Starlink Now Being Deployed on U.S. Navy Warships | Hacker News Reader

Starlink Now Being Deployed on U.S. Navy Warships

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17 pointspeutetre13 comments

Curious as to the timing given 9 days ago it looks like Russian Navy might be planning to use starlink on their naval drones. Would StarLink eventually be able to control nation state conflicts by disabling connectivity to the side they don't like? They've previously done this to Ukrainian drones.

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/08/new-russian-nav...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/musk-stopped-ukraine-atta...

Starlink isn't a reliable primary radio, period. The US ships being equipped with Starlink are doing so alongside their datalink and radio comms, as should any smart implementation. Both Ukraine and Russia are silly to rely on trivially-jammed AESA comms when more resilient military-grade options exist. Either side has access to military satellites for this kinda stuff.

That's probably why the US Navy uses a network agnostic architecture that connects to both Starlink and OneWeb, as well as military LEO satellites.

Besides, according to [1] they can so far only use Starlink for unclassified data. Unlike Ukraine and Russia, the US isn't under any real pressure and can take their time to get this right.

1: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/navy/2024/06/navy-project-bri...

Interesting speculation based on a render of a square antenna.

So basically they are switching from using their own geostationary satellites to using both Starlink and Oneweb, using multiple antennas at once to get more bandwidth.

Sounds pretty reasonable. Why do it yourself when you can outsource it to get a better product for less money. The Starlink constellation seems pretty resistant to physical attacks, with the laser link now allowing them to route around destroyed base stations. And as part of the contract they work on the resiliency to cyber attacks.

And giving sailors live streams and the ability to call family even at sea seems like a big morale win. Which by extension means being able to attract more and better candidates in the future.

Sounds like a good fit. I recently got fiber to replace the Starlink I had before, but I had very few complaints compared to my other options. Latency still left a bit of room to be desired and you'd have to let the coffee brew while your Docker containers downloaded, but it was fine. Netflix worked, games worked, it's like... well, having internet.

I really wonder what the solution was before Starlink got rolled out. My first satellite provider was Hughesnet, a devilish business that would automatically charge you $15/gb over your 50gb monthly satellite limit. Well, shoutouts to the Navy crew that can watch YouTube now without getting shouted at by the regiment officer.

> “Before SEA2, ship communications have relied upon Department of Defense (DOD) satellites for the past 30 years,” the NAVWAR piece explains. “These six satellites were roughly 22,300 miles away in geostationary orbit and provided a footprint on Earth the size of a hemisphere, resulting in slow data rates as the signal traveled up to the satellite and back down to its final destination.”

So a similar setup to Hughesnet (which uses three geostationary satellites). Probably with less recent but more expensive satellites, but who knows.

With the retailizing and standardization of untold and poorly-tracked corporate vendors and dependencies in the MIC DoD supply chain, I hope this is used purely for unclassified work and crew leisure purposes, i.e., Netflixing. Adding sidecars of third party gear outside of secure networks, especially with analytics, telemetry, IoT, wearables, and use of consumer-grade cloud services makes it very easy to create unintentional exploitable vulnerabilities.

It's for crew leisure and windows update.

And even the Fed owned options have vendors

Are we trusting the unstable Elon with the location of the US Navy Warships?

Yes. They also have AIS

Outsourcing military communication to private companies. What could possibly go wrong? Let’s just hope Huawei doesn’t buy Starlink.

They just won’t be allowed. Just like how Russian defense contractors can’t buy Boing.

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