Ukraine Spacewar
Ukraine: Russia Threatens Starlink
But the US has offered a workaround for Ukraine
Cat, mouse and satellite busting
As I wrote earlier in the year, the US and China were playing cat and mouse with their satellites.
The USA manoeuvred a satellite to take a peek at two Chinese satellites, which beetled away from it.
Then Russia tested a satellite buster, blowing up one of its obsolete satellites in the process and gained international condemnation. So what’s new there?
And now Russia is threatening Western commercial satellites, considering them legitimate targets in its war with Ukraine. Well, that’s the subtext anyway.
The threat
WASHINGTON, Oct 28 (Reuters) — A Russian official’s threat this week to “strike” Western satellites aiding Ukraine highlights an untested area of international law, raising concerns among space lawyers and industry executives about the safety of objects in orbit.
“Quasi-civilian infrastructure may be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike,” senior foreign ministry official Konstantin Vorontsov told the United Nations, reiterating Moscow’s position that Western civilian and commercial satellites helping Ukrainian’s war effort was “an extremely dangerous trend.”
No country has yet carried out a strike against an enemy’s satellite (laser, grabber arm, ground-launched missile, kinetic attack or blinding cloak). Such an act during the war in Ukraine could sharply escalate tensions between Russia and the United States.
“This threat has brought us to a brink that we’ve never been to before,” said Michelle Hanlon, co-director of the University of Mississippi School of Law’s Air and Space Law program told Reuters. “There’s always been a sense that this could happen, but never has somebody actually said that they might do that out loud.”
Ukraine’s military relies heavily on Elon Musk’s SpaceX for broadband internet beamed from its low-Earth orbiting Starlink satellite network. Ukraine also relies on it to keep civilian internet operational. Don’t forget that Ukrainian civilians are playing a vital intelligence role in the war, feeding back intel over Telegram and other channels.
U.S. firms like Maxar are capturing images of the war from satellites in orbit.
And tens of thousands of communications devices in Ukraine rely on U.S. satellite communications giant Iridium’s satellite network — conventional satphones just as I use on my boat.
“It’s really irresponsible to talk about shooting anything down in space for any reason,” Iridium chief executive Matt Desch told Reuters. “Space has gotten to be quite messy. If somebody starts shooting satellites in space, I’d imagine it would quickly make space unusable,” Desch said.
Musk briefly caused alarm in October by saying he could no longer afford to keep funding Starlink service in Ukraine, a position he quickly reversed, despite the fact that his new Twitter acquisition soon announced major cuts in advertising contracts and a tanking revenue stream.
Under the laws of armed conflict (paywall), a Russian strike on a private U.S. company’s satellite could be seen as an act of war to which the U.S. could respond.
White House spokesman John Kirby said that any attack on U.S. infrastructure would be met with a response but declined to elaborate further — no surprises there.
Fox News reported that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the U.S. will “pursue all means to explore, deter and hold Russia accountable” for any attacks on U.S. satellites.
The comments followed Russian foreign ministry spokesman Konstantin Vorontsov telling the United Nations that the U.S.’ use of “civilian, including commercial, infrastructure elements in outer space for military purposes” is an “extremely dangerous trend.”
“These States do not realize that such actions in fact constitute indirect participation in military conflicts,” Vorontsov said. “Quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.”
Legal murk
While some might argue that a Russian anti-satellite strike would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — specifically the ban on placing weapons of mass destruction in space — legal experts say the issue is debatable. The Liability Convention of 1972, to which Russia is a signatory, requires countries to financially compensate for any damage caused by its space objects. Yes, sue the Kremlin.
Other countries which have conducted anti-satellite missile tests (such as Russia used) are the United States — which last demonstrated an anti-satellite weapon in 2008 — China, and India.
Vorontsov did not single out any companies in his comments to the U.N. panel.
However the Starlink satellite constellation has stood out as a clear target for Russia, which has attempted to signal-jam the network’s signals during the war, Elon Musk has claimed.
A cloud of thousands of interconnected satellites encircling Earth has been championed by the U.S. military as being resilient to potential anti-satellite attacks that could only target a small portion of the network without fully disabling it, in the same way that DARPA conceived the original design of what we now know of as the internet.
“It complicates the calculus for the enemy,” Lieutenant General Philip Garrant, the U.S. Space Force’s deputy chief of strategy and operations, told Reuters in a recent interview. “If there’s lots of satellites, they don’t know which one to target.”
SpaceX’s Starlink network currently consists of roughly 3,000 satellites (aiming for 42,000), and there are also several dozen commercial U.S. imagery satellites eyeing Russia and Ukraine.
So, to disable the satellite surveillance of Ukraine would be a mammoth task. Unless…
Yes… the data has to flow through ground stations. But these too are covered by law:
Space asset architecture is composed of three segments. First, a ground segment, second an uplink and downlink segment, and third a space segment, or the satellite itself. — Journal of Conflict and Security Law
The warning
Starlink
Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, providing satellite Internet access coverage to 40 countries. It also aims for global mobile phone service after 2023. SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites in 2019. As of September 2022, Starlink consists of over 3,000 mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), which communicate with designated ground transceivers. In total, nearly 12,000 satellites are planned to be deployed, with a possible later extension to 42,000. Starlink provides internet access to over 500,000 subscribers as of June 2022.-Wikipedia
Staggering inter-satellite communication
The satellites will employ optical inter-satellite links and phased array beam-forming and digital processing technologies in the Ku- and Ka-bands, according to documents filed with the U.S. FCC. While specifics of the phased array technologies have been disclosed as part of the frequency application, SpaceX enforced confidentiality regarding details of the optical inter-satellite links. Early satellites were launched without laser links. The inter-satellite laser links were successfully tested in late 2020. — -Wikipedia
And on my boat?
How much does Maritime Starlink cost?
Starlink Maritime has an upfront hardware cost of $10,000 in addition to a monthly cost of $5,000/month. The hardware cost includes two high-performance Starlink terminals— the kind used for Starlink Business — and two pipe-mount adapters. — SpaceExplored.com
Definitely not for me!
Plan B for Ukraine
US Offers Ukraine 4 Satellite Communications Systems
The US is alive to the threat of Russian interference with Starlink and so they have offered the Ukraine four independent systems.
But it’s not as comprehensive as it first sounded.
I assume that those 4 satellite communications antennae will give access to a US Government satellite network, but who knows?
Watch this space…
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