SpaceX reprioritized to cyber defense and overcoming signal jamming
twitter.com
twitter.com
The best way to attack the system might be to hack the user terminals, which Russia apparently already did to Viasat terminals located in Ukraine at the start of the invasion.
SpaceX is now in direct opposition to the Russian military and is going to be attacked just as Viasat was. They need to especially make sure that the command and control systems for the satellites are bulletproof.
I wonder if existing anti radiation missiles would be able to lock onto Starlink user terminals. If not, I expect that feature will be developed soon. It's well known that the US military has been investigating using Starlink so I'm sure other militaries have been thinking about countermeasures.
Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution.
Sounds like something to take with a pinch of salt.
I find it hard to believe that Inmarsat, Iridium etc. are no longer functional in Ukraine.
Edit to add:
(a) Given all the Western journos broadcasting out of Ukraine, I think it is almost certainly a fact that Inmarsat, Iridium etc. are still functional because its kind of standard kit for warzone correspondents. All the "senior correspondents" the major news orgs are sending out to Ukraine will have cut their teeth on Inmarsat, Iridium etc., and will be comfortable with its use and operation.
(b) Twitter post from Iridium boss saying they've stopped shipments to Russia but have no intention of stopping shipments to Ukraine and/or stopping service over Ukraine. "Shutting down service over Ukraine would stop Ukrainian use and aid orgs as well."[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1498847589520846854?s...
Just a thought.
I work with developers in Ukraine. They’re still logging in, joining calls, etc.
I doubt that’s because they’re among the “lucky” few that got Starlink receivers.
Musk is just a really effective lying conman.
Thai submarine thing, “full self-driving,” most egregiously: rolling a stop sign at 2mph is “not running stop signs.”
But the technical things you mention, like the stop sign “rolling stop” - I think that’s a bit slippery. Where I live, 2mph is definitely considered stopping. I would not think twice about going 2mph through a stop sign, as long as that gives me enough time to evaluate whether it is safe to proceed or actually come to a complete stop. And if it bothers you that much, you could always have put it in “cautious” mode or whatever it was called.
As far as full self-driving goes, have you seen recent versions? It is seriously impressive. Still not level 3/4 SAE so I guess it’s technically a lie, but they are working hard to make it less of a lie. It would be nice if they were more upfront with their customers about what capabilities exist today, vs what they hope to achieve in the near future.
Here’s a random video of v10.10 on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1-UTGwP33DE
None of this is commentary on the underlying tech. Obviously Tesla is impressive, obviously SpaceX is impressive, obviously Musk is impressive. But none of these should absolve him/his companies/his supporters from basic obligations toward truth - especially when introducing potentially dangerous technologies to “the commons” like public roads.
And which "parts" of Ukraine would that be that don't have the view of the sky required to get Iridium, Inmarsat etc. working ?
Last time I checked, Starlink required a view of the sky too. ;-)
I have always been a little dubious about Musk. Whether bold claims about magical tunnels under cities or over-selling the abilities of cars.
But ultimately, for me the final straw was at the whole Thai cave rescue thing.
After that, I've considered him largely a marketeer when it comes to abilities to make useful contributions to world events.
Emphasis: some, not all
Use all the bold type you like, make it size 200 if it makes you feel better, but I will simply re-iterate:
Which "parts" of Ukraine would that be that don't have the view of the sky required to get Iridium, Inmarsat etc. working ?
Last time I checked, Starlink required a view of the sky too. ;-)
To be clear, my issue is not with Starlink per-se, but with the claim "the only non-Russian communications system still working" which should be taken with a significant pinch of salt as it is effectively impossible to believe.
Particularly so given the public Twitter statement made by the boss of Iridium that clearly states they are still live over Ukraine, still shipping kit to Ukraine and have no intention of doing otherwise.
I don't know whether or not normalizing such behavior is sane, especially during a kill/be-killed war scenario.
What about lasers? Since even if it just heated up the satellite it could cause damage since they have no way of cooling.
And whether with lasers, missiles, or whatever - targeting a US-based satellite network that is near & dear to the Pentagon would be an extreme escalation. Especially after the Russians warned that any hacking of their satellites would be seen as justification for war.
This is before considering the effects of atmosphere between a ground based laser and the satellite. This will make dispersion much worse.
> Directed Energy Weapons. China likely is pursuing laser weapons to disrupt, degrade, or damage sat- ellites and their sensors and possibly already has a limited capability to employ laser systems against satellite sensors. China likely will field a ground-based laser weapon that can counter low-orbit space-based sensors by 2020, and by the mid-to-late 2020s, it may field higher power systems that extend the threat to the structures of non-optical satellites.
https://aerospace.csis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/201901...
Here is a more academic article discussing the risk from ground based Satellite Laser Ranging systems to optical sensors, specifically when they are imaging the area near the SLR. I'm guessing the power required to damage structure vs optical sensors are probably orders of magnitude different.
> This density is 100 times the damage threshold of 106 J/m2, and will damage the pixel unless the laser light is filtered. In this case both the pixels and the filter may be damaged.
(There is a caveat to the above statement based on timing probability being very low)
> ...it may field higher power systems that extend the threat to the structures of non-optical satellites
Just conjecture?
Lets pick lamda so 1.222lamda is 1000nm (blueish light). Then by smal angle approximation, the size of a beam at 500km (starlink height) is 500km * 1000nm / d
Say we want our beam to be 50m wide. That gives an aperture requirement of 1cm.
Huh, that seems reasonable. So in a vacuum, it could perhaps be done. Atmospheric effects would make this worse ofcourse. And a 50m beam is not going to dump much heat, but it seems somewhat plausible in the near future.
I have no doubt a military could build a weapon that could use some form of EMP pulse to completely destroy my cell phone if it were an equivalent distance from a ground-based attack site, in an environment where it wouldn't be simply destroyed. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised there's some researchers who could put something together from their test bench and bits lying around in the lab in a day or two. Doing it to a hardened target is going to be much harder.
It seems not totally out of the question. My calculation yielded an aperture requirement of 1cm for a blue-ish laser. Which yields a 50m beam at the height of a starlink satelite
Lasers that bounce off the moon are an expensive way to make a small crater.
"...is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
So destroying a subset of satellites might create enough debris to cascade-destroy the rest of them. But that would not be limited to SpaceX satellites, and would effectively lock-out human species from accessing space for some time.
Makes for pretty good anime though:
Kessler syndrome is more complicated than just "satellite debris bad". At the altitudes the Starlink satellites are at, it is a near non-concern. There is a causal link there... we can afford to put up lots of little satellites at that altitude for that exact reason, and that's exactly why they are where they are. That it's also less energetically expensive to launch is just a bonus.
It could be true that the phenomenon exists conceptually, but that were nowhere near remotely close to triggering it, and that people are vastly underestimating the size of space.
Debris left in orbits below 370 miles (600 km) normally fall back to Earth
within several years. At altitudes of 500 miles (800 km), the time for orbital
decay is often measured in decades. Above 620 miles (1,000 km), orbital debris
normally will continue circling Earth for a century or more.
I seem to remember that during the Crimea invasion, Russian used a similar tactic: they used sigint to find Ukrainian cell phone signals of soldiers hiding in the forests, tipping off the defenders’ locations.
I'm not sure if there are enough presently up to take out a Starlink plane, but there are definitely some already up and at the ready, likely by at least Russia (and likely also the US).
And guess which company is best positioned to re-launch a crazy amount of satellites in a very short time. Russia would have to allocate a lot of resources it does not currently have to keep up with SpaceX.
The EMP of Starfish Prime [1], the detonation of a nuclear bomb at 400km altitude (the altitude of the ISS), knocked out streetlights over 1400km away in Hawaii. That means it could have damaged satellites up to at least 1800km altitude (but this was in 1962), which is almost all of the low Earth orbit altitude range. With enough nukes you could probably wipe out Starlink's satellites, but with the way they're spread out, I think you'd wipe out most other satellites too.
Thank you for the counterpoint though, it was interesting :)
But if fallout is the product of irradiated soil, then things are different. Would love to learn more.
That probably makes the bar to reach for a successful DDoS fairly high.
https://www.rferl.org/a/marie_colvin_death_concerns_about_sa...
If someone at the top says “we need to restock 1000 additional cruise missiles”, then the person under that grifts a little and says “we need to stock 950 additional cruise missiles”, and you follow that down the chain, you might end up with 500 instead of 1000 missiles. Same would go for things like vehicle maintenance. And it might be more invisible too, like ordering cheap tires instead of quality one’s.
I have heard rumors, that some troups just sold off fuel on the black market before the invasion started. Whether that was just corruption or planned sabotage, no one of course knows.
Attacking ground stations could degrade or deny service to nearby areas with the current Starlink system. But V2 will be able to route signals between satellites in space in areas where ground stations are missing, so that won't work in the future.
But, I imagine the real attack here, if sufficiently motivated, would be much simpler. Bomb gps satellites, destroying time syncing functionality on the satellites.
I never said they fired a single type of missile. US missile defense systems are frankly not cutting edge and lag behind Russia and China, and will for multiple years.
Missile defense systems have significantly more existing infrastructure than exist for rocket launches. The question in wartime is ‘what capabilities are you getting rid of, and for how long?’ In the case of starlink, the question is complicated both by reaction to the creation of so much space trash and the piggybacked approach SpaceX has taken to get the satellites up there.
This is feasible. Again, I doubt it is the right satellite attack strategy, but it is not absurd.
This may be true for ground based anti-aircraft systems or maybe you're thinking of the recent buzz around anti-ship and hypersonic missiles. But for missile defense this is quite false. The Aegis system and THAAD are as good as it gets. US doctrine always focuses heavily on missile defense with the assumption that they would have air superiority for offense.
In the media they're primarily pitched as offensive weapons. However with China breaking the heat-seeking problem for hypersonic missiles they have very interesting defense implications. Midcourse interception becomes much less vaporware and much more feasible. Existing technology to neutralize missile defense (e.g. by launching a larger number of smaller missiles prior to terminal phase) are less viable with (marv) hypersonic missile defense systems.
I think we are in a two to three year periods where due to defensive capabilities there is an extreme asymmetry. I think consequently you will see Russia, China, and NK (who have likely been given advances here by China) become more aggressive.
(Edit: keep in mind that Starlink operates on dozens of different orbital planes all at the same inclination and (approx.) same altitude that all intersect twice over the course of an orbit (which takes approximately 90 minutes). Pieces from the debris cloud would be at risk of hitting another satellite at every intersection at a high relative speed. It's not a low risk of damage once but a low risk of causing damage again and again until the debris has decayed enough).
If "Russia" (Putin) would like to disable Starlink satellites, I would guess that he easily could. If he wants to destroy an American-owned constellation and most likely raise the conflict to a whole another level is a different question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome cascades can result and even spread to higher orbits. As an extreme emergency measure it might even be wise to de-orbit everything in attempt to mitigate the damage.
Wrong. You cannot execute an orbital change with a single application of delta-v. Any pieces can at most end up in a new elliptical orbit where the high point is further up and the low point is where they started, and this subject to the same atmospheric drag there. It takes a second application of energy at the top to circularize into a new orbit.
The killers don't need to spend weight on payload, and they can be designed for a lifespan of a few weeks, so for example they can carry very small amounts of propellant. They might be small enough that you can't see them until they strike, at which point it might be hard to determine who had launched them. You might think maneuvering thrusters would be visible because they glowed, but resistojets can run at subzero temperatures. It just makes them less efficient.
The saving grace is that as far as I know nobody has such a system flying or ready to fly; the Kosmos 1408 test seems to be the state of the art. And it would probably cause a dramatic takeoff of Kessler syndrome at least in LEO, destroying other satellites as well, eventually everything in LEO. Aside from being a public relations catastrophe, this would dramatically diminish the wartime advantage of spacefaring powers like Russia, China, and the US over non-spacefaring powers like Iran, so those spacefaring powers might be reluctant to use such a weapon if they had it.
You say, "attacking US satellites would probably be an act of war." Well, maybe. But it's just property damage; no human lives are at risk. And SpaceX is theoretically a private company, not officially part of the US military. If damaging the property of private citizens is "an act of war" then just about every country whose citizens own property in Ukraine has a casus belli against Russia now. And in that case Russia also has a casus belli against Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/03/germany-seizes...
AFAIK Starlink user terminals aren't designed for stealth, so it would be foolish to expect stealth from them. However, they use millimeter-wave phased arrays with hundreds of elements, so they probably aren't crawling with sidelobes, and in theory their beam divergence would be about a degree with isotropic radiation more than 20dB down from the main beam, so it might be hard to detect until you're passing through the beam. And I'm guessing most anti-radar missiles are currently designed for regular microwaves, not millimeter waves. I don't know anything about Starlink's technical specs, though, and not much about millimeter-wave communications, and nothing about anti-radar missiles.
You have very dubious reasoning about this. It sounds like you are calculating attacking each satelite with an individually maneuverable free-flying space vehicle. This is clearly not the most optimal way to do it so it is not the right calculation to estimate the minimal number of launches required.
Instead of thinking about smart and expensive satelite killers each with the complexity of a faberge-egg you can pack a missile full of nails and spread them into an expanding cloud with a timed explosive. A shrapnel bomb in orbit if you please. Will one launch suffice to kill all the starlink sats? Maybe, maybe you need two or 3 at different inclinations. You definietly don’t need as many launches as many spacex needed to put their satelites up.
My intuition, though, is that it wouldn't work. Kosmos 1408 became a two-tonne barrel bomb full of nails in November and so far isn't known to have taken down any other satellites.
I don't really understand orbital mechanics, so take the following with a grain of salt.
The Starlink satellites weigh 230-300 kg and orbit at 540-570 km altitude, at which altitude the thermosphere will passively deorbit failed satellites within 5 years. I think a metal object weighing 10 g, such as a nail, would deorbit about 30 times faster, about 2 months, because it weighs 27000 times less but only has about 900 times less surface area. But that's assuming the nail is in orbit in the first place. If you have a barrel bomb in LEO and you blow it up, sending the nails in every direction, most of them will immediately deorbit: those traveling backwards or down will deorbit immediately, while those traveling forwards or up will deorbit 45 minutes later on the other side of the earth.
Only a narrow plane of the shrapnel will stay in orbit at all. If the shrapnel forms a sphere around where the barrel would have been if it hadn't exploded, a plane through its center intersects that sphere in a circle. The nails in this circle will stay in orbit: some are going sideways, some forward and down, others backward and up.
The Minkowski sum of a nail and a Starlink satellite is almost exactly the same size as a Starlink satellite, so we can think of each nail as sweeping out a Starlink-satellite-sized path in its orbit. I don't know how big the satellites are, but they must be on the order of 50 liters to weigh what they do if they're mostly made of metal, which would make them on the order of 40 cm in diameter. So each nail is sweeping out roughly 40 cm x 40 cm x 7000 m/s. So over the course of two months before it deorbits, it sweeps out about 5.9 billion cubic meters (5.9e9).
If we approximate the Starlink volume as a 30 km thick sphere beginning 540 km above earth's surface, its inside radius is about 6911 km and outside radius about 6941 km. That has a volume of 1.8e19 cubic meters. So a random nail has a chance of about 1 in 3 billion of killing a particular Starlink satellite, of which there are almost 2000, so about 1 in 1.5 million of killing any of them.
From one point of view that suggests that a barrel of nails could work; you just need several million nails to kill any satellites (thus, tens of tonnes, which is feasible) and several billion nails to kill them all (which is not).
Smart and expensive killer satellites are likely to be much more cost-effective. Faberge eggs are far too simple, though; your killer satellites need to be more like the complexity of a feature phone. A feature phone controlling a Bernz-O-Matic valve, though.
Now consider that we're talking about, in this case, satellites distributed over 30 km of altitude (thickness). This gives you a volume that's roughly ten times the volume of the Earth's oceans. (You can throw in the crust too if you find it helpful.) So instead of thinking about shrapnel from a barrel bomb trying to hit a microwave oven in Central Park, think about trying to hit a microwave oven somewhere in the oceans of ten Earth-sized planets. Even with a 7-km-per-second supertorpedo with two months of fuel, it's not going to be easy without guidance.
Space, in short, is big.
I'd like to blame stupid movies like Star Wars and Gravity for this, but I think it's just the kind of cognitive error the humans are unavoidably prone to. It's easy to get results that are off by nine orders of magnitude like this when you just rely on your untutored intuition.
The other counterintuitive thing about LEO is that, though for hypervelocity collisions it's a three-dimensional space, for things like rendezvous or getting from your launch trajectory to your desired orbit, it's a six-dimensional space of orbital elements. For understanding the results of a barrel bomb in orbit, it may be more useful to think of the nails as being distributed across a small ball of this six-dimensional space in the six-dimensional point occupied by the barrel, rather than gradually spreading out in a complicated way in three-dimensional space. The humans are not good at intuitively reasoning about six-dimensional spaces either.
These aren't US satellites. They're SpaceX satellites. An attack might still result in war since they're owned by an Oligarch, but that certainly isn't the default.
An oligarch is someone who was given their business by the government by force, often with murder and jail involved to the oppressed. Like Abramovich receiving state owned oil and steel companies. Musk built paypal, helped revive tesla, and built SpaceX using his own money as collateral. He didn't get handed NASA.
That's how the word is/was used by the Russians, but isn't really how it's used by the western media. Any Russian billionaire is called an oligarch; it's used as a substitute for plutocrat.
Musk, Bezos, the Koch brothers, Soros, and a few other billionaires are plutocrats, ergo, they are oligarchs.
Funny, about that..read the career bio of Mike Griffin.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin
They were being jammed.
I also felt it kind of a dick move to "brag" about giving Ukraine Starlink terminals on social media as it informs your adversaries that you have another channel they have to go out and shut down. Much better (in my opinion of course) to keep it as discreet as possible so that opponents are guessing.
In contrast, the Starlink satellites are zooming around the planet orbit once every 95 minutes[1] or so. At any given time, there are many Starlink satellites "visible" and the antenna tracks them using a technique called "phased array antenna tracking." This is the same way multi-target RADAR works on modern ships and planes.
Anyway, the cool think about Starlink (I just installed mine) is that you put it up where there is a lot of "sky" visible, and then the antenna moves itself to maximize the area of sky that it's antenna can "see". It is very cool and an amazing bit of engineering.
Which would be what intuitively makes sense to me, though I'm not an expert in phased arrays. If you have more gain straight up, then you must have less gain in other directions.
Afaik, Starlink phased arrays have very high gain (low beamwidth), so they must have proportionally lower gain in other directions, or else it wouldn't add up and you'd have overunity.
Just like with the Thai cave rescue.
I hope these network terminals get used, but the messaging is important too.
It's a powerful tool (which I personally vehemently oppose) but even if you think censorship has its place, it should be somewhere with oversight, due process, et c. ISPs are not that.
The obvious failure mode can be observed presently in Russia.
I put it to you that most fair minded people are also pro-censorship.
They're all on TOR now, and even there they get regularly busted due to shoddy opsec.
Example: Almost any of the various image booru sites have it, usually behind a checkbox.
And it incites harm, which is one of the restrictions that can be placed on speech.
But that doesn't have anything to do with constitutionally protecting 3rd party nations using platforms/speech for propaganda in our (or any other opposing) country.
Seems ridiculous on its face to try to confuse or equate the two and argue the point.
Musk is not anything like a free speech absolutist. He makes extensive use of NDAs and other speech restriction agreements for non-security non-trade secret reasons, and one time it seems he swatted a whistle-blower.
This experience might encourage Starlink engineers to build in some public-safety/emergency service protocols.
Some folks are looking at the receiving end with software radio:
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/26/analyzing-starlink-satellite...
Could help in lots of places!
A high-bandwidth low-latency ground station that can talk to multiple satellites at once is not going to be easy.
That's why we require FCC certifications, to make sure that these kinds of devices cannot act like jammers out of the box. However, like I said, with the right custom FW, they could be turned into jammers illegally by bad actors.
A common easy trick used in some home WiFI routers to boost the range for free, was to select a specific country from the device configuration menu, outside of Europe/North America, which had lower restrictions on TX signal strength than what the FCC/EU allowed, and presto, extra (illegal) WiFi range for free.
Has any other human successfully revolutionized automotive, orbital, and telecom products as CEO?
I realize he builds amazing teams, and they do the work as well, but lighting striking three times in the same spot? Truly awesome.
It’s easy to forget this stuff if you read his twitter, but it’s true.
Edited to be less of an ahole while still making the same point.
There is no we. There’s him. He calls the shots. He tweets what he wants. He deals with the hacking.
As others have said, originally Fedorov Mykhailo, a Ukraine vice prime minister, publicly tweeted a request for Starlink service and terminals [0] and later thanked SpaceX after they arrived in-country [1] and today, in Ukraine media, the mayor of Kyiv is pictured with terminals about to be deployed [2]:
"“Friends! StarLink global satellite Internet stations are already in Kyiv. Two stations were provided by the Ministry of Digital Transformation. I and Volodymyr [Klitschko] agreed on provision of ten stations with international partners and friends," Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko posted on Telegram.
According to him, StarLink will help ensure the critical infrastructure of the city and the defense of the capital."
[0] https://twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/14975436332932669...
[1] https://twitter.com/fedorovmykhailo/status/14983925152627466...
[2] https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3421352-starlink-statio...
"Talked to @elonmusk . I’m grateful to him for supporting Ukraine with words and deeds. Next week we will receive another batch of Starlink systems for destroyed cities. Discussed possible space projects . But I’ll talk about this after the war. "
[0] https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1500246977086373891