to destroy an American-owned constellation and most likely raise the conflict to a whole another level is a different question.
I disagree. Certainly you could create a debris cloud, but would it be big and dense enough to actually take out a large percentage of the constellation in a shortish time frame? My guess is no, especially considering that the satellites have some maneuvering capability. I'd be really interested in seeing some calculations about it though. How much mass, how many fragments, how does it spread, etc.
Given their low orbit, it would make the next couple of decades (?? offhand, I'm not sure how long it would take for the debris to completely de-orbit and some of the results are going to be more energetic after any attack) really suck... The resulting loss of life as a result of inability to launch new storm tracking satellites alone should warrant the death penalty for anyone involved in such an intentional attack.
Should be 5 years or less, that's why SpaceX put the satellites in low orbit, the atmosphere cleans it up. Also a low orbit debris cloud wouldn't prevent launching new satellites to higher orbits, the probability of collision just passing through would still be negligible, it adds up as you spend time in the polluted orbits. There are a lot of misconceptions about space debris.
5 years if __intact__ and simply inoperative. In the event of a collision or attack the objects will break up, and the energy is not evenly distributed. Some pieces end up with lower energy and decay faster, others greater energy and thus higher orbits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome cascades can result and even spread to higher orbits. As an extreme emergency measure it might even be wise to de-orbit everything in attempt to mitigate the damage.
Wrong. You cannot execute an orbital change with a single application of delta-v. Any pieces can at most end up in a new elliptical orbit where the high point is further up and the low point is where they started, and this subject to the same atmospheric drag there. It takes a second application of energy at the top to circularize into a new orbit.
Operating satellites at that altitude would become dangerous, launching through it would be no problem. Debris decays more quickly the lower it is in the atmosphere (the thermosphere extends to ~600km for example).
In theory it could require about the same number of rocket launches from the ground as it took to launch the satellites in the first place. You'd just do a single launch with lots and lots of satellites which you gradually move into orbits that hit the Starlink satellites.
The killers don't need to spend weight on payload, and they can be designed for a lifespan of a few weeks, so for example they can carry very small amounts of propellant. They might be small enough that you can't see them until they strike, at which point it might be hard to determine who had launched them. You might think maneuvering thrusters would be visible because they glowed, but resistojets can run at subzero temperatures. It just makes them less efficient.
The saving grace is that as far as I know nobody has such a system flying or ready to fly; the Kosmos 1408 test seems to be the state of the art. And it would probably cause a dramatic takeoff of Kessler syndrome at least in LEO, destroying other satellites as well, eventually everything in LEO. Aside from being a public relations catastrophe, this would dramatically diminish the wartime advantage of spacefaring powers like Russia, China, and the US over non-spacefaring powers like Iran, so those spacefaring powers might be reluctant to use such a weapon if they had it.
You say, "attacking US satellites would probably be an act of war." Well, maybe. But it's just property damage; no human lives are at risk. And SpaceX is theoretically a private company, not officially part of the US military. If damaging the property of private citizens is "an act of war" then just about every country whose citizens own property in Ukraine has a casus belli against Russia now. And in that case Russia also has a casus belli against Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/03/germany-seizes...
AFAIK Starlink user terminals aren't designed for stealth, so it would be foolish to expect stealth from them. However, they use millimeter-wave phased arrays with hundreds of elements, so they probably aren't crawling with sidelobes, and in theory their beam divergence would be about a degree with isotropic radiation more than 20dB down from the main beam, so it might be hard to detect until you're passing through the beam. And I'm guessing most anti-radar missiles are currently designed for regular microwaves, not millimeter waves. I don't know anything about Starlink's technical specs, though, and not much about millimeter-wave communications, and nothing about anti-radar missiles.
> In theory it could require about the same number of rocket launches from the ground as it took to launch the satellites in the first place.
You have very dubious reasoning about this. It sounds like you are calculating attacking each satelite with an individually maneuverable free-flying space vehicle. This is clearly not the most optimal way to do it so it is not the right calculation to estimate the minimal number of launches required.
Instead of thinking about smart and expensive satelite killers each with the complexity of a faberge-egg you can pack a missile full of nails and spread them into an expanding cloud with a timed explosive. A shrapnel bomb in orbit if you please. Will one launch suffice to kill all the starlink sats? Maybe, maybe you need two or 3 at different inclinations. You definietly don’t need as many launches as many spacex needed to put their satelites up.
Well, I was trying to make the case that it's not dramatically harder to take Starlink down than it was to put it up. If your barrel bomb full of nails works, that would be even stronger evidence that it's not dramatically harder.
My intuition, though, is that it wouldn't work. Kosmos 1408 became a two-tonne barrel bomb full of nails in November and so far isn't known to have taken down any other satellites.
I don't really understand orbital mechanics, so take the following with a grain of salt.
The Starlink satellites weigh 230-300 kg and orbit at 540-570 km altitude, at which altitude the thermosphere will passively deorbit failed satellites within 5 years. I think a metal object weighing 10 g, such as a nail, would deorbit about 30 times faster, about 2 months, because it weighs 27000 times less but only has about 900 times less surface area. But that's assuming the nail is in orbit in the first place. If you have a barrel bomb in LEO and you blow it up, sending the nails in every direction, most of them will immediately deorbit: those traveling backwards or down will deorbit immediately, while those traveling forwards or up will deorbit 45 minutes later on the other side of the earth.
Only a narrow plane of the shrapnel will stay in orbit at all. If the shrapnel forms a sphere around where the barrel would have been if it hadn't exploded, a plane through its center intersects that sphere in a circle. The nails in this circle will stay in orbit: some are going sideways, some forward and down, others backward and up.
The Minkowski sum of a nail and a Starlink satellite is almost exactly the same size as a Starlink satellite, so we can think of each nail as sweeping out a Starlink-satellite-sized path in its orbit. I don't know how big the satellites are, but they must be on the order of 50 liters to weigh what they do if they're mostly made of metal, which would make them on the order of 40 cm in diameter. So each nail is sweeping out roughly 40 cm x 40 cm x 7000 m/s. So over the course of two months before it deorbits, it sweeps out about 5.9 billion cubic meters (5.9e9).
If we approximate the Starlink volume as a 30 km thick sphere beginning 540 km above earth's surface, its inside radius is about 6911 km and outside radius about 6941 km. That has a volume of 1.8e19 cubic meters. So a random nail has a chance of about 1 in 3 billion of killing a particular Starlink satellite, of which there are almost 2000, so about 1 in 1.5 million of killing any of them.
From one point of view that suggests that a barrel of nails could work; you just need several million nails to kill any satellites (thus, tens of tonnes, which is feasible) and several billion nails to kill them all (which is not).
Smart and expensive killer satellites are likely to be much more cost-effective. Faberge eggs are far too simple, though; your killer satellites need to be more like the complexity of a feature phone. A feature phone controlling a Bernz-O-Matic valve, though.
I think the more general point here is that, because LEO is a place, people tend to think of it as being kind of like Central Park or Spain, giving them misleading intuitions about what kinds of interactions to expect. A good starting point for your intuition pump is to remember that the surface area of LEO is basically the same as the surface area of Earth. It's slightly larger, because the radius is larger, but the radius is only about 8% larger in this case.
Now consider that we're talking about, in this case, satellites distributed over 30 km of altitude (thickness). This gives you a volume that's roughly ten times the volume of the Earth's oceans. (You can throw in the crust too if you find it helpful.) So instead of thinking about shrapnel from a barrel bomb trying to hit a microwave oven in Central Park, think about trying to hit a microwave oven somewhere in the oceans of ten Earth-sized planets. Even with a 7-km-per-second supertorpedo with two months of fuel, it's not going to be easy without guidance.
Space, in short, is big.
I'd like to blame stupid movies like Star Wars and Gravity for this, but I think it's just the kind of cognitive error the humans are unavoidably prone to. It's easy to get results that are off by nine orders of magnitude like this when you just rely on your untutored intuition.
The other counterintuitive thing about LEO is that, though for hypervelocity collisions it's a three-dimensional space, for things like rendezvous or getting from your launch trajectory to your desired orbit, it's a six-dimensional space of orbital elements. For understanding the results of a barrel bomb in orbit, it may be more useful to think of the nails as being distributed across a small ball of this six-dimensional space in the six-dimensional point occupied by the barrel, rather than gradually spreading out in a complicated way in three-dimensional space. The humans are not good at intuitively reasoning about six-dimensional spaces either.
> Not to mention that attacking US satellites would probably be an act of war.
These aren't US satellites. They're SpaceX satellites. An attack might still result in war since they're owned by an Oligarch, but that certainly isn't the default.
A little off topic, but about calling all super-wealthy people in America "oligarchs". That's just not true - if anything, they're plutocrats.
An oligarch is someone who was given their business by the government by force, often with murder and jail involved to the oppressed. Like Abramovich receiving state owned oil and steel companies. Musk built paypal, helped revive tesla, and built SpaceX using his own money as collateral. He didn't get handed NASA.
That's how the word is/was used by the Russians, but isn't really how it's used by the western media. Any Russian billionaire is called an oligarch; it's used as a substitute for plutocrat.
Musk, Bezos, the Koch brothers, Soros, and a few other billionaires are plutocrats, ergo, they are oligarchs.
Russia deliberately destroying satellites would be a heck of an escalation that would likely find retaliation in a mysteriously high failure rate of Russian spy satellite optics.
An "act of war" is whatever the executives in government deem it to be. Being a asset which the US is responsible for and regulates (for example, if China wants to complain about it, they have to go to US gov, not the private company) it wouldn't be unreasonable for to treat it as a US asset. Most space and companies tech operate under ITAR restrictions, so the government isn't just a passive regulator here.
Abso freaking lutely. These statements (so common for him) are way too cryptic and open to so many different interpretations. I guess firing all his PR/comms staff is going well?
Idk it seems pretty clear if you have a bit of context of what is being discussed - he's pointing out that there are techniques to locate the dishes, that Russia could use to physically locate/attack Starlink users in Ukraine.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone developed a jammer for starlink. Given the signal levels and the relative receptivity their antenna has to signals coming from the sides (a common problem I'm told of phased arrays where the array edges are not benefiting from antennas on one side) one could presumably just barrage jam at the downlink frequencies. Of course you would either need to be really 'loud' or pretty close to do that.
I also felt it kind of a dick move to "brag" about giving Ukraine Starlink terminals on social media as it informs your adversaries that you have another channel they have to go out and shut down. Much better (in my opinion of course) to keep it as discreet as possible so that opponents are guessing.
Giving companies the green light to brag about help provided might also encourage others to help for PR reasons. More help, even a little, might be more important than being covert.
Satellite communications can be extremely resilient to jamming. The reason being that it's easy to filter out RF from every direction but above with a very simple antenna. Depending on the constellation and the angle of the satellite relative to the antenna it could be close to impossible without an aircraft or something directly in the terminal's line-of-sight.
As someone who has had to manually satellite TV dish, AFAIK, there's always guidelines on the specific angles you need to orient your dish at. Couldn't an adversary place satellites to also broadcast noise in roughly the same direction?
Satellite TV dishes are pointed at satellites that remain in the same position of the sky relative to the satellite. These are in geosynchronous orbit meaning they orbit the earth once every 24 hours. (Which is what makes them appear stationary to Earth stations).
In contrast, the Starlink satellites are zooming around the planet orbit once every 95 minutes[1] or so. At any given time, there are many Starlink satellites "visible" and the antenna tracks them using a technique called "phased array antenna tracking." This is the same way multi-target RADAR works on modern ships and planes.
Anyway, the cool think about Starlink (I just installed mine) is that you put it up where there is a lot of "sky" visible, and then the antenna moves itself to maximize the area of sky that it's antenna can "see". It is very cool and an amazing bit of engineering.
Citation? Some quick googling suggests that if you want to become more jam resistant, you switch to phased arrays.
Which would be what intuitively makes sense to me, though I'm not an expert in phased arrays. If you have more gain straight up, then you must have less gain in other directions.
Afaik, Starlink phased arrays have very high gain (low beamwidth), so they must have proportionally lower gain in other directions, or else it wouldn't add up and you'd have overunity.
I don't think that's fair, the vice prime Minister of Ukraine asked him to do it on Twitter. I'm not sure discreetness was ever a goal from the other side
He mentioned in a follow up that it's worth operating with caution if in Ukraine, suggesting that the Russians can likely locate the ground station using ELINT tools and either destroy it or otherwise overrun it.
Ukraine gov't specifically asked for it, publically. And of course, Russia government responded with anger. "Publicity" is naive. Unquestionably what Elon is doing now is provocative to Russia (and the handful of pro-Russia countries), but at a time when most places don't want to be friends with Russia, it's great PR but more importantly, it has real effects for people on the ground. It sends materialistic support and and condemnation which encourages others to follow suit.
Do you mean the most important thing for SpaceX? Because it's also important for Ukraine not just to win on the technological front but also to seem like they're winning, and bragging about capabilities helps their propaganda effort. "We have a network you can't easily disconnect or jam, and your invasion is being livestreamed on YouTube right now" might even have the effect of discouraging some war crimes from happening. If there's even a slight positive impact it's worth it.
I hope these network terminals get used, but the messaging is important too.
musk also twitted that he won't block russian media as requested. Starlink is probably a great intelligence tool and obviously will never be turned off, on or anything . He s basically utilizing the importance of starlink to US army to promote his absolutist free speech view. not bad
If starlink is to be successful, I see it pivoting to being a service provider for ISP's. Then the ISP's can apply whatever filtering or prioritization they require to meet local laws or their business requirements. But the customer would be free to move to another ISP which has different rules.
The ISP is not the place to enforce censorship, if you think censorship is warranted: courts and police are.
It's a powerful tool (which I personally vehemently oppose) but even if you think censorship has its place, it should be somewhere with oversight, due process, et c. ISPs are not that.
The obvious failure mode can be observed presently in Russia.
I'll take that criticism. If preventing people from having websites as easily available to them to watch kids being raped is as easily available as watching YouTube is then I am pro-censorship.
I put it to you that most fair minded people are also pro-censorship.
To the best of my knowledge, dedicated CSAM sites in the clearnet have all but gone - every hoster in the world will cut you off for that, even the "bulletproof" hosters that claim to ignore piracy and dealing in stolen credentials all ban CSAM and legal-but-close content like "lolita" etc. simply because of the attention it draws from law enforcement.
They're all on TOR now, and even there they get regularly busted due to shoddy opsec.
There's plenty of drawn lolita imagery easily publicly available on the clear net. Primarily because it's legal in many countries. Often times it's only filtered behind going into a settings menu and hitting a checkbox, but usually not even that.
Example: Almost any of the various image booru sites have it, usually behind a checkbox.
I support other countries establishing free speech laws. And in general the protection of non-US citizen speech within the US, especially foreign reporters.
But that doesn't have anything to do with constitutionally protecting 3rd party nations using platforms/speech for propaganda in our (or any other opposing) country.
Seems ridiculous on its face to try to confuse or equate the two and argue the point.
There aren't "known CSAM sites" lol... If they were known they'd already be taken down. There aren't big scary CSAM sites on the public internet hosted in foreign countries that need blocking.
The best bet is to train end users to use the internet effectively. BigTech has spent the past 15 years laboriously dumbing down its users to become scrolling monkeys.
I wish this where true, but I disagree. I think you drastically over-estimate the average (particularly non tech) person's will and ability to learn such things.
That's because we never adapted and used people's emotional biases to make money. Just because some friend says something doesn't mean it's true - but pointing this out would cost a lot of money
We scrolled less (thanks Aza), but were the same monkeys before. People wildly overestimate their critical thinking faculties and how impervious they are to propaganda.
Musk is not anything like a free speech absolutist. He makes extensive use of NDAs and other speech restriction agreements for non-security non-trade secret reasons, and one time it seems he swatted a whistle-blower.
He’s a free speech absolutist who agreed with the SEC to have his tweets pre-screened by lawyers. It’s funny how much people on this site eat up anything remotely contrarian sounding from this guy.
I'm really surprised by this move. Starlink will need as many customers as it can get all over the world, and there're too many countries, even some in EU, who'd want to filter some content, or otherwise would ban terminals. Some are huge, like India. For those declaring that all traffic would go to the in-country land station could work. With that arrangement even China wouldn't totally out of the question. Making spacex free-speech outpost is nice and would create some contraband market for terminals, but...
Looking ahead, might be nice to have an open-source ground station that could be made from available circuitry, a downloadable instructable (think pdf) and hobbyist level electric skills.
This experience might encourage Starlink engineers to build in some public-safety/emergency service protocols.
Some folks are looking at the receiving end with software radio:
That's going to be pretty complex, and either it'll need to be a very very advanced hobbyist, or else it will have to feature prebuilt stuff that you just plug together.
A high-bandwidth low-latency ground station that can talk to multiple satellites at once is not going to be easy.
It always amazes me how seemingly complex hardware problems can be fixed in software with the right amount of work. It's a bit similar to where we are in AI I think, with very advanced and capable hardware but just needs the correct software to be able to fully exploit all the hardware capabilities.
I'd assume in this case it's more reprogramming of something like a DSP or an FPGA so in effect the hardware is getting modified more so than the software.
I wonder how hard it would be for starlink system to run an alternative internet on earth aka starlink bbs. As great as the internet currently is, as a long time user it has been rather disappointing to see what it has become. I get the feeling it could have been so much more if it was so heavily funded by ad technologies.
In theory, every modern programable radio transmitting device could become a jammer in their operational frequency band with the appropriate firmware (like SDR dongles or even some WiFi routers and Bluetooth dongles, for example).
That's why we require FCC certifications, to make sure that these kinds of devices cannot act like jammers out of the box. However, like I said, with the right custom FW, they could be turned into jammers illegally by bad actors.
A common easy trick used in some home WiFI routers to boost the range for free, was to select a specific country from the device configuration menu, outside of Europe/North America, which had lower restrictions on TX signal strength than what the FCC/EU allowed, and presto, extra (illegal) WiFi range for free.
I wish Elon would learn to be more tactful with his tweets. We need to make sure we work as covertly as possible with this tech and announcing Starlink for Ukraine like it’s some PR exercise starts the Russians hacking your system immediately.
Edited to be less of an ahole while still making the same point.
You're projecting a problem that doesn't have the implications you imagine.
As others have said, originally Fedorov Mykhailo, a Ukraine vice prime minister, publicly tweeted a request for Starlink service and terminals [0] and later thanked SpaceX after they arrived in-country [1] and today, in Ukraine media, the mayor of Kyiv is pictured with terminals about to be deployed [2]:
"“Friends! StarLink global satellite Internet stations are already in Kyiv. Two stations were provided by the Ministry of Digital Transformation. I and Volodymyr [Klitschko] agreed on provision of ten stations with international partners and friends," Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko posted on Telegram.
According to him, StarLink will help ensure the critical infrastructure of the city and the defense of the capital."
To keep the information together, 5th March 2022, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted about a further shipment of Starlink terminals for destroyed cities [0]
"Talked to @elonmusk . I’m grateful to him for supporting Ukraine with words and deeds. Next week we will receive another batch of Starlink systems for destroyed cities. Discussed possible space projects . But I’ll talk about this after the war. "
The best way to attack the system might be to hack the user terminals, which Russia apparently already did to Viasat terminals located in Ukraine at the start of the invasion.
SpaceX is now in direct opposition to the Russian military and is going to be attacked just as Viasat was. They need to especially make sure that the command and control systems for the satellites are bulletproof.
I wonder if existing anti radiation missiles would be able to lock onto Starlink user terminals. If not, I expect that feature will be developed soon. It's well known that the US military has been investigating using Starlink so I'm sure other militaries have been thinking about countermeasures.