How Elon Mush saved Ukraine and changed warfare.

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IT IS ONE of the wonders of the world—or, more accurately, off the world. The Starlink constellation currently consists of 3,335 active satellites; roughly half of all working satellites are Starlinks. In the past six months new satellites have been added at a rate of more than 20 a week, on average. SpaceX, the company which created Starlink, is offering it as a way of providing off-grid high-bandwidth internet access to consumers in 45 countries. A million or so have become subscribers.

And a huge part of the traffic flowing through the system currently comes from Ukraine. Starlink has become an integral part of the country’s military and civil response to Russia’s invasion. Envisaged as a celestial side-hustle that might help pay for the Mars missions dear to the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, it is not just allowing Ukraine to fight back; it is shaping how it does so, revealing the military potential of near-ubiquitous communications. “It’s a really new and interesting change,” says John Plumb, America’s assistant secretary of defence for space policy.

Appropriately enough, the story started with a tweet, one sent by Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, two days after the invasion:

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@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars —Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space—Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.


Mr Musk replied to him within hours, saying that the Starlink service had been turned on over Ukraine and that the hardware would follow. Within days lorries full of the pizza-sized flat dishes used to access the satellites began to arrive in Ukraine.

By May around 150,000 people were using the system every day. The government quickly grew to rely on it for various communication needs, including, on occasion, the transmission of the nightly broadcast by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Because the dishes (some of which are round and some rectangular) and their associated terminals are easily portable and can be rigged to run off a car battery, they are ideal for use in a country where the electricity and communication networks are regularly pounded by Russian missiles. When Kherson was liberated in November Starlink allowed phone and internet services to resume within days.

Crucially, Starlink has become the linchpin of what military types call C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). Armies have long relied on satellite links for such things. An hour before Russia launched its attack, its hackers sought to disable thousands of modems associated with the terminals which provide access to the main satellite used by Ukraine’s army and government, among many other clients. But the capabilities Russia sought to degrade in that pre-emptive strike were far less advanced than the capabilities Ukraine enjoys today....


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Onward and upward,
airforce