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Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

• kolinko 8mo ago
  The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's. (And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are. The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.
  • db48x 8mo ago
    SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.
    • bryanlarsen 8mo ago
      Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
      • zitterbewegung 8mo ago
        To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-internet-spacex-amazon.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
        • fragmede 8mo ago
          What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
          • zitterbewegung 8mo ago
            If you are good at making businesses then why not make more?
      • db48x 8mo ago
        I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?
  • thisislife2 8mo ago
    Can you explain what makes Falcon9 / Starship special (or needed) to launch these satellites? China, India, EU, Japan etc. all have the capability to launch satellites. So why is a Falcon9 / Starship a particular requirement?
    • samrus 8mo ago
      Has to be the cost. A reusable launch vehicle is such a ridiculously better value proposition that it creates a discrete evolution. Some things just arent feasible to do without them
    • tartuffe78 8mo ago
      Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.
      • palmotea 8mo ago
        > Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities. But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?
        • iSnow 8mo ago
          >But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? No. The German army wants a constellation of initially 40, and later just over 100 satellites. They do not want or need to replicate the massive Starlink numbers.
          • kolinko 8mo ago
            The numbers just don't add up there. With just 40-100 satellites they need to be GEO, and this means crappy transfers, big lags (200-300 absolute minimum, more 500ms), and most importantly - big, power hungry antennas. It's a PR project to calm people down, not a real solution.
  • assaddayinh 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • jmyeet 8mo ago
    The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea. Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953. China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries. The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips. The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates. More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1]. China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off. And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too. I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen". [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidia-chips https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi... [2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-zhuque-3-test-previews-the-global-race-for-reusable-rockets/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...
    • ciupicri 8mo ago
      > many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
  • bryanlarsen 8mo ago
    Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go". suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success. So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though. And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.
    • pie_flavor 8mo ago
      The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
      • IshKebab 8mo ago
        Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.
      • jopsen 8mo ago
        > but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem. How many starlink clones are there really customers for? Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet. Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do. Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.
  • icegreentea2 8mo ago
    I'd broadly agree that EU is pretty behind the curve. But I think China is probably only ~5 years max behind the curve in terms of Starlink. But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-contract-bigger-than-70-million/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX. I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).
    • bryanlarsen 8mo ago
      China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.
      • polalavik 8mo ago
        i don't get why more folks aren't just going for the much cheaper option like this https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/ https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/
        • jacobgkau 8mo ago
          There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.
        • adolph 8mo ago
          That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight. There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer space. This debate is unsettled. [0] There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider. 0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1204 https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
  • tristor 8mo ago
    All of that, and the funny thing is /that is the easy part/. Moving payloads to space is just incredibly expensive, but not fundamentally hard in the same way that post-launch coordination of satellite constellations and RF tuning to support things like mobile connectivity are (I can connect to Starlink satellites from my iPhone through T-Mobile).
    • bryanlarsen 8mo ago
      Connecting to a cell phone and/or selling a phased array antenna that can track an object travelling 17,000 mph for $300 is crazy hard. But a military is going to be fine with an antenna that costs $3000.
  • RobotToaster 8mo ago
    I'm wondering if we will see a resurgence in direct to geostationary, It seems like it should be a lot easier to cover the planet when you only need a few satellites.
    • kolinko 8mo ago
      Bandwidth, input latency (250ms absolute minimum), energy use and antenna size (mattering for mobility and military). I don't think there is a way for geo to compete.
  • thisislife2 8mo ago
    India's ISRO already competes with SpaceX for these launches ( ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-launches-heaviest-payload-rocket-mission-lvm3-m3-oneweb-india-2-carrying-satellites/article66663592.ece https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... ), despite not having any reusable launch vehicles (reason - it's in the top 5 in space technology and just cheaper - Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo ). Once it masters reusable launch vehicle technologies, it'll be hard to compete with ISRO on commercial launches.
    • kolinko 8mo ago
      36 compared to 10000. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude. It's like a corner store trying to compete with Walmart.
      • ripe 8mo ago
        They have a list of 434 foreign satellites launched so far as of January 2026 on their website: https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html
      • thisislife2 8mo ago
        The point was that you don't need a reusable launch vehicle if a single use launcher is just as cheap.
  • ergocoder 8mo ago
    How did Starlink get so far ahead of everyone that everyone else is 20 years behind? We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive. Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.
• Bender 8mo ago
  Starlink's first customer was supposed to be the US Army. I am curious what requirements they did not meet.
  • pantsforbirds 8mo ago
    There is a separate entity, StarShield, that the US military uses. I think it's a fully separate set of satellites, but I'm not 100% on that.
    • Bender 8mo ago
      [flagged]
    • kotaKat 8mo ago
      IIRC it’s separate sats but same backhaul and they also leverage the same terminals?
      • pantsforbirds 8mo ago
        That seems entirely plausible. I based my comment on one of Elon's tweets (xeets?) about it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2028261823678759335?s=20 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2028261823678759335?s=20
      • ianburrell 8mo ago
        Starshield means multiple things, or really it is SpaceX business unit with military. Starshield is the name for US military buying Starlink service. It is also SpaceX building Starlink-based satellites for the military. This doesn't have to be communications, the first ones were missile defense trackers. I think the custom satellites came first and they rebranded the communications after it.
• _whiteCaps_ 8mo ago
  In Canada, the CF is working on rebuilding their expertise in HF radio, as they realized that in case of large scale conflict, satellite systems aren't going to be dependable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_Affiliate_Radio_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_Affiliate_Radi...
  • spwa4 8mo ago
    Ever notice just how many countries seem to be pretty convinced war is coming? And don't tell me it's all Trump, at the very least they believe that whoever follows Trump isn't going to be very different. Plus it's mostly EU that's rearming, and surely they aren't afraid they'll be attacked ...
    • roughly 8mo ago
      EU had a reliable military and technological partner in the US until circa 2016, and maintaining that belief became untenable in 2024. The reason EU countries are all of the sudden investing in onshoring critical military capabilities is that until Trump it’s been the policy position of the US to prevent them from doing so by doing it for them, a policy we inaugurated after WW2 and expanded during the Cold War for various reasons that we seem very sure don’t apply anymore.
      • spwa4 8mo ago
        I've worked in defense tech. This is true, but it should be described much more as "Europe believed US would save their ass - for free, and did nothing" (with exceptions, like France, and some token efforts within NATO) The US was not holding back much within NATO.
        • jltsiren 8mo ago
          It's more that most European countries had little reason to spend money on defense. Until recently, Finland and Sweden were small countries close to Russia but outside NATO, and their defense spending was similar to West European NATO members. In other words, nobody saw any real military threats to Western / Northern Europe, and the NATO security guarantees had more political than military value. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the threat environment changed. I'm less familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe. Many countries joined NATO as quickly as possible, because they understood the Russian doctrine and saw a real threat there. Russia tries to surround itself with puppets / friends / allies, by force if necessary, to avoid having to fight in its own territory. Many East European countries didn't want to be part of that so soon after the fall of communism. But it looks like the idea of being in friendly terms with Russia instead of fully committing to the West never went away.
• Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
  Starlink direct connect LTE support is simply going to bury any telecom that ignores the technology. Essentially, anyone with a smart-phone will now be able to text home from anywhere without specialized equipment. Elon can take a victory lap on that product. Competitors naive enough to underestimate what it took to build Starlink are going to find spectrum auctions already well out of their league. =3
• spwa4 8mo ago
  They have suddenly discovered what engineers have been telling them for about 80 years, and theoreticians have known for 100+ years is actually true: directional beams that cannot realistically be distrupted + satellites out of reach + even if you can you can only take ALL satellites out of orbit (ie. including your own, not just the enemy's). So on future battlefields, everyone will have livestreaming. Do governments and militaries even believe in the laws of physics? I mean that exactly this was going to happen (undisruptable radio comms + robots, on the battlefield) was perfectly predictable near ~about 1960, and it's an absolute miracle that it took so long to come to pass. And even that is assuming you're only willing to believe in demonstrations. For physicists it must have been a theoretical certainty that this was coming before WW1 was done.
• jordanb 8mo ago
  I think the next big war will involve a kessler syndrome, not because people start firing off anti-satellite weapons (since there's a strong component of MAD in doing that) but because the belligerents will have their own multi-thousand satellite constellations in orbit and they will quit coordinating with one another on collision avoidance.
  • childintime 8mo ago
    A smaller player like North Korea and Iran would not have as much to lose. Iran is doing something similar today, suicide bombing everything it can.
    • krunck 8mo ago
      Iran also has a space program with Satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Space_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Space_Agency
  • tehjoker 8mo ago
    These LEO satellites are low enough that I imagine a Kessler situation would self-resolve within a few years.
  • bryanlarsen 8mo ago
    Starlink is redeploying to 300 miles. Many consider Kessler to be impossible at 300 miles. Any unpowered satellite at a 300 mile orbit will deorbit within a couple of months. But a collision means fragments which deorbit faster because they have a higher surface/weight ratio, and because orbit disturbances lower that time considerably. Any single disturbance that raises aphelion lowers perihelion.
    • rationalist 8mo ago
      Would collisions cause debris to be ejected into a higher orbit? Although I guess as long as the debris does not pick up any significant speed boost, its orbit would be elliptical and would just collide with Earth (burn up on re-entry)?
• jmyeet 8mo ago
  There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US. An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on platforms run by EU companies subject to EU jurisdiction. Think EU AWS. This is easier said than done. But this is really a consequence of the current administration having absolutely no idea what they're doing and they're intentionally and unintentionally destroying American soft power. Another way this can come to pass is that the EU decides that the US is an unreliable partner for their security needs so you will find that various weapons, vehicles, platforms, etc for EU militaries will be supplied by local companies, particularly if the US effectively abandons Ukraine. Starlink is just another piece of that. The current administration paints NATO as Europe taking advantage of the US. It could not be more wrong. NATO is a protection racket for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy. We kind of saw a precursor to all this with GPS. For anyone who has been around long enough, GPS used to be less accurate, deliberately. Why? Because defence (apparently). There was a special signal, Selective Ability ("SA") [1], that military gear could decode to be more accurate. Fun fact: one of the clues to the first Gulf War was that the military turned off SA on the commercial GPS system because they couldn't procure enough military equipment so had to use civilian gear [2]. I think Europe was slow to learn the lesson of being completely reliant on the US but we did end up with Glonass and Galileo as a result. To exert the kind of control the US does through tech platfoorms, the US needs to be predictable and reliable can't be too overt with exerting political influence such that American imperial subjects can pretend they're still independent. This administration has shattered that illusion. [1]: https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability [2]: https://www.spirent.com/blogs/selective-availability-a-bad-memory-for-gps-developers-and-users https://www.spirent.com/blogs/selective-availability-a-bad-m...
  • palmotea 8mo ago
    > There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US. That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.
• josefritzishere 8mo ago
  It's worth pointing out that aside from Elons behavior the real issue with Starlink is that it's insolvent. Starlink does not make money. (The solvency gap is hotly debated) But that fact means it's long-term reliability is in question. No military wants to risk that kind of system dependency.
  • vardump 8mo ago
    Anything to back that up? Starlink is widely considered profitable.
• Razengan 8mo ago
  God can we have an alien invasion already PLEASE 12 000 years of this shit
  • bluGill 8mo ago
    Sorry, relativity is against it. They - if they exist (a debate I'm not touching) - don't even know we are here. Even if they knew we are here they can't get here.
    • Razengan 8mo ago
      Or have a hands-off policy like we do with uncontacted tribes and some protected animal populations etc. I'll settle for anything to be honest. A sign, a derelict, an artifact, a fossil, an echo.. anything to distract humans from shitting on each other for a little while at least.
      • bluGill 8mo ago
        Again, physics says they can't. relativite and signal degrigation is hard. the energy of a star outside our arm of the galaxy isn't easy to detect, much less any signal of lower power.
        • johnnyanmac 8mo ago
          Our current knowledge of physics says they can't. Who knows what others figured out. We still can't even explain 80% of the mass we measure.
          • bluGill 8mo ago
            we know enough to know what we don't know is constrained by current rules. Newton physics mostly is good enough even when relativity is more correct - likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.
            • 8mo ago
• deleted 8mo ago
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• badcarbine 8mo ago
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• kkfx 8mo ago
  People seem to have trouble understanding that orbital space isn't infinite, nor is the manoeuvrability of satellites; or to put it another way, there isn't room for everyone with launch capabilities.
• agentultra 8mo ago
  I hope this doesn’t continue unabated. LEO pollution of all kinds is liable to get out of hand. From particulates on re-entry combustion, gases from launch rockets, to light pollution from the orbiting swarm… seems like there’s too much traffic up there.
• cameldrv 8mo ago
  I think also underappreciated is that Starlink can be used for purposes other than communication. It's already physically capable of acting as a giant radar, and SpaceX has gotten a missile tracking contract, and the E-7 wedgetail radar plane has been cancelled, which the DoD had publicly said was because it is obsolete given what's possible from space. It could be that they're planning on launching another radar constellation, but my guess is that it's already up there and it's called Starlink.
  • bob1029 8mo ago
    Starlink has become quite massive since v1. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10283270 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10283270
  • kyboren 8mo ago
    > they're planning on launching another radar constellation They have been launching, continue to launch, and are planning to launch that and much more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proliferated_Warfighter_Space_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proliferated_Warfighter_Space_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
    • cameldrv 8mo ago
      It's not clear to me that the radar is necessarily a separate constellation. SpaceX hasn't said a whole lot, but for example, SpaceX sells "Starshield" comms to the military, which uses the Starlink satellites for communications, except apparently the military has separate ground stations. There's also been some published work where people have been talking about using Starlink signals passively for aircraft tracking. I'm not sure you couldn't use Starlink as a "stealth radar", in that the waveforms that are coming out of the satellites look like normal communications, but the satellites can also look at the echoes. Having the entire Starlink constellation form the radar is also pretty attractive from a cost and resiliency perspective since there are so many satellites to shoot down.
• le-mark 8mo ago
  I’ve often thought balloon internet aka googles abandoned project loon would be ideal for this use case. Specifically point to pint microwave to receivers near the front line.
• dopesoap 8mo ago
  Oh great more satellites to strip away the ozone layer. I love the military.
• 01100216599 8mo ago
  عبدالله عبد البصير