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Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

newscientist.com

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Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#71

Post by bryanlarsen »

pantsforbirds wrote: post #66
jmyeet wrote: post #26

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…

You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation. Either NATO is a scam that exploits Europe, or it's a security umbrella that Europe needs. The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for d…

> no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada

Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#72

Post by bryanlarsen »

buckle8017 wrote: post #69
Liftyee wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working. If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the s…

[flagged]

Sure, they're trying. But there's no evidence they've succeeded in stealing anything other than open source intelligence from SpaceX.

There's a lot of open source intelligence about SpaceX rocket designs available.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#73

Post by krunck »

childintime wrote: post #28
jordanb wrote: post #22

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.

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.

Iran also has a space program with Satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Space_Agency

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#74

Post by joe_mamba »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #36
bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things. They are not even hiding it anymore. It's almost comical how much they copied SpaceX. And I'd be surprised if they hadn't supply-chained themselves into some level of access in all the big aerospace corpos by now. But Europe? Developing this kind of stuff from scratch in a few years without an unregulated messy startup ecosystem and no army of st…

>China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.

Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.

In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."

Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.

Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#75

Post by roughly »

yostrovs wrote: post #44
roughly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 va…

Europe wouldn't spend the agreed 2% of GDP on the military. Many presidents for many years tried to make them comply with the agreement, but they just ignored it. It was thought better to spend on the healthcare of the public and mock Americans for not having universal government healthcare. Many people in countries in Europe, like Spain and Ireland, that effectively don't have militaries, are still laughing and mock…

Again, this was a considered policy choice on the part of the United States. Unipolar military supremacy bought us a quiet Europe, a stable and high dollar, and the ability to set the terms on nearly every other negotiation we made with European countries. This was an intentional trade: we will spend on the military so you don’t have to. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, some US policymakers deluded themselves into thinking geopolitics didn’t exist anymore, and so we’ve come to start bitching more about our side of paying that bill, but we bought the American century with military spending.

And, to be clear, the US not having health care is a policy decision on the part of the US, not some lack of funding, as becomes clear when one looks at the expenditure per capita on healthcare in the US compared to other developed countries.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#76

Post by victorbjorklund »

mooreds wrote: post #7
thisislife2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive. 0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html

Because the Chinese govt doesn’t have money to burn…

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#78

Post by Bender »

pantsforbirds wrote: post #67
Bender wrote: post #13

Starlink's first customer was supposed to be the US Army. I am curious what requirements they did not meet.

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.

[flagged]

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#79

Post by jmyeet »

pantsforbirds wrote: post #66
jmyeet wrote: post #26

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…

You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation. Either NATO is a scam that exploits Europe, or it's a security umbrella that Europe needs. The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for d…

> You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation.

Sure I can. I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.

> The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades ...

Ah, now I get it. This is Trump administration talking points eg [1]. Those talking points are just a shakedown for American defense contractors. Again, just like a protection racket. Because it is a protection racket.

> Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs

This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs. Even something like the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was only tolerated because of Norway's strategic position in the North Atlantic as a foil against the USSR.

> During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes,

America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.

But again we come back to the protection racket. You can't both have a protection racket (and, by extension, defang the militaries of the protectorates) AND expect military help, particularly when the entire thing only happened because of the US material support to Israel's genocide.

> With Operation Epic Fury ...

Operation Epstein Fury FTFY

> ... the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging,

Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran other than the US and Israel. Everybody else, including Europe and other Middle East neighbours, all of whom are American client states, basically, begged the US not to do it. And they did anyway.

So yeah, you're on your own.

> Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them.

Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect any more than Fiji invading the Central African Republic. What are you talking about?

[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/us-slams-czech-republic-over...

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#80

Post by kotaKat »

pantsforbirds wrote: post #67
Bender wrote: post #13

Starlink's first customer was supposed to be the US Army. I am curious what requirements they did not meet.

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.

IIRC it’s separate sats but same backhaul and they also leverage the same terminals?
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