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Comment by rzimmerman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

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

Time to do the same for starlink eh.

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

> 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

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