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There’s Just Something About Starlink
Elon Musk now has Starlink satellites operating over Ukraine, reestablishing much-needed internet communications after damage from the Russian attack. It may not have occurred to very many people before these events, but in some ways, SpaceX is an actual military power in space. When you have close to 2,000 maneuverable satellites in low earth orbit, you’re in a position to do…very interesting things.
One has to wonder just how many aha! moments are taking place all over the world. Starlink presents challenges to militaries interested in achieving internet superiority during a time of war. And with maneuverable satellites, Starlink is not incapable of retaliating against aggressors.
China had begun taking notice of the implications of Starlink’s fleet even before these events. China would have us believe that their concern is genuine and only motivated by their treaty obligations to report things to the United Nations. LOL!
I’ve been a little surprised that, even before Musk’s move to support Ukraine, lots of info was still coming out of the country through normal internet channels. The Russians had been hacking them for a while, and it seems that whatever success the Russians may have had, they haven’t got total control of Ukraine’s internet infrastructure. Ukraine’s ability to stay online has certainly called into question the press’ breathless scaremongering about the inevitability of cyber-war effectiveness. Perhaps Ukraine had been paying attention to hardening its internet infrastructure far in advance of these events. One would hope so.
One also hopes that Elon Musk has been paying attention to hardening Starlink’s own infrastructure (I suspect he has), because the world now has a taste of the possibilities, and he’s liable to start drawing all kinds of unwanted cyber attention.
Elon Musk: 1
Russia: 0
Published in General
Related: The Daily Mail reports that the Kremlin web site is down, and Russian TV stations have been hacked and are broadcasting Ukrainian songs.
It is surprising that Biden will allow Musk to assist.
or exist.
Joe probably thinks Musk is an ingredient in Hunter’s after shave.
I just shut off Hughesnet, as my Starlink arrived and is ~80 times faster with latency about an eighth as long. Also, so far no data limit. Only $9 more per month. For rural medium mountains of New Mexico, not bad at all.
The Ukrainians are no slouches at cyber-warfare either….
When WWI began, one of the first things the British did was to cut the German undersea cables. Given the British control of the seas, the cables could not be repaired during the course of the war, and this led to a British dominance of communications with neutral countries–especially the United States. While Germany was not totally cut off from the world–they had a powerful radio transmitter at Nauen–communication from the Allied Powers was more convenient and subject to British influence; war correspondents, for example, tended to file their reports from Britain. In the opinion of many writers (here, for instance), this gave the Allied Powers a considerable advantage in propaganda. (Also in message interception for purposes of espionage, of course)
Comm Check
This is why the Biden administration does not like Musk or any of his companies. The government does not control them, and that scares them. He doesn’t need their dollars, can do what is best for his companies and stockholders, almost uniquely among large corporations today Being non-union is the first big issue, then the independence of thought and action.
Keep in mind that these satellites are vulnerable to hostile powers. China has reportedly been funding a capability to shoot them down.
It’s one thing to use the internet they provide to stream Netflix. But anyone providing a critical service should not use them. Electric grids utilize microwave as well as fiber to control their power grids. I’m sure supply chain operators are also using internet based location services to manage their grid.
If we get into a cold/warm/hot war with China, over dependence on those satellites could be a real problem. Airlines already over depend on satellites for air travel.
The Russian military doesn’t have much logistics moxie, it’s turning out, with tanks reportedly running out of gas.
Don’t expect the Chinese to be that inept, unless they show it.
What sort of speed, Latency and jitter you getting?
Aviation of all types has become quite dependent on GPS…many of the ground-based electronic navigation beacons are being shut down for cost reasons, although a ‘minimum operational network’ is to be maintained.
And it’s not just aviation: the new Positive Train Control system for railroads makes extensive use of GPS. Many car and truck drivers would probably be unable to navigate without GPS. And some of the approaches to self-driving vehicles are quite GPS-dependent.
It’s worth remembering that the German embassy begged Woodrow Wilson to allow them to use the US cables for encoded “peace negotiations” and he permitted it!
The encoded traffic included plans to encourage Mexico to attack the US in order to distract us from the war in Europe.
It is a classic example of the foolish naivete of a progressive president, in control of his own wishful thinking…
Is that not the point of a decentralized network like The Internet? With enough nodes, properly-configured, it should be (nearly?) impossible to cut an entire country off.
With tens of thousands of the dang things zipping around in LEO, good luck with that.
Foolish? How do you think the US found out about Zimmerman telegram?
On my Samsung J3 Orbit’s WiFi, according to Starlink app:
63 Mbps up, 5 down. 35 ms total latency. Speed seems to be limited by the phone, not the router/sat link.
On my fairly new Win10 machine with an Office Depot dongle using ad-thick Speedcheck.org:
32 up, 19 down. 160 ms total latency.
Not sure how to measure jitter, but on my fairly old work-from-home-dedicated Dell laptop with built-in WiFi (which I’m not going to test speed on) I’ve attended, even hosted a couple MS Teams meetings that were smooth except for a couple drop outs that lasted a few seconds. I was warned about that in that they haven’t filled up the planned constellation yet. Also I might be blocked a bit by a bare elm tree. If it gets worse when leaves come in I’ll know I need to trim the tree.
With Hughesnet I was lucky to get one or two Mbps down and about 2 seconds latency, which is fast enough for an MP3 podcast, email, and documents, but had to buffer tube-of-you or download over a long time. Plus I think they throttle Ricochet and EIB. (Hi @rushbabe49 !)
I’m spoiled, because I go back to 300 bps dialup on a used NEC PC-8401A I paid 1000 bucks for used. And ‘dem was 1988 bucks.
Hah! Youngsters. I used 110bps sometimes direct-wired, sometimes acoustic coupler.
That’s an ASR-33 Teletype, kiddos!
China is also doing extensive research on AI (not to be confused with Al). That probably isn’t an insurmountable problem.
It isn’t a computational problem. It is a munitions problem. Starlink satellites don’t have super-hot maneuvering thrusters, but they can certainly dodge any clumsy approach. And their orbital altitudes are much higher than ordinary LEO. So each and every one of them would have to be taken out by a powerful and maneuverable dedicated killsat. And with the dodging, an adversary might need multiple killsats per target. There are already a few thousand Starlinks in orbit, IIRC, and the goal is something like 30,000 in the next three or four years.
Delivered:
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-dishes-arrive-in-ukraine/