I will probably come at a premium, but I think it's pretty much given that governments and the military will have a huge interest in this, if only for the fact that you can't cut a laser beam in space. At least not without anyone seeing it - unlike undersee cables.
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Starlink is always 1 missile away from being turned off though. You don’t need to disable the network, you don’t need cause a Kessler syndrome, you just need to convince 1 billionaire that servicing a region is going to be met with force.
It's a distributed, self-healing satellite constellation: it'd take thousands of very expensive [a] missiles to dismantle it. That's one of the features that makes it so attractive for militaries.
See, for example, Chinese military thinking in response to Starlink. They're fully aware they currently have no way to disable it (kinetically). Supposedly, they're putting a priority on figuring ways to do that, in a war.
- "With more than 2,300 satellites – and counting – in orbit, Starlink is generally believed to be indestructible because the system can maintain proper functioning after losing some satellites."
- "The unprecedented scale, complexity and flexibility of Starlink would force the Chinese military to develop new anti-satellite capabilities, according to Ren and his colleagues."
[a] Here's what the US used for its anti-LEO-satellite test. Wikipedia says these cost about $10 million each.
Such an engineer take. There’s an xkcd about this that involves a wrench.
Let me explain, “the Russians shot one of our satellites out of orbit and say they will continue if we keep providing internet to …, let’s stop” is much more likely than “1 down 2300 to go! Whoop”
You don't need to disable the system in a technical sense, you just need to persuade management/ownership that it might be a good idea to take the hint.
>Starlink is always 1 missile away from being turned off though
One missile going into space will trigger every single ICBM early warning system on the planet. And since Starlink is not one system but thousands, trying to disable their backbone functionality would seem like a nuclear first strike. Yes, some countries could probably do it. But you can't do it without being seen, so the risk and possible ramifications are infinitely higher than for undersee cables.
> One missile going into space will trigger every single ICBM early warning system on the planet.
Rockets go into space all the time without triggering accidental nuclear war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1408 IIRC was blown up in an ASAT weapons test without any advance warning; nukes headed to DC/Moscow have a very different flight path than one looking to hit a Starlink node.
Of course they don't trigger nuclear war, that wasn't the point. The point is that they trigger detection systems. We know exactly what happened to Kosmos 1408, including all actors and events, down to every minute. We even have a Wikipedia article listing all those details that you were able to dig up easily. Compare that to the undersee cables that got cut, where we will probably never know exactly what happened. If we cought someone red handed while destroying critical infrastructure, that would be a pretty good casus belli.
> If we cought someone red handed while destroying critical infrastructure, that would be a pretty good casus belli.
We're not going to go to war because someone openly took out a Starlink node to send Musk a message. Not unless we were already going to do it for other reasons.
It's not that it's a message to Elon; that would be a message of air supremacy to the entire world. There is no way that wouldn't provoke a pretty drastic reaction of some sort from groups that seek to hold the title of 'owners of the sky'.
No war. We send a grumpy note to their ambassador and just consider it a minor acceptable consequence of obliterating significant chunks of their armed forces in a proxy war elsewhere.
These US drones were operating in a theatre of war. Things would turn sour very quickly if they shot down civilian critical infrastructure far away from active warzones.
One missile going into space will trigger every single ICBM warning system on the planet.
Most of the world's great powers don't need to fire a missile into space to take out a satellite. They've already lifted that capability into orbit.
I don't believe any of those powers would take out satellites willy nilly. I think it would take open direct military conflict. At the same time though, I didn't believe any of them would 'cross the Rubicon' with respect to undersea pipelines and internet cables either without direct open military conflict.
Governments and the military already have their own space internet; I doubt the US would want to go into an agreement with a commercial entity owned and controlled by someone with dubious allegiances. They will require heaps of legal changes and certifications first, including making sure Musk does not have control over it.
> SpaceX also designs, builds, and launches customized military satellites based on variants of the Starlink satellite bus, with the largest publicly known customer being the Space Development Agency (SDA).
> In 2019, tests by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) demonstrated a 610 Mbit/s data link through Starlink to a Beechcraft C-12 Huron aircraft in flight. Additionally, in late 2019, the United States Air Force successfully tested a connection with Starlink on an AC-130 Gunship. In 2020, the Air Force utilized Starlink in support of its Advanced Battlefield management system during a live-fire exercise. They demonstrated Starlink connected to a "variety of air and terrestrial assets" including the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker.
The military wants far more bandwidth than is available with their current setup, for everything from drone swarms to far-flung observation bases wanting to check their email.
The military could change the specs and require the sats be equipped with kinetic interceptors. Strategic Defense Initiative mk2. Oh, wait, they already have. It's now called SDA.
