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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

#81

Post by pantsforbirds »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #71
pantsforbirds wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I believe those people are being a bit silly, and their position probably comes from a strong dislike of Trump as a person, and not a genuine belief.

Russia annexed a warm-water port and then shortly after attempted to incorporate Ukraine as part of a plan to remake the USSR. The only thing keeping China from taking Taiwan is the United States.

The US has no desire to annex Canada, and it also has no need to. If Canada proposed statehood or even a territory agreement with the US, I genuinely don't think it would even pass a vote.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#82

Post by db48x »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #8
db48x wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.

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.

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?

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#83

Post by bryanlarsen »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #47
kolinko wrote: post #2

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 Fa…

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-... ) from SpaceX. I think China is well within reach of bei…

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.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#84

Post by bryanlarsen »

pantsforbirds wrote: post #81
bryanlarsen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. I believe those people are being a bit silly, and their position probably comes from a strong dislike of Trump as a person, and not a genuine belief. Russia annexed a warm-water port and then shortly after attempted to incorporate Ukraine as part of a plan to remake the…

Russia might have the desire to annex Canada, but they don't have the capability.

China might have the capability, but they don't have the desire.

Only US has both the capability and the desire.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#85

Post by throw310822 »

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]

Be serious, do you think defense industry normally respects other nations' industrial secrets?

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#86

Post by adrian_b »

ciupicri wrote: post #24
jmyeet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.

At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.

Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.

In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.

The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.

In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#87

Post by JumpCrisscross »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #62
toomuchtodo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the cost be to deny these orbital altitudes?

Incalculable. The cost isn't in paying someone to not use the orbit, it's that the busier a part of space gets, the more expensive it becomes to do collision avoidance and station keeping. What makes this impossible to calculate is that there's an unknown exponential involved. The more satellites, the more collisions that need avoiding. And the higher the chance that one avoidance will create new future collisions. A…

> What makes this impossible to calculate

It’s really not impossible to calculate, particularly if you’re trying to cause damage.

The answer is it’s cheaper to shoot down individual satellites than try to create a localized cascade. Kessler cascades propagate too slowly, and degrade too quickly in low orbits, to be useful as a military tactic. In high orbit one could feasibly e.g. deny use of a geostationary band. But again, it’s cheaper to just shoot down each satellite.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#88

Post by jopsen »

pie_flavor wrote: post #32
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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#89

Post by mwambua »

Liftyee wrote: post #65
sigmoid10 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Bloomberg's podcast "The Big Take" has been running an interesting series on Chinese industrial espionage called "The Sixth Bureau". Here's a link to the Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38L5UzLwt-s&list=PLe4PRejZgr...

Re: Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

#90

Post by db48x »

jopsen wrote: post #88
pie_flavor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)

But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.

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