Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route | Hacker News Reader

Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route

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109 pointsrobtaylor23 comments

I just hope it is actually gonna be more than just empty promises, unlike the last 2 times (saving children from a cave and making ventilators)

SpaceX did deliver Starlink to Tonga, rural parts of Texas, Chile, and several Indian reservations. Some of those projects were at no cost for limited time, others were discounted.

Saving children from a cave wasn't empty promises, it's just a hard problem that actually requires product development and testing in more real environments than SpaceX had easy access to. They did indeed deliver a prototype-level product.

What is the impact of Russian military signal jamming on the starlink satellites and receivers? I assume the receivers transmit fairly narrow beam, can the satellites winnow out the signal from the jamming? Ditto the receivers.

Good on Elon/SpaceX for pointing more satellites at Ukraine (is that even how this works?). But do we know if they have enough kits to use it, I hope they're also working on getting more into Ukraine.

Not being critical of this, just curious.

The starlink satellites are in low earth orbit and fly-over coverage varies only by latitude.

They do have the ability to ‘point’ service with electronically steerable antennas, but at ~50 degrees N, Kyiv is actually in a very good place for Starlink support.

The main question is where Starlink will have ground stations and how vulnerable they might be to attack. A single ground station can service users within 3-4 hundred mile radius. In addition, the terminals require zero local infrastructure beyond basic power and can sole m supply 200+Mbps down, 40+ up.

There's decent coverage in Ukraine from ground stations in Lithuania, Poland, and Turkey: https://starlink.sx.

Very cool. Just confused as to how the Starlink kit itself will be distributed in a war zone in order to consume said service?

I think there's a lot of stuff here depending on who is the target user, but some ideas to think about:

- distributed the same as other equipment - loaded up on transports coming from the west

- war zone moves - what is accessible today may not be accessible tomorrow, so setting up backup access in nodes currently not affected is important

- ISPs could use them as emergency down/up link when international cables are cut

- military actions are very unevenly distributed - you can literally drive past a column of invading army forces because you're not relevant (see lots of civilian videos)

Probably won't be very much. Ukraine asked Musk and Musk enabled it. Neither one is going to get much value out of it.

This a feel-good measure on both sides for the most part. It takes time to ship all the hardware.

I have been wondering all day about how any of the military aid will reach Kiev, or how the soldiers are supplied with their rations.

I'm just genuinely curious about wartime logistics.

The details are not going to be published for security reasons, but have a look at the map of military actions. Central/west Ukraine is still very open and trains were running quite recently (not sure today). For now, there shouldn't be too much problem for protected transports.

But the problem with logistics is real in the actual war zones. See reports of Russian forces being impacted by Ukraine attacking not the incoming armed vehicles, but the support groups behind them.

Well theoretically they could land a Dragon capsule full of terminals anywhere on Earth ;)

(Dragon's return payload mass is 3000 kg, and the mass of the terminal kit is ~15 kg, so 200 tops - through probably couldn't fit that many inside)

I wonder if this is a risk to Starlink.

Will Russia point their anti-satellite capability at it?

The bigger risk is to the end-users. See this thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1497745011932286979

You don't hold a Starlink dish to your ear, instead you place the thing in some unobstructed area and connect to it through (long-range) Wifi. If the dish draws in a missile that's a net-loss for the aggressor since that missile will cost a lot more than the dish.

There’s way too many satellites to shoot down. If they wanted to get all of them, they’d create hazards that would put Russian satellites at risk.

That's the most tony stark thing i've ever read.

What are they going to drop dishes from in that airspace?

What?

They have to deliver the base stations for this to be useful, parent post is just saying 2-day air FedEx is not happening

I would suppose they would go across the border to poland along with all the NATO weaponry, but its still quite a logistics feat, I don't know that musk can snap his fingers and consider it done

Plus I'd be surprised if they had base stations in stock just sitting in a warehouse when they could already be in revenue service.

Forgive my cynicism of musk's grandiose gestures

I guess they had at least a truckload in stock: https://twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/14983925152627466....

Understood and I share your cynicism. I was just confused when reading the post initially.

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