SpaceX Unveils 'Starshield,' a Military Variation of Starlink Satellites (cnbc.com) 83
Elon Musk's SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield. CNBC reports: "While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use," the company wrote on its website. Few details are available about the intended scope and capabilities of Starshield. The company hasn't previously announced tests or work on Starshield technology.
On its website, SpaceX said the system will have "an initial focus" on three areas: Imagery, communications and "hosted payloads" -- the third of which effectively offers government customers the company's satellite bus (the body of the spacecraft) as a flexible platform. The company also markets Starshield as the center of an "end-to-end" offering for national security: SpaceX would build everything from the ground antennas to the satellites, launch the latter with its rockets, and operate the network in space.
SpaceX notes that Starshield uses "additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely," building upon the data encryption it uses with its Starlink system. Another key feature: the "inter-satellite laser communications" links, which the company currently has connecting its Starlink spacecraft. It notes that the terminals can be added to "partner satellites," so as to connect other companies' government systems "into the Starshield network."
On its website, SpaceX said the system will have "an initial focus" on three areas: Imagery, communications and "hosted payloads" -- the third of which effectively offers government customers the company's satellite bus (the body of the spacecraft) as a flexible platform. The company also markets Starshield as the center of an "end-to-end" offering for national security: SpaceX would build everything from the ground antennas to the satellites, launch the latter with its rockets, and operate the network in space.
SpaceX notes that Starshield uses "additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely," building upon the data encryption it uses with its Starlink system. Another key feature: the "inter-satellite laser communications" links, which the company currently has connecting its Starlink spacecraft. It notes that the terminals can be added to "partner satellites," so as to connect other companies' government systems "into the Starshield network."
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Musk basically extorted money from the military
He did what now? Where? When?
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i think they are talking about the fact that he said that he could not perpetually support the use in the war zone.
vs all other companies getting paid first.
Re:So which military wants to rely on this? (Score:5, Informative)
His position, which he stated in a letter to the Pentagon, was not unreasonable: The US sends a lot of aid to Ukraine and many companies are being paid for what they provide, except SpaceX, and it was getting a bit expensive. Of course the way he went about getting what he wanted was rather self-destructive. Giving Starlink to the Ukrainian military was stellar marketing; it's a great showcase for the service, and makes the company and its owner look sympathetic. Publicly demanding money and threatening to take his ball and go home like that achieves the exact opposite.
Re:So which military wants to rely on this? (Score:4, Informative)
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And I never used the word extortion. Offering a service for free, then asking for payment or discontinuing the free service is fine; it's the way you go about making the announcement. Threatening to discontinue service over a payment issue, to troops at war who rely of your service as their sole means of communications, doesn't go very far towards promoting your service to the military.
Re:So which military wants to rely on this? (Score:4, Informative)
They were paying (Score:1, Flamebait)
The week Musk sent out these whiny tweets about providing Starlink for 'free', prominent Ukranians like Maria Drytska were posting invoices full of Starlink charges.
Perhaps Musk was giving some people Starlink for free, but not most. Ukranians were paying, many of them via Polish accounts.
I'd only ask that you not take anything Musk says at face value. He's not a good faith actor.
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I'd only ask that you not take anything Musk says at face value. He's not a good faith actor.
So your suggestion is instead to listen to people who unlike Musk have zero chance of having an actual insight into the beancounting aspects of the whole Starlink operation?
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I think it's fair to acknowledge that they're one of the only Internet providers in the country and that "residential" service is going to get shared with multiple households, but they also are relaying data satellite-to-satellite all the way from Poland. The math still doesn't add up.
As of September, there were about 23,000 satellites but he claimed the cost of keeping their country operating is about $20 million per month - about $1000/mo per user. It's a steep claim and I'd like to see the receipts.
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Also any reasonable military stupid enough to entrust their communications
Re:So which military wants to rely on this? (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone perceived it as extortion and it backfired bigly on him. I bet the repercussions will be felt for a long time by his companies every time they tender for government business.
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According to the SpaceX figures shared with the Pentagon, about 85% of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine were paid – or partially paid – for by countries like the US and Poland or other entities. Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs $4,500 each month per unit for the most advanced service. (Over the weekend, Musk tweeted there are around 25,000 terminals in Ukraine.)
So which is more li
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Now lets say you are a soldier in the US military and using a Musk product. How comfortable are you? How often does the CEO of Raytheon, Northrup, Boeing throw a tantrum?
Agreed. And because of this, I have to imagine DOD will require that the satellites are owned by them, not rented. TFS says Musk's company will "operate the network in space," but that could mean a number of things. DOD is paying extremely close attention to what happens in Ukraine, and they are not going to let a prissy billionaire take his ball and go home in their war.
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There was no warning to Ukrainian forces, a second person said, adding that now when Ukraine liberates an area a request has to be made for Starlink services to be turned on.
And we know what happened -- the units were moved outside of the system's geofenc
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Everyone below addressed the rest of the FUD, so I'll just go after the last part that wasn't yet addressed as of typing this. "Catastrophic loss of communication" is Ukrainian government's officials not communicating with one another. Because Starlink has long been requested by other Ukrainian officials to geofence the terminals, because many of them got captured by Russian forces over time. Some got disconnected because Russians were dumb enough to take trophy pictures... with serial numbers visible.
But t
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He's crying that it would cost him $100 million to keep it running? From one of the richest people on the planet. He's only worth *checks notes* $200 BILLION. Like me saying I can't afford to pick up the tab at Burger King.
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Do you own a house? Let's take the AirBnB daily rental rate for something similar, multiply by, I don't know, 20 years or so, and call that your "net worth." Now, you wouldn't mind giving me some reasonable fraction of that, right?
(If you don't own a house, we can do the same thing with a car).
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He basically said [cnn.com] (publicly) that he didn't think SpaceX could keep the service up and running for Ukraine at zero cost, and threatened to pull the plug unless the Pentagon would pony up. This following a rather undiplomatic tweet from a Ukraine diplomat in response to Musk's silly peace plan.
Yeah, he's been saying he can't afford a lot of things now that he's a major investor in a company that is now $44 billion further in debt.
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A semi-intelligent person would have greased an elbow or three in congress and had money pouring over their heads immediately. Public temper tantrums are going to end up being Musk's downfall.
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He basically said [cnn.com] (publicly) that he didn't think SpaceX could keep the service up and running for Ukraine at zero cost, and threatened to pull the plug unless the Pentagon would pony up. This following a rather undiplomatic tweet from a Ukraine diplomat in response to Musk's silly peace plan.
It's a little weirder than that. Musk might have spoken directly to Putin [vice.com] before presenting his peace plan that made no sense and echoed Russian talking points.
As for the letter, according to the article you cited his request sounds a lot more like a hissy fit after a Ukrainian diplomat had the gall to actually criticize his ill-informed Tweet.
Musk on Friday said that in asking the Pentagon to pick up the bill for Starlink in Ukraine, he was following the advice of a Ukrainian diplomat who responded to Musk
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Except when it doesn't because nobody else provides a service that is even within an order of magnitude of the performance or latency.
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SpaceX doesn't provide Ukraine with free Internet connectivity. Starlink connectivity costs military 4500USD per terminal per month. I purchased 9 Starlink terminals privately in Ukraine (as well as 5 generators and will have to double that soon), they cost me 75USD a month per terminal.
Re:So which military wants to rely on this? (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is that both NASA and the military have been nothing but happy with what SpaceX delivered in the past. Musk seemingly behaving like an asshole on Twitter won't change much in this regard.
It's mostly a media scandal anyway, they just can't stand Musk being in their (media) business now. Ignoring him hasn't worked too well for the competition in the car and space business after all.
That Starlink has military implications just due to its sheer scale has been obvious from the very beginning. A satellite constellation that has sats in low orbits everywhere at all times is just a wet dream for all kinds of surveillance. It's also an advantage that is very hard to replicate by other nations, again due to its scale.
On the other hand the satellites are just too small for high resolution optics, this is mostly about sigint and situational awareness, but global and basically 24/7.
In the current situation all of this is just too valuable to fight it just because you don't like Musk. It would be outright idiotic to not use it.
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The military isn't going to be using Starlink's for intelligence. They don't really do that. The NSA, who does, has their own sigint satellites, and they're the size of football fields.
A high bandwidth satellite constellation is very very useful for communication though, from letting deployed troops get e-mail to confirming or waving off in-flight ballistic missiles, and everything in between. Especially drones.
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When the petulant bitch running the company could threaten to cut service with a tweet?
Why would he do that to a paying customer? Use your head: this is a commercial service for military contracting. There's no charity going on with this.
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the military can find an judge that can force the company to keep it running.
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But thank you for looking out for my best interests and assigning me that label.
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As we found out in the Netherlands, where for centuries the common term for white person was "blank" (same as South African, similar to the French "blanc"). Calling someone "wit" (white) was considered rather impolite, at best referring to an unhealthy skin tone, at worst it's used as a racial slur. But at some point the word gained traction in some circles, especially in social studie
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Is your skin color ivory, or a very pale brown?
Depends. Most of it is a very pale pink, except the parts which get a bunch of sun, which are a light but not particularly pale brown. That's what it's like being a white hispanic.
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Nice dodge, racist. Some albinos are the only people who have a credible claim to pink skin (outside of nipples), though.
You haven't seen my pasty white (pink) belly, or ass. Pink is literally just red with a lot of white in it, which describes the color of my untanned skin pretty well... which is most of it.
Also, I literally cannot be a racist, because I literally do not believe in race. It's not a real thing, it doesn't have a scientific basis, it was just made up to justify abusing brown people. Period.
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So if we go by the historic guilt hypothesis, you're either pre-Reconquista guilty of islamic mass rape and slaver + Aztec slavery and human sacrifice.
Of you're post-Reconquista guilty of horrific tortures by Spanish Inquisition, Spanish fascism + Aztec slavery and human sacrifice.
Methinks the proper white devils you're so desperately trying to distance yourself from aren't quite as evil as you. At least they have the whole "defeating the nazis" and "anti slavery campaign that forced eventual abolition of s
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See, the whole "judge people for the color of their skin based on the sins of their forefathers" as a concept is fucking awful, because everyone is a sinner and gets to go to the bottom of hell.
I've never thought we should do that, either. That's precisely why white privilege is wrong.
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The most news-grabbing recent military action has been in Ukraine. That involves (according to US government definitions) mostly-white people invading a more-white country and the invaders having their asses kicked. Most of the world thinks this is a good thing, including Musk -- who is providing Starlink comms to the defenders -- and the US government -- which is providing extensive military aid to the defenders. Do you think Russia should be winning there?
Before that, the US invaded Afghanistan (not wh
Thought of this a long time ago (Score:3)
It's pretty obvious so I don't expect a medal, but a shitload of small satellites would be a good way to avoid having your weapons system knocked out trivially by anti-satellite weapons.
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Counterpoint: Excessively large numbers of satellites makes a full blown Kessler Syndrome event exponentially more likely.
Sure it would be tough to destroy all the satellites directly, but now you can only take out a few and in a couple months everything in LEO is destroyed.
=Smidge=
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Not if you're at a level of orbit that requires frequent thrusts to fight atmospheric drag. Destroyed satellites clean themselves up.
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It's pretty obvious so I don't expect a medal, but a shitload of small satellites would be a good way to avoid having your weapons system knocked out trivially by anti-satellite weapons.
Sure, but if these satellite operators continue to operate without any meaningful consequences for not cleaning up after themselves the Kessler effect will soon take care of shooting down an unsustainable number of satellites without any help form the world's paramilitaries. Caveat: I'm not blaming anybody, lest of all Elon and SpaceX. While Donald J. Kessler predicted this would happen in 1978 and we have been observing his prediction come true for decades, obviously, when the time comes that space junk be
Forgive my skepticism about Musk, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
This sounds to me like America's newest John Galt wannabe is sniffing after more of those tasty taxpayer-funded gubmint subsidies.
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He's a businessman looking for business.
Like welfare payments, if you don't like people accessing it legally, then it's the government you should be complaining about, not the recipients.
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Thanks for saving me the trouble of responding. Funny how you got the point, but he's still looking around for whatever made that "whoosh" noise as it went over his head.
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Oh, yes, whoosh, right. Of course. We weren't supposed to correct your bullshit, we were supposed to be interested in you pathetic whining. Woosh. Yes,
I hope you two geniuses are very happy together, fighting the lizard people and the zombie hoards.
Don't like the silly non-believers distract you from the cause(s)!
Re:Forgive my skepticism about Musk, but... (Score:4, Funny)
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No, the point is that John Galt types are fucking hypocrites who continue to believe that they're entirely self-made and that everyone is a drag on them.
Let me set something straight. You see, it all boils down to the so-called "social contract" the leftists love talking about so much.
So. Elon Musk hates it. Supposedly. Whatever. But:
You didn't give a shit what he thinks about it when you said he's going to be bound by it regardless.
You didn't give a shit what he thinks about it when you were heaping taxes on him.
You didn't give a shit what he thinks about it when you were heaping regulations on him.
So, when you all of a sudden start giving a shit w
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If I think welfare is being misused, it's because the system is set up poorly to monitor the millions of people using them. That's the government's, and specifically the bureaucracy's, fault, but less so on the people as there's millions of them.
If I don't like government subsidies to the companies owned by a billionaire, then that's a "billionaire has unfair access to free money" kind of thing. That has less to do wit
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"That's personal and entirely different, and the billionaire has equal blame as the legislators."
I disagree.
To often we blame companies for trying to make more money ( their raison d'etre, after all ) in legal ways we do not approve of, when the real solution is for our politicians to change the law so that those ways are no longer legal, and then all (almost all...) companies will stop using them.
We are punishing good companies, when we should be preventing companies from being bad.
e.g. Don't ask companies
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The American military is always going to spend money on satellites and communication equipment etc, so why shouldn't SpaceX make a play for some of it? It would only go to the usual suspects otherwise.
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In fact, experience shows that Musk could probably do it for half the price the military pays its buddies.
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A staunch conservative out to pwn libs, but he had no problem keeping his mouth shut when those fat subsidy checks the government were rolling into Tesla. Look at the shitty tunnel service be built in Vegas. You sit bumper to bumper in a Tesla in a tube underground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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He's no conservative, by any conservative definition. He just happens to disagree with some left-wing policies and opinions. Of course, that makes him a bete noir to leftists.
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He's no conservative, by any conservative definition.
Neither are virtually any of the people we describe as conservatives. They always raise the deficit when they are in charge, for example, then complain about it when they aren't. They claim you have to have principles, but theirs are confused; pro-life, pro death penalty, for example. Pro-Jesus, but anti-poor? The list goes on.
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This sounds to me like America's newest John Galt wannabe is sniffing after more of those tasty taxpayer-funded gubmint subsidies.
I don't know where you get your definition of "subsidy" from, but where I come from, creating a service and then offering it at a specified charge isn't a "subsidy". It's commerce.
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Tesla took advantage of the subsidy for electric cars which is given to car buyers, at the very least.
Does that mean... (Score:2)
Goodbye, Boeing?
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Viasat mainly. That was the service used by Ukrainian government at the start of the current war for example, and it got knocked out by Russians right as the attack started.
The absolute end of surface privacy (Score:2)
I was a beta tester for Starlink and just canceled my service after about 18 months due to quality of service. I love the idea of sat internet for the world but it's real purpose is 100% military. Providing internet to to war zones, and you and I, are a nice side-effect of that purpose.
OTS Digital Battlefield finally within reach (Score:2)
SpaceX tech earns a turn in the catbird seat ousting lobby-heavyweights in mfgr. Crazy side-effect from a Mars ambition that was just as absurd. Mr. Big has arrived – deal with it.
Hosted Payloads (Score:2)
Those "Hosted Payloads" might as well be a bunch of tungsten rods, with a bit of solid rocket engines attached for initial acceleration/breaking orbit and guidance. ...
Quite a few smaller rods can fit in a the current StarLink v1.5 sats. And 20 ft long rods will perfectly fit in the v2.0 sats.
And when you have a few hundred of those bundles of rods circling the earth every hour and a half