If one way or another Starlink starts providing precise positioning data it will turn their satellites into a valid military target in case of a war. E.g. if China invaded Taiwan, they may take down the part of the constellation that passes over China (if they can cheaply mass produce and launch interceptors).
Every part of the constellation passes over China. The Starlink satellite constellation is practically invulnerable to physical attack because it would be prohibitively expensive to hit thousands of individual satellites with interceptors. And SpaceX can keep launching them, 50 at a time (potentially hundreds at a time once Starship is working, along with an increase in constellation size to 30,000+).
Physical attacks on the ground stations are more feasible from a physics perspective, but now that the satellites have laser links you'd have to take out ground stations all over the world to completely cut service, not just locally.
The way to attack Starlink would be hacking, either of the command and control system or the user terminals. Failing that, then jamming, and/or anti-radiation missiles targeted at the user terminals. Russia is known to be trying hacking and jamming already (recall that they were already successful in hacking Viasat at the very beginning of the war). I haven't heard about them locating user terminals by their transmissions but I'd be shocked if they aren't trying that too.
China already has an extensive network of fixed location coordinated signal jammers deployed across the country. It is regularly used to overpower Radio Free Asia and Voice of Tibet broadcasts, and has conducted exercises blocking GPS.
But a much more likely response would be equipping local police with direction finding equipment for signals in the 10-12 GHz band and bashing in the skulls of anyone found with a terminal.
The military threat of Starlink to China is as a way for the Taiwanese defense to communicate during an invasion. In peacetime they can prevent Starlink from operating in China simply by threatening Elon Musk with the loss of his Shanghai factory.
Starlink seems to be protected by the fact that it could launch satalites cheaper than the adversary. That advantage will hold until the opponent gains the ability to launch small satalites at a low cost. Eg. Opponents launches and pre-positions mini suicide satalites 100 at a time in orbit, leading to a weaponization of space.
Or it might be easier to just pressure Musk's other business interests.
Not really. To destroy satellite you need suborbital rocket with much lower speed. Usually it is a missile launched from airplane. Even WW2 V2 missile could propably do it, if it had navigation.
Even so, SpaceX can launch 50 satellites in one launch, and each suborbital interceptor can only hit one. And the "if it had navigation" part is doing a lot of work in that sentence; a satellite interceptor kill vehicle is not easy to build. Are 50 of them cheaper than one Falcon 9 launch with a 15x reused booster? I think "maybe" is the only possible answer, but probably the cost of killing all the satellites that way would be around the same order of magnitude as putting them up in the first place. You would need to build multiple whole factories just to make the thousands of interceptors you would need.
It's an interesting idea. They are deployed and start spreading out within minutes of launch. You might be able to take them all out in the first couple of orbits. I expect it would be much harder after that. SpaceX could possibly defend against this by varying the orbit so you don't know where to place your interceptors, and maybe by having the satellites boost apart from each other sooner.
But you'd also need to take out most of the on-orbit satellites before it would be useful to blow up the replacements.
Recent actions of Russia in Ukraine have shown how vacuous the term “valid military target” is, to the point that there’s very little sense in discussing it.
(One may argue that along with that it also exposed how empirically inadequate are a lot of other terms, institutions, conventions, and rules we’ve become accustomed to relying on for maintaining our peace, security, and ensuring that bad guys don’t go unpunished, but i guess that would be a digression for another time).
The meaning behind such terms, absent methods of enforcement when they are violated, exists only for those warring states that choose to respect them - the list that likely does not include any of the realistic opponents we consider today, such as Russia, or North Korea, or Iran, or unfortunately, China.
There are a few technical reasons I don’t see this as a real threat:
1. There isn’t a particular part of the constellation that passes over China. There are probably a few launch groups that never or rarely pass over China, but a majority do. An adversary would have to destroy or disable a few thousand satellites.
2. Anti-satellite weapons aren’t nearly plentiful enough and given the ground support required, I’d be surprised if launching more than a few per day is feasible. A counterattack would come too quickly.
3. Precise positions don’t help that much. Even knowing a satellite position to ~2m still requires some active tracking on the interceptor. It’s not much benefit over knowing the position to 1km.
4. The debris created would be catastrophic and likely to damage the ISS even at Starlink’s low altitude.
All of the first three apply to GPS as well even though it’s only ~32 satellites.
Starlink already is a valid military target in time of war.
Also, the way the orbits are established and the fact that Taiwan is roughly equatorial, I thin every satellite eventually passes over it. Starlink is not geostationary
I would be more worried about the undersea fiber optic cable. There's 13 cables that provide the vast majority of internet into the country and they're deep underwater where they could easily be destroyed with no defense.
Any communication systems are valid military targets in case of war. So much so that they are usually among the first targets.
But there are also other considerations. In your example I doubt China would want to provoke the US by shooting American-owned satellites out of the sky, and I doubt Starlink would be that important anyway.
They could easily saturate the whole LEO where starlink operates with schrapnel - and any damaged sat would add more schrapnel, as described by the "Kessler syndrome".
Kessler syndrome is not "easy" to create at 550km. The orbits decay way too fast. Whole satellites decay in 5 years or less; smaller debris decays faster due to higher surface area to mass ratio. And the orbit doesn't have to decay all the way to 0 for the debris to stop being a threat to Starlink; a few km is all it would take. I haven't seen a lot of calculations about this but my belief is that even intentionally creating Kessler syndrome at 550 km would be infeasible, and it certainly won't happen by accident.
The point really isn't to completely shut down that orbit, just deny it for however long you strategically need. Throwing up a huge flak cloud using magnetized cheap metal tinsel on an old ICBM isn't only easy, but also has actually been done before, albeit for different reasons
You won't be able to cause Kessler syndrome promptly. It takes a while for the collision debris to build up, and it takes a while for individual satellites to get hit. Space is big and even huge debris clouds will take a long time to hit something. It's not going to help your invasion next month or anything like that. Very impractical as a weapon of war, even if it was feasible which it isn't.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. Any given orbital plane is larger than the entire surface of Earth, including the oceans. Combine that with the fact that explosions and collisions introduce randomness to the orbital plane of each piece of debris, and you’ve got a lot of hurdles to overcome in order to get to some short term low earth orbit Kessler.
That just makes it more likely. If you think war is going to last awhile, or you have a severe disadvantage, you shut down access to space for a few years. The cost of such an attack is lower BECAUSE it resolves itself rather quickly.
Though the issue is that it is substantially harder to create the Kessler Syndrome than people claim.
I disagree that it is at all likely. It would take months if not years worth of launches to fill an orbital shell with debris and nobody's going to do it before starting a war. It's practically a declaration of war on its own. It won't happen at the beginning of a war because nobody starts a war with the intention of having it drag on for years. If you're winning a war you're not going to do it and if you're losing a war you're not going to have the resources or time to do it nor the ability to do the launches without getting your launch pads destroyed. Furthermore it doesn't shut down all access to space, as you can launch through the cloud to a higher orbit.
That would be quite dumb. Whatever you put in that orbit will decay within a few years.
Given the current situation, USA/SpaceX is in a far better position to quickly repopulate LEO with satellites when the debris has fallen down. In that case, they may send up satellites armed with weapons that can shoot down anything being launched into orbit to create debris again.
I don't think entering into that kind of conflict with USA is a winning proposition for China unless they have their own Falcon 9 or Starship-like rocket.
> Given the current situation, USA/SpaceX is in a far better position to quickly repopulate LEO with satellites when the debris has fallen down
It's far cheaper to heft tens of thousands of ball bearings into orbit vs a single satellite. You can give them a nice spread so you have a space shotgun that ruin an orbit for years at a time. The decay is a bonus to the attacker[1] because they can a go all out during wartime, without impacting their long-term space-faring program.
1. The decay also allows the same armaments to cover a larger vertical slice of the orbit.
I was thinking having the projectiles being aerodynamic may increase decay time, then realized you can have the launch vehicle use solar power to fire the metal spheres using a railgun mechanism. This way, you can get vastly larger areas of denial by firing at an angle perpendicular to that of travel. You can have an every-shifting debris field if you fire 2 ball-bearings (port and starboard) every 10-50 meters to make that entire altitude unusable[1] - not just a specific orbit.
Edit:
1. The perigee and apogee will differ for projectiles fired from port or starboard based on launch vehicle inclination and the resulting relative speeds to earth. It would be a nightmare to track and avoid the resulting mess.
> USA/SpaceX is in a far better position to quickly repopulate LEO with satellites when the debris has fallen down
Until china threatens musks other factories and he voluntarily decided that defense isn’t a good business for SpaceX. Or maybe he’ll do what he did with Ukraine and advocate for china just to end the war (probably due to business risk of Tesla et al).
Tesla might be the most profitable business Musk is involved in, but SpaceX is nearest and dearest to his heart. It’s worth more to Musk than one factory which, after Berlin and Austin finish ramping up, will represent just one quarter of their global factory capacity.
IMHO, I think would be more likely that Musk would divest his entire ownership of Tesla than do anything which would compromise the long-term mission of SpaceX.
I don’t think he’d have that luxury. Especially not if a situation snuck up as they often do in war. Not that I think any of this is likely.
25% of their factory output is a lot. Sure it’s an amount that won’t leave the company in ruin, but it’s a lot. Teslas growing stock price basically funds all of spaceX so divesting is unlikely.
Realistically, SpaceX filled the mission musk had. It proved that space is viable with better tech. They’re really beholden to the government and he won’t be able to shake that.
It is simply wrong on the evidence that Tesla’s stock rise funds SpaceX. It is a profitable business and funds itself. And SpaceX doesn’t hold any Tesla stock as far as I’m aware.
My point is that he would divest ownership of Tesla before allowing himself to be blackmailed over SpaceX. I’m not saying that he wouldn’t care if the factory in China shut, though I am saying he might prefer that over SpaceX being neutered.
> It is simply wrong on the evidence that Tesla’s stock rise funds SpaceX. It is a profitable business and funds itself. And SpaceX doesn’t hold any Tesla stock as far as I’m aware.
No but musk owns Tesla shares and as they rise he can invest new cash into it.
You said "Teslas growing stock price basically funds all of spaceX" and now you're completely changing your story to something else which is also speculation based on nothing. It would be appreciated if you actually admitted that to yourself and perhaps in an apology here.
Do you think you know the long term mission of SpaceX? It certainly is not colonizing Mars, no matter what Elon claims. Nothing SpaceX is known to be working on is anywhere close to adequate for that.
My own guess is it is to get the US military dependent on him. Then he can write himself billion-dollar checks. NASA is just for practice.
In some hypothetical hot conflict where a major belligerent nation had already started taking down satellites and/or polluting orbits, the treaty will have already become a 'dead letter'.
Given that they have a working space station, I'm certain China has enough launch capability to make the Starlink orbit hell with several well-placed rockets undergoing very dirty disassembly in orbit.
(In fact, among the things that makes that scenario less likely is the fact they have a space station and would like to keep visiting it without worrying about passing through a Kessler cloud).
A Kessler cloud would not persist in orbit at the altitude of Starlink satellites for very long.
And building and maintaining a Kessler cloud at that altitude seems like it would be… not effective with just a handful of rockets due to the significant atmospheric drag.
Kessler syndrome is a real concern, but only at higher altitudes where atmospheric drag is negligible.
> Given that they have a working space station, I'm certain China has enough launch capability to make the Starlink orbit hell with several well-placed rockets undergoing very dirty disassembly in orbit.
Yes and their "working space station" is also below that orbit. So they'd need to blow up their own station as well. Also the international space station as well.
