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Every part of the constellation passes over China. The Starlink satellite constellation is practically invulnerable to physical attack because it would be prohi
by modeless 4y ago
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.
- mike_d 4y agoChina 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.
- modeless 4y agoThe 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.
- wolpoli 4y agoStarlink 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.
- uri4 4y agoNot 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.
- modeless 4y agoEven 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.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI wonder how hard it is to take out multiple starlink satellites right after launch, when they're all on essentially the same orbit?
- modeless 4y agoIt'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.
- zeroimpl 4y agoSeems like it’d be easier/more effective to take out the launch vessel.
- sgc 4y agoSince 500 terminals a month are being destroyed in Ukraine, per Elon, it seems clear they are targeting them.
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- Schroedingersat 4y agoI would have assumed most advanced militaries would have a maser or similar capable of cooking civilian solar panels at 500km by now.