If Russia can hack SpaceX's systems and divert them to ensure they do not provide service over Ukraine, why wouldn't they? Or brick all terminals by sending a malicious update? Similarly, dealing with electromagnetic interference.
Thinking Russia is completely benign would be an incredibly naive take. Or simply blinded by Musk hate.
This experience has allowed them to launch "Starshield", but it definitely has not been cheap.
> If Russia can hack SpaceX's systems and divert them to ensure they do not provide service over Ukraine, why wouldn't they?
That didn't happen as far as I know.
> Or brick all terminals by sending a malicious update?
That didn't happen either.
> Similarly, dealing with electromagnetic interference.
For which there is no evidence at all, in fact the only reason Starlink ever suffered an outage was for reasons which had nothing to do with the Russians.
> Thinking Russia is completely benign would be an incredibly naive take. Or simply blinded by Musk hate.
No, I'm totally not thinking that Russia is 'completely benign', and I'm sure they'd love to do all of those things and more. But without any evidence that it is actually happening it is as far as I'm concerned fantasy.
> This experience has allowed them to launch "Starshield", but it definitely has not been cheap.
So what?
Really, I can't make heads or tails of your comment, that's probably on me though.
Are you in the denial phase or the ignorance one? If the former, why would the government take part in a conspiracy to pretend that Starlink didn’t require special support to work in that environment? If the latter, why would you even boldly claim “there is no evidence at all” without even doing a cursory search?
Operating a receiver in a warzone is always going to be tricky, and operating a transmitter even more so because it might give your opponent targeting information (and that includes jammers, which you really don't want to leave sitting around for too long or artillery will find them for sure).
The fact is: the Russians have to date been unsuccessful in suppressing Starlink signals, for a variety of reasons including some countermeasures.
But let's not pretend that the main cost is in that aspect of operating the service. The main cost is in making and launching the satellites and once those costs have been sunk further use of the system assuming the terminals are bought and paid for.
As time goes on and parties are getting more inventive likely there will be some more defenses against countermeasures. But a LEO based satellite system has a number of advantages over a GEO based one and those operate in war zones all the time. Hacks of Starlink satellites and terminals have - afaik - not happened.
GGGP claimed: "The expensive part is not the terminals, it is providing continuous reliable service in a hostile environment with a determined adversary." -> I see no evidence for that. It is a cost, but not the cost.
Note that Elon has a vested interest in making it appear as though he is spending a lot of money on keeping Starlink online in Ukraine, personally I would not put it past him to inflate those costs.
> see no evidence for that. It is a cost, but not the cost.
Because you are not looking. The fact that spacex is having to spend engineering time at all making improvements to operate in an actively jammed environment means software and possibly hardware engineering resources not being spent on scaling the network, working on their next gen constellation, etc. For a company that runs as lean as SpaceX on engineering headcount (based on reading Blind and Glassdoor reviews), that opportunity cost is easily tens of millions of dollars.
You’re also drastically misunderstanding the lifetime and duty cycles of LEO sats. Those things have to have time to dump heat and charge their batteries. Serving in Ukraine means worse coverage in America 90 mins later. It’s not just a magic mirror in the sky that costs nothing to cover the ground.
Ehhhh..... Naive? My point was hypotheticals that Russia would like to achieve disconnected from the physical terminals.
This is the first result when searching for it.
> But Musk says it's been a difficult environment. "Starlink has resisted Russian cyberwar jamming & hacking attempts so far, but they're ramping up their efforts," he wrote(opens in new tab) on Twitter Tuesday (May 10).
> According to a Reuters report(opens in new tab), which Musk also shared, a coalition of countries have said that Russia backed a cyberattack against satellite internet systems that ultimately pulled tens of thousands of modems offline shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24.
> British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the attack against Viasat's KA-SAT network was "deliberate and malicious," Reuters stated(opens in new tab), and the Council of the European Union said the hack caused "indiscriminate communication outages" in Ukraine and several member states. The attacks were confirmed by the United States, Canada and Estonia, Reuters added.
None of that is news. What would be news would be a success but afaik they haven't managed to do so to date. All satellite operators face these challenges and none of them see that as an extra burden but basically the kind of thing that you should expect if and when you start operating this kind of service. Inmarsat terminals have a ton of tricks up their sleeve to deal with signal jamming and other attempts to interfere with the downlink/uplink.
If anything, SpaceX/Starlink has an easier time of it because their signal levels are much higher and the satellites can use phased arrays to pinpoint the receivers (in fact, they have to because they aren't geostationary and very low).
https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/ukraine-uses-over-11000...