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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

With Starlink in full operation, it should be teoretically possible to create such unidirectional service with much bigger bandwidth. Not just with Iran, but China as a target.

Blocking such signals from reaching the earth would be a challenge even for China.

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China (or some other totalitarian regime) would probably threaten to shoot down the sattelites if Starlink didn't let the Chinese government do man-in-the-middle.

Well, yes, of course that comes to mind, but between the threat and the actual shooting, there is a very significant decision that could lead to a nuclear war.

I think that they, among the threats, would start working on jamming the signal somehow. A much safer option.

That's fairly absurd, such an action would essentially be declaring war. I don't see it happening, Starlink simply won't sell the devices in China and that's it.

I thought that this alternative is too obvious to mention. My point was that providing internet access in China without letting them MITM it would effectively be a war declaration.

Satellite phones are illegal to own, yet work perfectly fine right now in China and have done so for decades, no one is shooting them down.

Satellite phones ($500 and up for the device, $40 and up per month for the subscription, $1 and up per minute of use [1]) are out of reach for ordinary Chinese (GDP per capita in 2020 is about $10k) [2]. A better comparison would be China's handling of VPNs.

[1] https://www.bluecosmo.com/satellite-phones

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

Think you might have understood my point.

Satellite phones are out of reach like meth and online political dissent is for the Chinese, yet still everywhere.

Regardless of mispricing in your links for the average mainlander (they make most satphones/data receivers) hundreds of millions of people in China could still afford it at the prices quoted.

This isn't some small Finnish town we're talking about, it's 1/5th of every person alive on Earth.

> hundreds of millions of people in China could still afford it at the prices quoted.

Maybe (I would be more comfortable with a claim that tens of millions can afford them), but they don't have them. Why not? Because the affluent "elite" largely consists of the CCP's 91 million members. They are the winners in the current system, and therefore the least likely to oppose it.

What China fears and cracks down on is free flow of information to and between the masses of ordinary Chinese.

> This isn't some small Finnish town we're talking about, it's 1/5th of every person alive on Earth.

Moving the goalpost there. 1/5 of Earth's 7.8 billion is 1.6 billion, not your "hundreds of millions".

If they shoot down satellites, war would follow and they are probably done for.

They would simple disallow business between you and the satellite operator. Nothing easier than that.

it's not that hard to jam open satelite channels.

Just put a big air-baloon over each city(or even much larger areas), positioned aroung the direction the satelite is, and you can easily send a similar, but more powerful signal than the satellite and jam the reception.

Why iran doesn't do this is an interesting question.

i don't think china will hesitate to simply attack all internet satellites targeting their ground on the pretext of national security.

they're able to go to the moon, so i don't think destroying a piece of flying metal in orbit would be a problem

Starlink will be ~ten thousand pieces of metal, all on different orbits.

Ignoring the whole "act of war" thing, everyone in this thread is dramatically underestimating how difficult it would be to shoot down a constellation that large. We can barely shoot down one satellite, at a cost of somewhere around a few million dollars.

SpaceX is launching 60 at a time, while each shoot down would be a fairly complicated logistical nightmare.

The question is what comes next.

Starlink being an American military asset among others, the US would probably respond by destroying all Chinese hardware in space.

Now what?

Three chances that any major power hot war doesn't produce Kessler Syndrome: slim, fat, and none.

(Not that we'll necessarily be around to care. I have no idea if ICBMs still use celestial navigation, but we'd have to mess up pretty badly to no longer have stars...)

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