Starshield: Secured satellite network for government entities | Hacker News Reader

Starshield: Secured satellite network for government entities

spacex.com

116 pointsrlt149 comments

So far I haven't seen anyone mention the big deal here, that Starshield is offering to take over ANY satellites communications entirely using lasers. A customer no longer has to include a radio system on their satellite (unless that is the whole point of the satellite), just a small laser and gimbal. This seems like a major savings in weight and power. Send your satellite up and join the existing network and you get communication to your other satellites in orbit (via laser), to the ground (via RF), and to aircraft (via RF), worldwide. All of it point-to-point which makes it very difficult to interrupt or intercept. This is a space internet, an internet for things in space, though only open to wealthy customers who can afford to launch things into orbit. I quote:

INTEROPERABILITY

Starlink's inter-satellite laser communications terminal, which is the only communications laser operating at scale in orbit today, can be integrated onto partner satellites to enable incorporation into the Starshield network.

End quote.

Depending on how large the weight and power savings are this could cause a proliferation of satellites. It may require satellites to be in an orbit near that of the Starlink satellites, or maybe not. Depends on what angle range the laser gimbals cover. I would guess each Starlink satellite with lasers already has multiple lasers plus backup lasers, so dedicating the spare ones to providing communication for other satellites might be easy. The laser/gimbals may already be time shared to spread wear evenly and make sure they are working.

Practically speaking it doesn't really eliminate the need for a radio system entirely, since you would still want a control interface that isn't dependent on such a sensitive technology (ie you would want to be able to fix the satellite if some software or tracking error makes it unable to accurately target a Starlink satellite).

What this does mean is that the bandwidth restrictions for transmitting larger amounts of data become a bit looser and become much harder for adversaries to detect and track.

That makes sense. The radio system could be a much lower power, low baud rate system though, enough to transmit commands and get a little telemetry but much smaller than would be required for constant communication with Earth. This may also be relevant:

"NRL Engineers Ready Innovative Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) Payload for Launch"

https://www.nrl.navy.mil/Media/News/Article/3214111/nrl-engi...

Starshield as a "space network as a service" and robots as a "repair service for space infrastructure". Seems like together these could make doing things in space cheaper and easier. Both would require very well defined standards.

It sounds like they’re trying to sell two things:

1. Hosted payloads, where DoD entities pay to have something (telescope, Sigint equipment, whatever) strapped on to a starlink satellite with comms all figured out for them. Probably a good deal if your stuff fits on that big flat satellite. SpaceX starlink launches do sway the launch market significantly enough (offering a launch at half othe price or less, beholden to starlink orbits) that it can seem worth it.

2. A government friendly starlink service which has security features like hardware managed encryption.

The cynic in me wonders if there just isn’t enough market for commercial starlink. But honestly it makes sense to sell the empty edges, kilograms, and bandwidth to the government. They have a lot of money.

It's part of this program,

https://www.science.org/content/article/decades-after-reagan...

More on Wikipedia: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

That doesn't seem related. That's 3 years ago.

As the wikipedia article says (SpaceNews reference), the first SpaceX element for the program is finally launching this month (Dec 2022). But yes, it was first announced under the Trump administration in 2019 when the Science article came out.

Yes they're related. This is SpaceX making public (to a partial extent) what they have long been doing for the Space Development Agency (a Mike Griffin government program closely aligned with Starlink).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

Makes you wonder, given the sensitivity of this, how the government feels about having Elon at the helm of it given some of his business ties.

Or in light of his recent behavior that could charitably be interpreted as slightly unstable.

But hey, the government somehow survived our last President and that was a far greater risk in just about every way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_disclosures_o...

They don't care, Gwynne Shotwell runs the company.

But I do foresee a future in which the SEC bars Musk from holding any executive position for any number of things he has done.

> They don't care, Gwynne Shotwell runs the company.

This isn't really true in as much as no one person can "run" a company. She acts as in her role as Chief Operations Officer and President of the company. She doesn't set long term vision and she doesn't generally handle projects that are in early incubation.

> But I do foresee a future in which the SEC bars Musk from holding any executive position for any number of things he has done.

We should try to keep our thoughts within the realm of realistic.

Isn't spacex privately held? That'd mean that the SEC's opinions of Musks character, however valid, would have even less weight there than they might at Tesla or wherever else.

> This isn't really true in as much as no one person can "run" a company.

People seem to think Musk runs quite a few companies.

> We should try to keep our thoughts within the realm of realistic.

Anyone else would have had their ability to hold an executive position at a publicly traded company revoked by the SEC for this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776

Also the more the government is bought into Starlink, the larger the pressure is to sideline regulatory problems.

If anything, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated how useful something like starlink can be. It makes sense that the DoD would gladly pay up to create a dedicated, hardened network for its own utility with specialized tweaks...

The DoD already had something like Starlink. SpaceX is trying to sell a lower cost version of the same thing, but cost savings isn’t that compelling for congress who sees costs as much as a feature as a bug.

> The DoD already had something like Starlink.

The NDSA doesn't actually exist yet, and SpaceX is presently the only company that could launch the larger versions of it.

They already have global coverage via a range of communication satellites used by various programs going back decades. For example the F-16 program had an independent network for effectively global coverage via 4 geostationary satellites. Other systems used polar orbits for actual global coverage.

Starlink has more total bandwidth and lower orbits, but the US military only needs so much bandwidth.

4x giant geostationary assets have a drastically different adversarial profile compared to 10,000 mini assets.

The DoD has far more than just 4 satellites up there.

Anyway, it’s vastly easier to destroy LEO satellites than Geostationary ones. A surprisingly tiny missile fired from an aircraft doing Mach 2 can take out Starlink satellites as you only need vertical speed the satellite provides energy at collision, but geostationary orbit takes significantly more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

> The DoD has far more than just 4 satellites up there.

Yeah, and they want a hell of a lot more. Seriously, read up on NDSA. For the transport layer they want hundreds to thousands of satellites in LEO.

From the sources I looked at, NDSA is supposed to be less than 1,000 satellites by 2030 which isn’t a huge jump over what they already have. They just don’t benefit from that kind of satellite density at the bottom of LEO when it comes at the cost of lower lifespan.

What they want from NDSA is multiple different systems each with a separate focus that can all use a uniform transmission layer.

I would expect the bandwidth demands of the US military to be effectively infinite. Especially if the connection can be guaranteed and is low latency. Communication is incredibly valuable in maneuver based combined arms warfare. The main limit is being able to quickly react and properly coordinate. For that comms are important, and reliability of comms is incredibly valuable, with latency being important as well.

Starlink has the very nice feature of being robust, just by virtue of having soo many satelites. China can easily knock out 4 geostationary satellites. But hundreds of low-orbit satellites make for a very difficult target.

The DoD has far more than just 4 satellites. Anyway Starlink satellites are really low making them much easier targets.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a single HARP style light gas gun couldn’t cheaply take down every Starlink satellite for a few hundred million total. The best defense is having a wide range of satellite orbits and the ability to quickly deploy more. If nothing else, a single nuclear EMP could wreck a huge swath of the Starlink network.

To get more revenue from limited capacity, it helps to go after customers who can pay more.

(Also, demand from governments is likely somewhat geographically different than demand from consumers.)

> They have a lot of money.

They will also pay $10,000 for a toilet seat. If you maintain the same markup the $110 a month sub will be $110,000 for the government

They split the arpanet into a military net and a civilian net.

Time to do the same for starlink eh.

One thing that people miss is the fact that in the event of any type of a "big" war between superpowers satellites are going to be heavily affected and probably one of the first targets. Having something like this, having that kind of speed in deploying new satellites is going to be a superpower to the USA.

Kessler Syndrome notwithstanding.

Such low orbits should prevent that being a long term problem. I also wonder how much more difficult it is to target satellites going this fast than say the one China destroyed a few years ago?

Seems like speed wouldn't be that much of a problem when the satellites all move in a highly predictable manner.

What's basis for thinking it would be much harder? Still has highly predictable trajectory. Recall the US destroy one a few months later in 2008 with a modified SM3, from a boat. That sat was in a ~ 244km×261km decaying orbit -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost.

If the thing China shot was on orbit, there isn't much difference in orbital velocity vs other objects. If it's below ~7.8km/s it's suborbital, and if it's above 11km/s it's on escape trajectory.

> Such low orbits should prevent that being a long term problem.

Wouldn't a military power be more willing to trigger Kessler syndrome for 5 years than 500?

Probably. In a war I don't think they'd hesitate, since they've already demonstrated their willingness to cause huge clouds of LEO debris with simple tests. But the upside is that it's much less of a problem for the rest of humanity. Losing access to space for a few years is certainly not something we want, but in the context of a major war between two space powers it will be among the least of our worries.

Note also that "Kessler Syndrome" is not a binary condition. As debris gets worse, the expected lifespan of satellites in those orbits drops, and as does the success rate of launching rockets through the effected altitudes. However these don't drop off to zero immediately. If the satellite is important enough to justify the elevated risk and additional expense then you can simply plan to launch several of them to get one of them through. Manned missions would be a bad idea, but odds are good that vital weather satellites and the like would be kept aloft.

That depends on whether that military thinks they rely on space less than the other military. But likely there will always be at least one military that thinks it would be to their advantage.

Kessler Syndrome is overused and isn't even relevant in a war context.

Any "big" war between superpowers is going to be over in a day because it's sheer utter hubris to imagine surviving with any quality of life afterwards.

Sure the the elites will have their billion dollar bunkers but the modern life is over otherwise. Pandemic was a model of 1% of what fallout would be like.

It seems warmongers have found an end-run around that though, proxy wars like Ukraine which is horrifying.

The Ukrainians, whose country was invaded, might take issue with your characterisation.

What counts as big, and what counts as a superpower?

By any reasonable measure, Russia is losing in Ukraine, and the USA lost in Vietnam. Really awful for both victim nations, but despite various hawks in both aggressors calling for the use of nukes, that didn't happen.

At this point, Russia appears to be cannibalizing their nuclear arsenal into conventional weapons, so I don't think they're a threat. That leaves China and NATO (as a bloc, three nuclear powers), because although I don't know how big Indian and Pakistani militaries are, that isn't going to spread, and North Korea is small enough that if it was dumb enough to strike at the USA I doubt it would manage to be worse than Covid (and similarly with Israel and it's neighbours, but I don't have enough appreciation for their geopolitics to call them dumb even preemptively about a hypothetical like this).

Sounds extremely profitable. While you can end-to-end encrypt things so it all looks like noise, you'll want to send nonsense data constantly just to make sure you can hide real data when you need to without tipping anyone off.

Like an HF numbers station, but you have to pay for every transmission.

> Starlink already offers unparalleled end-to-end user data encryption.

I don't understand this marketing. How would they possibly being doing E2E encryption? This is the wrong layer to be applying encryption at anyway.

Clearly they're using a different definition of end. All wireless and shared-media (DOCSIS, PON) protocols should be encrypted out of respect for customer metadata privacy.

Encryption should be at a higher layer, preferably from the end client to end the server, to provide any security. To be fair, the fact that the data is being transmitted wirelessly does mean that encryption is 100% required or else someone could easily spy on you.

Wireless has nothing to do with it, you always need encryption: https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...

Sooner or later the US Government will realize the Starship will be a good launching vehicle for the ballistic missile defense. Currently a midcourse ground base interceptor booster [1] weighs more than 20 tons, costs a few tens of millions, and carries one single kill vehicle [2] that weighs about 64 kg.

A single Starship would be able to carry more than 1000 such kill vehicles. If Russia launches a few hundred missiles at the US, a couple Starships could send multiple kill vehicle against each Russian warhead.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle

SpaceX already has contracts for a Missile Defense Shield (w/ SDA, now part of Space Force). Govt program was started by Mike Griffin-- one of the early founders of Strategic Defense Initiative, space kill vehicles, and SpaceX itself.

His history with Elon is fascinating.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

I thought SpaceX is just building thermal imaging satellites for tracking ballistic missiles, but agree it's obvious just the first step to orbital weapons for interception.

Yes that's the plan. Sounds like Biden Admin wasn't a fan of Star Wars and has been slowing Elon down.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

Correct

It has to get off the ground first.

Nobody doubts it'll get off the ground, which is all you need for the OP's proposal. Catching the second stage with chopsticks, though...

Three things:

1) That way you would have a single Starship launching a single kill vehicle in more than 1000 pieces. In order to be truly independent, each kill vehicle needs significant delta-v on its own, which lowers the number of kill vehicles by two orders of magnitude.

2) Starship has pretty weak engines for this task. While the missile used to launch the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle reaches ~10 km/s in less than 4 minutes, Starship launch profile suggests 8 km/s in ~9 minutes. When a nuclear strike is incoming, you don't have those minutes to waste.

3) Starship uses liquid fuel, which means it can't wait on the launchpad ready to launch at a moment's notice very long. Missiles use solid fuels for a reason.

The kill vehicles are staged in orbit just like Starlink satellites.. See Brilliant Pebbles.

I think there's a consensus that orbital weapons are bad.

Even if they're defensive weapons only? I think Reagan's star wars program was cancelled only because the Russian threat was not as big anymore. Not because of weapons in space concerns.

FWIW only WMDs are really banned in space.

Democrats / Clinton shut down the original Star Wars program because they favored arms control (arguing Star Wars was illegal under the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty)

That treaty expired in 2002 and then Elon went to Russia to buy some ICBMs...

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was a Nixon-Brezhnev 1972 thing, albeit ratified by a Democratic Senate in the same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty

Yes Good recent discussion: https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/12/16/approaching-third-r...

They also shut down star wars because it relied on magic that didn't exist. Raegan was a big fan of big projects that didn't make technical sense (see also the SSC)

Do "kill vehicles" that are only capable of destroying a few tens of square meters at best really illegal under the ballistic missile treaty?

> Even if they're defensive weapons only?

And how you are going to convince everyone else that they are "just" defensive weapons ?

Apparently Republicans are all for weapons in space...

https://www.science.org/content/article/decades-after-reagan...

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/nuclear-weapons-china-a...

Weapons are bad in general. The military, however, takes a practical view rather than a moral one, and will not limit themselves based on what is good and bad, but will arm themselves based on what is effective. This is why we can't have nice things.

I was thinking more like game theoretically bad.

They may be bad in some game theory way, I don't know the argument, but large groups of humans are very much not rational actors. The tendency is to oppose the enemy rather than to maximize gains or minimize losses.

The biggest CO2 polluter in the world is ... the US Military. What makes you think they won't clutter up space with weapons?

You're talking about boost-phase interceptors, not mid-course interceptors. Starship to replace GMD (as suggested by credit_guy) doesn't make much sense, but Starship does have the technical ability to launch a massive constellation of space-based interceptors for quite cheap. With Starship, it should be possible to put tens of thousands of interceptors into LEO, and to rapidly replenish the constellation.

As for the "general consensus that weapons in space are bad", there's also a general consensus that war is bad, so we should all breath easy! Wait no.

The problem with weapons in space are that they put the opposing super-powers in an impossible position. Hence it forces them to make a move asap to prevent being at a total disadvantage. This is mostly because weapons in space can be used with very little warning. There is little defense, and not even any notice that allows you to prepare or setup a second strike.

Plenty of people don't think that's bad, but it seems that the top military decision makers of all super-powers do see the problem with that, and hence they have managed to keep weapons out of space. This remains a high-level decision, so it only takes a few rational people for the game-theory to work.

Consider the external politics around mobilization. It is a big deal to mobilize externally, because it forces opposing players to also mobilize, hence moving everyone closer to conflict. The thing about weapons in space is that they are effectively always mobilized. Even if you could sustain perpetual mobilization, it wouldn't be a good strategic move.

Something similar goes for missile defense systems that are too effective. It disrupts MAD, and pushes the opposing side in to a corner. Either make a move before the defense system is up, or accept a role as a second grade power from now on. The problem, specifically, is that it removes the second-strike capability much more than that it removes the first-strike capability.

So having a missile-defense system in orbit has game-theoretical downsides both for being in space, and for removing the enemies second-strike capability.

The same does not quite hold for having the capability to launch such a missile defense system. It gives your opponent time to react when you launch it. Hence they do not need to immediately react to you having the capability. So I think research into this area, preparations, and development of the system are fine. Heck it is even important and desirable. We just need to continuously refuse to even ready such systems outside of well-announced and limited tests.

Indeed, that's the classical game theoretic view. However, consider two possibilities:

- what if deployment of an effective BMD is covert and piecemeal, and is presented as fait accompli? The first to do that wins, and we only have one real contender. You might say that's a very dangerous gamble, but…

- what response do you envision if the cover is blown? Yes, classic game theory suggests launching everything, but let's think about, say, Putin's options. If he launches, he is guaranteed to die very soon and have his country obliterated. If he doesn't, his nuclear deterrent is indeed worth less now, but it's not given he'd ever need it. Both because it might not be needed during his long and happy life, and because the US is not very keen on attacking random dictatorships despite some historical precedents. So the choice for him is between immediate death and potential problems in the future, and hey maybe it's not actually BMD or maybe it's not very effective, right? Covert/deniable deployment helps here, a lot

So between those two possibilities, I think it's not given that an effective BMD would be as dangerous as you suggest.

Piecemeal deployment might work, if not discovered. But the discovery risk is rather large.

When an opponent discovers the deployment, either after-the-fact, or during deployment. They have many responses beyond immediately launching everything. The main problem is that this deployment corners them. Perhaps they try to attack the missile shield in space. Perhaps they run covert operations to disable the shield. Perhaps they take economic warfare counter-measures. I imagine plenty of former allies might side against whomever made such a huge uni-lateral move.

In any case, as we say in my native language, a cornered cat makes weird jumps. I don't think it makes sense to corner China or Russia in this field. MAD works well enough.

1. Not sure what you mean by significant delta-v. An 8km/s vehicle meeting a 6km/s warhead coming from the opposite direction will kill it just as surely as a 10km/s one. If you mean delta-v to go laterally, for that 1km/s is probably more than enough. A vehicle with 1km/s delta-v is, in the worst case scenario, twice as heavy than one with 100m/s delta-v, not 100 times as heavy.

2. 9 minutes is plenty. A ballistic missile takes about 30 min to go from one continent to another. The difference between 4 min and 9 min is not a make or break thing.

3. Everything has a price. If a single GBI booster costs north of $50 mil, then you can afford to spend a few tens of millions to keep fully fueled Starships on the launchpad, 24/7/365. From time to time you'd have to empty them, and move them an give them a thorough inspection. It can be done.

4. (bonus) If things get tense, a Starship could also carry a few hundred MIRVs. China thinks it can sprint forward in the arms race at a certain point. They'll find out it's not going to be that easy.

1. This is just basic orbital mechanics. Multiple missiles are launched from different locations at different targets. The launches are not fully simultaneous. Each kill vehicle must be at the right place at the right time to intercept its target. If you launch all kill vehicles from the same location at the same time, the differences between the required velocity vectors are easily several km/s.

2. The midcourse phase typically takes ~20 minutes. You can't predict the trajectory accurately during the boost phase, and you have the wrong kind of missile for intercepting the target during the terminal phase. If your boost phase is 9 minutes instead of 4 minutes, you have 11 minutes instead of 16 minutes for political and tactical decisionmaking.

3. What is the price of a fully disposable Starship? How many of them do you need to have one ready to launch at any time? Because if you have them on standby, you can't use them for any other purpose, and they are effectively disposable.

> What is the price of a fully disposable Starship?

Musk aims to get the cost of building one Starship to $5 million [1]. That sounds insane, I know, but he also aims to build about 1000 of them. When you get to this scale of mass production, efficiencies of scale kick in. Could he be wrong. I suppose so, but even if he's wrong by a factor of 10 or 20, it would still provide a tremendous value proposition for an Anti Ballistic Defense system.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-pl...

The delta-v is not needed to get a big enough impact. The delta-v is needed to be able to maneuver into an intercept orbit. In case you don't know, for rockets the fundamental limit of their fuel is expressed in delta-v.

Your kill vehicle doesn't need much delta-V if you can launch it close enough to an intercept course. But if all warheads are launched in very different directions, and all your kill vehicles need to start from a central starship point, they can't all be launched 'close enough' to an intercept course.

Historically, liquid fueled (cryogenic) vehicles have not been suitable for these kinds of missions because they take a long time to fuel and they can't be fueled ahead of time because the fuel boils off.

Why Russia, china or even North Korea cannot do that as well.

Huh. "Secured Satellite Network For Government Entities" .. which, or how many, entities? You can only offer your service to so many before you hit those inevitable political barriers. I think they're already firmly cemented in the "US and allies" market, so the broadly-worded marketing text is a bit funny to me.

"Government entities" usually referrs to US gov subcontractors, military, intelligence, etc etc..

Not 'an entity with a gov' and not 'an entity of a government'

"As a small time dictator I often find it difficult to terminate internet services to citizens of my country while still enabling it to my militias for effective opression. Now with Starshield - I can!"

Basically proving the Piketty theory of space, that all space efforts are eventually taken over & subsumed by military-governmental big dollar concerns. Unsurprising but definitely one giant leap for SpaceX away from being their own masters, away from being explorers & a venture/adventurers, & towards being a key element of the military-industrial complex. One perhaps with much less congressional hooks than previous M-I-C Complex.

> Starlink already offers unparalleled end-to-end user data encryption. Starshield uses additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements.

aka "We put TLS in SPAAAACE!" ? I kinda doubt government needs help in such basic things as "talking over unsecure channel"...

``` EARTH OBSERVATION Starshield launches satellites with sensing payloads and delivers processed data directly to the user. ```

Never heard of this capability for Starlink before. What kind of sensing payloads can it do? Imaging? Thermal? Since Starlink is low altitude and high density, it would allow almost real-time high-precision surveillance?

Starlink is growing a lot of headroom. "delivers processed data directly" is so skynet A.I. Looks like Amazon's Kuiper [1] constellation has a longer catchup to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Systems

At fist I thought this would something similar to band 14 on LTE networks, but seems like this is not the case, or at least they are not saying anything about QOS.

Not sure what they mean by encryption, since DOD has there own crypto chips with classified algorithms.

The DoD seems well on its way towards having two more such networks (augmenting the one it already has in existence), without the involvement of SpaceX at all: https://spacenews.com/u-s-to-ramp-up-spending-on-classified-.... Maybe this program was spun up in an attempt to grab those sweet government dollars in 2025.

Thay seemed to mainly cover specific efforts & contracts. All Space Force related.

Personally I feel like this is over narrow. They seem likenthey are just trying to make am acquisition, spend money to have some shit to be in control of.

I feel like DARPA has a much broader & more long-term real effort underway, not about hardware to buy but about how hardware communicates, networks, what things do. Space Based Adaptive Communication Networks (Space BACN) seems to be the real effort afoot right now, IMO, to more broadly define how communication works in space. There's, as I understand, some fairly popular command & control buses for satellites. But this Space BACN seems like a much broader networking initiative, that this Starlink project seems like a proprietary competitor to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33307864

Not exactly a name you want associated with anything to do with national security right now.

SpaceX has been launching Department of Defense payloads since 2006.

I didn’t say they were new to the game I said they probably aren’t looking super reliable all of a sudden.

Things that tend to matter a lot in that world are credibility, stability and reliability.

New information has come in via a very public set of car crashes and that relationship is now looking like a liability.

Could you elaborate for those of us who don’t typically follow space news? Has Space-X had some trouble recently?

He is saying spacex=tesla

I can’t tell if you’re being cute and trying to carve out some exemption here when it’s clear what I’m talking about I think but let’s operate on good faith.

The owner with an 80% voting control of the company has had some very serious issues in judgement lately not limited to the Twitter fiasco but has also made a number of public moves that were very friendly towards what the US has called their biggest national security threat repeatedly for the past half decade or longer.

In a national security context that would be generally thought of as a completely unacceptable amount of leverage for your main enemy to have over your national security infrastructure.

This isn’t some mindless Elon bashing post, I’m presenting this as an actual honest to god problem for natsec.

>I can’t tell if you’re being cute and trying to carve out some exemption here when it’s clear what I’m talking about I think but let’s operate on good faith.

Translation: "I think you're committing wrongthink to be asking such a question, but I'll magnanimously say 'let's operate on good faith'".

>The owner with an 80% voting control of the company has had some very serious issues in judgement lately not limited to the Twitter fiasco

Ah yes, the world's wealthiest man has invested 20% of his net wealth in something that may or may not work out. Proof that he is a danger to national security!!!1!!11!!!!!

PS - Two questions to ponder:

Q: Wasn't Twitter supposed to have collapsed and died like a month ago? A: Yes.

Q: Isn't Twitter functioning apparently quite well during the current mega world event known as the FIFA World Cup? A: Yes.

>but has also made a number of public moves that were very friendly towards what the US has called their biggest national security threat repeatedly for the past half decade or longer.

Oh, good grief. Musk said that Ukraine might have to give up land to end the war with Russia. A) A negotiated settlement is how 90% of wars in world history have ended, and B) such a settlement has always been the most likely scenario for ending the current war. Maybe it'll be a formal recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, maybe it'll also include parts of eastern Ukraine.

Now, maybe Ukraine's recent successes on the ground will let it regain control over all of its territory, maybe even Crimea. I hope that happens, but (again, even with the recent pushback of Russian lines) that still remains a relatively unlikely outcome.

>This isn’t some mindless Elon bashing post, I’m presenting this as an actual honest to god problem for natsec.

There is nothing wrong, from a legal or moral perspective, in Musk publicly stating what he said. He is an American and the US is not actually a combatant in the war. Musk is free to say anything he wants, and those who immediately claim that anything short of demanding "Ukrainian forces roll into Moscow and Zelensky personally swings the axe that cuts off Putin's head" = Russian sympathizer/"problem with natsec" just make themselves look stupid.

What does the Twitter purchase or Musk’s opinions on the war in Ukraine have to do with Space-X’s capabilities to successfully put satellites into orbit?

Musk has had some trouble recently, but I thought it was pretty well known that Shotwell pretty much runs the show at SpaceX & has for some time. I may be completely incorrect, but I think Musk is mostly just a mascot/figurehead/hype-man for SpaceX & has been for a bit. Regarding most of the day-day stuff that is, he probably still has some input on very long term matters.

But I think if Musk were to die in a mysterious Tesla fire tomorrow, not much would change for the worse at the company for quite some time.

I’m specifically referring to the 80% voting rights he has at SpaceX.

It is well known that Shotwell runs the business side and Musk runs the engineering/R&D side.

Eg. Falcon Heavy was almost cancelled because the engineering side turned out to make it more expensive to develop than expected (with the original plan for fuel crossfeed) and F9 had improved so much that it ate up most of FH's potential market. So Musk's preference was to cancel it. But because it was favorable for the business side (I think they might've even already bid on some launches with it by then), Shotwell pushed for them to keep it, which is how we got the current variation of FH which just has F9s with a reinforced center-core.

It wasn't important to the business side -- they'd only sold a couple launches or so. But Shotwell convinced Elon that it was important to their reputation.

Musk has since cratered his, but Shotwell's is intact.

I feel like that's nitpicking, when the company's reputation is obviously a business issue.

Musk has been a complete trainwreck for years, and it hasn't stopped SpaceX from winning a bunch of government (including defense) contracts, nor---crucially---from delivering on them. The recent Twitter stuff has gotten a lot of airplay, but I'm not sure what's supposed to have happened that would fundamentally change the equation.

Actually SpaceX's first contract and the name 'Falcon' came from the DARPA Falcon Project

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project

I believe I read in Eric Berger's book Liftoff that the name came from the Star Wars Millennium Falcon.

But your theory has some merit since the timing of the Falcon project's award to SpaceX could be coming about the same time that they named the rocket.

Both theories may be right. The Falcon project grew out of the Reagan era Star Wars project, so it's likely a backronym.

You nailed it...

Dig deeper and the story only gets more interesting.

That's unfortunate.

Are govt bureaucrats LARPing about posting left wing conspiracy about emerald mines on twitter? I doubt they pay any attention

This can't be more secure than running encryption over cell right?

> Starshield launches satellites with sensing payloads and delivers processed data directly to the user.

It seems to be more about low cost sensors in space than what consumer-level Starlink is used for.

Low-orbit data centers become interesting in this context. Yes, problems with radiation, solar flares and traditional ops. But 'free' power, real estate (1) and cooling.

(1) Low orbit real estate may be a future battleground?

Cooling is actually a big problem in space.

There is no free cooling in the space. It is actually harder to cool something in the space than in Sahara, because you have no air that you can dump energy into. Your only choice is to radiate heat away, which is very inefficient.

agree you would radiate it away - but why does that need to be inefficient at scale (understood there are upfront costs)? meanwhile cooling is a huge expense in terrestrial DCs.

i am not an expert - happy to hear more expert opinions which is why i wrote the parent comment - but on a quick google search it seems folks are working on these designs: https://orbitsedge.com/satframe

Cooling in space is easy -- it just requires massive radiators. And mass is expensive in space.

SpaceX is so cool. Why does Elon have to be the way he is?

Unfortunately Elon always has this in the plans from day 1 with Mike Griffin.

Meh, history is rife with people on the leading edge that have a tinge of madness. It’s probably required since they are extreme outliers in behavior otherwise.

As compared the the sane management of, say, Boeing? The whole idea of SpaceX was madness back in the 2010s

Is Elon Musk a DoD project?

Yes and Michael D Griffin is his handler. Surprising few talk about it given the evidence out there...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

A scary thought, but thankfully not likely. From Ashlee Vance's biography:

>At SpaceX, Musk and the company’s top executives had spent most of December in a state of fear. According to reports in the press, SpaceX, the onetime front-runner for the large NASA contract, had suddenly lost favor with the space agency. Michael Griffin, who had once almost been a cofounder of SpaceX, was the head of NASA and had turned on Musk. Griffin did not care for Musk’s aggressive business tactics, seeing him as borderline unethical. Others have suggested that Griffin ended up being jealous of Musk and SpaceX.

It seems to just be two space nerds doing their thing, nothing more:

>The collection of talent attending these sessions in 2001 was impressive. Scientists showed up from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL. James Cameron appeared, lending some celebrity to the affair. Also attending was Michael Griffin, whose academic credentials were spectacular and included degrees in aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, and applied physics. Griffin had worked for the CIA’s venture capital arm called In-Q-Tel, at NASA, and at JPL and was just in the process of leaving Orbital Sciences Corporation, a maker of satellites and spacecraft, where he had been chief technical officer and the general manager of the space systems group. It could be argued that no one on the planet knew more about the realities of getting things into space than Griffin, and he was working for Musk as space thinker in chief. (Four years later, in 2005, Griffin took over as head of NASA.)

>Musk had come to Russia filled with optimism about putting on a great show for mankind and was now leaving exasperated and disappointed by human nature. The Russians were the only ones with rockets that could possibly fit within Musk’s budget. “It was a long drive,” Cantrell said. “We sat there in silence looking at the Russian peasants shopping in the snow.” The somber mood lingered all the way to the plane, until the drink cart arrived. “You always feel particularly good when the wheels lift off in Moscow,” Cantrell said. “It’s like, ‘My God. I made it.’ So, Griffin and I got drinks and clinked our glasses.” Musk sat in the row in front of them, typing on his computer. “We’re thinking, Fucking nerd. What can he be doing now?” At which point Musk wheeled around and flashed a spreadsheet he’d created. “Hey, guys,” he said, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.” Griffin and Cantrell had downed a couple of drinks by this time and were too deflated to entertain a fantasy. They knew all too well the stories of gung-ho millionaires who thought they could conquer space only to lose their fortunes. Just the year before, Andrew Beal, a real estate and finance whiz in Texas, folded his aerospace company after having poured millions into a massive test site. “We’re thinking, Yeah, you and whose fucking army,” Cantrell said. “But, Elon says, ‘No, I’m serious. I have this spreadsheet.’” Musk passed his laptop over to Griffin and Cantrell, and they were dumbfounded. The document detailed the costs of the materials needed to build, assemble, and launch a rocket. According to Musk’s calculations, he could undercut existing launch companies by building a modest-sized rocket that would cater to a part of the market that specialized in carrying smaller satellites and research payloads to space. The spreadsheet also laid out the hypothetical performance characteristics of the rocket in fairly impressive detail. “I said, ‘Elon, where did you get this?’” Cantrell said.

>In April 2002, Musk fully abandoned the publicity-stunt idea and committed to building a commercial space venture. He pulled aside Cantrell, Griffin, Mueller, and Chris Thompson, an aerospace engineer at Boeing, and told the group, “I want to do this company. If you guys are in, let’s do it.” (Griffin wanted to join but ended up declining when Musk rebuffed his request to live on the East Coast, and Cantrell only stuck around for a few months after this meeting, seeing the venture as too risky.)

"Musk agreed to let Vance write his biography under the condition that Musk would proofread his script before it is submitted."

That Wikipedia link cites much more about Griffin & Musk than Vance ever did.

trusting a dude who is compromised by interests in China up to his eyeballs to do anything involving national security seems unwise

He is 1/10th as compromised as Tim Apple, and the DoD uses iPhones.

I think it's pretty ridiculous to compare Tim Cook to Elon Musk.

Elon has demonstrated in both his public and private life that he can be very flexible with his ethics and morals if it furthers his business objectives. Tim by comparison has been pretty consistent.

You mean like when he committed perjury testifying to Congress that "[Apple App Store] guidelines are transparent and applied equally to developers of all sizes and in all categories"? Or how he keeps marketing iMessage as "end-to-end encrypted" while Apple continues to hold the encryption keys to the overwhelming majority of user messages and regularly decrypts them for law enforcement purposes? Or how Apple continuously bends over for the Chinese government, handing over complete control of all data in iCloud for Chinese accounts?

https://twitter.com/alx/status/1598473176102600704

It's a ridiculous comparison. Tim Cook literally censors for the communist party on a daily basis he is practically working for them. Not at all a fair comparison

The only virtue Tim Cook knows is money. Everything he pretends to believe in the context of America goes completely out the window in the context of China. Why? Because money.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Neither Tim Cook or Elon Musk would really say "No" if the government asked them to do something, both are business-motivated people with the ability to ignore morals.

DoD iPhones can only be used for “For official use only” information—that is, unclassified data.

Don't forget the rampant drug abuse.

literally can't make who you are talking about

They don't have a fake Russian Kompromat file to justify the foreign boogieman narrative this time around but they'll believe it if it suits their ideology ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted that he interfered in US elections.

And there was plenty of evidence other than the file that indicates that it happened.

Yes I remember the study showing the total amount of ad spending by Prigozhin was <$1 million. In a campaign where both sides spent $1 billion, not to mention the priceless wall-to-wall coverage the global media provided worth far more than an additional $1B.

But yes, I'm sure Russia did enough to sway the election...

All of the social media campaigns attributed to Russian agencies weren't even backing one party. They hit both sides. All they cared about was generating social conflict.

I am glad we can both agree that Russia did in fact interfere in the election.

You're openly spreading Russia propaganda by the guy who founded Wagner (Russia is very important, they even swayed the US election!). I wouldn't pat myself on the back for such a thing.

If spending a few hundred $k on foreigners using Twitter/FB advertising accounts is enough to meaningfully sway an election I think we have bigger problems than Russia.

I believe your last statement is accurate.

Then by your standard everybody interfered too. This is a nonsensical stance. Degree matters, particularly when the degree was beyond miniscule relative to the handwringing and accusations and response.

It’s been obvious for years that the narrative around “Russian interference” was an absolute ploy and a con. It’s a little silly to be still pushing it in 2022 don’t you think?

> It’s a little silly to be still pushing it in 2022 don’t you think?

When you live in a bubble like subreddits and Twitter communities then this sort of reality distortion is encouraged and rewarded.

They never seem to have a response when someone outside their circles calls them out though. They just go quiet or redirect.

They rebranded Starlink so they can sell it to the government for 10x the price.

Governments want it 100x more than the public, so they might be under charging.

NASA has already saved billions by using SpaceX instead of legacy vendors so they're definitely charging less than they could.

How much of SpaceX's technology contains components sourced from abroad, and/or China? My bet is that it's enough to kill any national interest in defense applications.

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