Weird things about SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites | Hacker News Reader

Weird things about SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites

space.com

29 pointskungfudoi22 comments

""" The Starlink terms of service contain a section stating that in the event that SpaceX will reach Mars and establish service there, the company will have full independence from any government on Earth.

"For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities," the Starlink terms of service read. "Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement." """

Very interesting. Perhaps this is why Musk doesn't mind paying out-of-pocket to provide Starlink service in Ukraine.

Indebting all parties in the war to his vision for multi-planetary independance?

This is illegal under the Outer Space Treaty. I'm tempted to say it's a joke but Elon may be able to outmaneuver whoever would enforce that treaty.

Kind of a joke, but honestly there's not much someone on Earth could do to enforce their will on Mars. In practical terms they are on their own regardless.

Yes there is just like it’s done on earth at the point of a gun, all laws are enforced at the end of the day by gunpoint.

Except that it takes about 6 months for a gun from Earth to get to Mars. It's hard governing a place you can't easily reach.

And if a Mars colony really is self sustaining, stopping supply runs also doesn't do as much as you'd maybe like. Sending a gun(ship) might also be prohibitively expensive.

There's probably a lot of fiction written about exactly this topic. Maybe the Martians could buy their independence with Epstein drives.

It's likely enough that the Mars end of the service would enjoy being able to communicate with the ground stations on Earth.

The space force will enforce the USA needs on the Martians!

Also the us military assisted spaceX in its development. There’s a reason spaceX has ITAR compliance needs.

ITAR compliance is a requirement for anything which could be repurposed for certain classes of weapons. Working on an aircraft autopilot requires ITAR compliance.

The Outer Space Treaty is a treaty between governments. As a rule, treaties only apply to governments. So SpaceX can say whatever they like in a document, as it's legal to do so in the US and then act upon it based on US law. From my understanding this means that they can claim it all they like, but if they tried to enforce that claim against anyone it wouldn't work.

Yeah, a contract is totally going to stop government from forcing them to do something in the future. Absolutely.

Very naive. A planet without a single monopoly on violence (aka a government) will quickly get one or have N competing groups fighting to become one. There is a reason why we called countries without a functioning government a “failed state”.

Oh there will be government on Mars... and Elon wants it to be him.

Yep. He will control the flights to and from Mars. That’s a lot of power.

This might just be my distaste of Musk showing, but whilst under most other circumstances I’d assume that this was entirely a joke but in this case it does seem consistent with Musk’s libertarian space fetishism.

The extraterrestrial pecking order has zero chance of being independent of Earth’s. I find it hard to believe that Musk would be all for holding hands and singing kumbaya if things started swaying away from…anarcho-capitalism.

I beleive a number of European countries are now covering Starlinks costs in keeping Ukraine connected.

11. Starlink satellites can focus the beam doubling as potential directed energy weapons.

This nicely illustrates one of the fundamental problems of internet comments… it took 30 seconds to write this but it would take me an hour to prove it’s bull.

This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as Brandolini's law or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

It's true, that's the basic principle Starlink dishes and satellites operate on - they use phased antenna arrays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

It's not practical to use it as a Directed Energy Weapon, but it is - conceptually - similar to one.

What is the EIRP of a starlink spot beam? Even if you had multiple satellites blasting a single region with all of their antennas does this do anything worse than raising the noise floor? It just seems like the orders of magnitude are all off for a weapon.

Maybe it gets powerful enough to burn out the radios in smartphones? I can't find a good reference to the total TX power from a Starlink satellite, but I do know that the spot beams have a 15 mile diameter and the inverse square law is a harsh mistress.

If you have some way of measuring the received power from each satellite inside the cell phone, you might be able to use that as feedback to the array to better focus the signal/s?

You wouldn't need to disable the radio altogether, just swamping / destroying the antenna would be enough to 'disable' the system, for all intents and purposes. Since an antenna is optimized for a known frequency, resonance would probably also help.

It sounds just "James Bond villain-y" enough to not work.

In all honesty, the fact that this laser based communication exists makes me a lot more likely to believe that SDI was actually a success in the classified world.

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