How Elon Musk’s satellite internet is coming to Ukraine’s defense
In a move as rogue-ishly provocative as his moonshot, Elon Musk is inserting himself into the drama of international conflict by bolstering Ukraine’s internet connection to the outside world.
Last Wednesday, his trucks delivered a second shipment of satellite-based Starlink internet terminals to a battered Ukraine, responding to a plea from the nation’s vice prime minister. His initial shipment arrived on Feb. 28, only four days after Russian forces launched an assault on the nation.
His system beams data from space — and so, unlike landbased networks, it is less vulnerable to attack or authoritarian control. Those aspects seem to be angering Russian officials.
“This is the West that we should never trust,” responded Dmitry Rogozin, directorgeneral of Russia’s space agency, on a state television channel translated by Katya Pavlushchenko on Twitter. “When Russia implements its highest national interests on the territory of Ukraine, Elon Musk appears with his Starlink which was previously declared as purely civilian.”
There are other complications too. Using Starlink is potentially dangerous because the Russian military could detect and identify citizens by their satellite communications, warned John ScottRailton, a senior researcher at Toronto’s The Citizen Lab. “Users’ uplink transmissions become beacons for airstrikes,” he tweeted.
Musk himself took to Twitter to offer Ukrainian tweeters strategic advice, instructing users to “place light camouflage over antenna to avoid visual detection” and “turn on Starlink only when needed and place antenna away
(sic) as far away from people as possible.”
Meanwhile, his company blasted another 48 satellites into orbit Wednesday as part of a burgeoning effort to bring high-speed internet to the skies over Europe.
Billionaire Musk, co-founder of companies PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and others, has never been a typical tech tycoon. While others are cool and detached, he’s a showman. He jumps into the fray with outlandish ideas, proposing to fly tourists around the moon, colonize Mars and deploy a miniature submarine to rescue Thai soccer players trapped in a cave.
If Russia destroys Ukraine’s internet networks or tries to muzzle its digital communication, Musk’s expanding system of satellite-based internet service can help maintain the nation’s link to the outside world, say experts.
In repressive nations, “it’s a game-changer, because you now have a way of bypassing any centralized control over what citizens can receive,” said Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. “Government censorship over the internet no longer works.”
“When the cost and size drop, and Starlink is fully deployed, the geopolitical implications are potentially quite profound,” according to Lin.
Starlink’s satellites “are valuable tools for communication by political and resistance leaders and journalists, if they are unable to safely access the internet or it is blocked,” said Larry Press, professor of information systems at California State University.
Ukraine has responded with gratitude. “Starlink keeps our cities connected and emergency services saving lives!” tweeted Mykhailo Fedorov, the nation’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation.
So far, the nation’s internet, with Starlink as a backup, is largely holding up, according to Emile Aben, a system architect and research coordinator at the Amsterdam-based RIPE NCC.
There are several reasons for its resiliency. There is no dominant player in the nation’s internet market, so the failure of an individual system doesn’t bring down the whole network. Its networks are run by Ukrainian companies, so aren’t governmentcontrolled. Finally, its tech workers have been heroic in their repairs, wrote Aben.