Starlink

Understandary Cascade

Starlink

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-21:52

Starlink

Colin Wright

Oct 27, 2022

This month we talk about SpaceX, Cuba, and the Iranian protests.

We also discuss Project Kuiper, Ukraine, and Musk drama.

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Transcript

A recent report from the nonprofit human rights organization Freedom House found that internet freedom, globally, has been on the decline for the past 12 years-ish, but even more so over the past year.

This is especially true in countries run by authoritarian regimes, like Russia, Sudan, Libya, and Myanmar.

Some countries, like Russia, but even more so, and with greater sophistication, China, have taken online repression and censorship to the next level, creating what some call a "splinternet" that operates in similar ways to the global, more open internet, but which is tightly controlled and regulated, which has the effect of turning it into something else entirely.

In China's case, that something else is more or less a tool of the state: folks can't really say much that isn't approved by the government, lest they have their posts and presence taken down, before they are then punished in real life by authorities.

In other cases it's more about partitioning off foreign influences, keeping specific apps or social networks blocked, or disallowing the purchase or consumption of various goods and services.

So while China received the worst ranking from Freedom House for the eighth consecutive year, because of their success in this department—they're really quite good at censoring things at this point—they're far from the only entity attempting to do this.

And to be clear, while the aforementioned authoritarian nations are more overt about their censorship, ostensibly free nations, like the US and UK, have also received mediocre scores over the years.

The US actually increased its ranking on this list for the first time in six years, and it's now ranked 9th globally, tied with Australia and France.

And ninth is pretty good, considering how many countries there are in the world, but it's still weird that the country that invented the internet should be so relatively low on the list.

That said, because of all the efforts by various factions—mostly Republicans and other right-leaning folks right now, but not exclusively, and there have been more left-leaning folks doing this in the past—because of their efforts to ban certain networks, websites, and ideas that they don't like, or think their supporters don't like, the US languishes near the bottom of the top ten.

The incredible surge in misinformation, wild-eyed conspiracy theories, and harassment aimed at election workers and officials in the US-oriented portions of the internet have also played a role in the awarding of that relatively low ranking.

Ultimately, freedom on the internet is considered to be an important topic because it's directly correlated with the level of freedom, education, and self-reported happiness people enjoy, wherever they happen to live.

An open, non-abusive, resource-laden and accessible to everyone internet gives people tools, education, and connections they wouldn't otherwise enjoy, or wouldn't be able to access as easily and cheaply—it might be limited to just some privileged portions of society.

It also breaks down walls between people, cultures, and nations, and makes exposure to new ideas and different perspectives almost unavoidable.

There are also cases in which internet access is fundamental to survival, as is often true in war zones like Ukraine, which is currently being invaded by Russia.

Folks on the ground often have their communications cut in any way their enemy can manage, and increasingly that means knocking out mobile phone towers and other means through which local defense forces coordinate; keep them from telling each other what's up across the battlefield, and they suffer from the same or worse fog of war as the invading forces often do.

What I'd like to talk about today is a relatively new communications technology that's been making waves in those battlefield scenarios, among others, and why it's evolved into a complicated and at times drama-ridden industry.

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The article I'd like to unspool today comes from Bloomberg, and it's entitled:

SpaceX Loses $20 Million a Month on Starlink Internet Service in Ukraine

Starlink is a sub-brand, a service, operated by the private US space company, SpaceX.

SpaceX is perhaps best known for being founded by let's say colorful tech-billionaire, off-and-on the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, who also founded electric vehicle company Tesla, among other endeavors. It's also known, though, for revolutionizing the space launch industry by producing reusable rocket components, which has had the practical impact of massively reducing the cost of launching stuff into orbit, and which may soon help the US, and other countries, probably, get back to the Moon.

Starlink is part of what allowed SpaceX to scale-up its reusable rocket capabilities.

When you launch a rocket, you need payload, you need something in that rocket to justify the cost of sending it into space. And if you're iterating a new technology, like producing robotic landing components on your rockets that will allow them to float back down to earth and land themselves on little barges so they're easier to refurbish and get ready for another launch, you need to chuck tons of stuff into space, over and over at a regular cadence.

The space industry has only had so many customers for a long time because of the overall expense of getting things up there, and because it's relatively expensive to produce the often quite sizable and heavy satellites that have traditionally been used.

Part of SpaceX's model was to allow smaller satellites to be packed into each rocket, so you can book smaller compartments on these rockets, cheaper, because of that size differential, and because these rockets were being launched regularly.

That regularity of launches, plus the ability to pack several smaller payloads into each rocket, meant more companies could afford to send satellites and experiments into orbit, and SpaceX, if they managed to sell out a lot of that space, could fund their development of this reusability technology.

Because it took a while for this concept of more, cheaper, smaller launches to catch on, though, they often had to fill up empty space on their rockets with their own payloads; and often, that meant putting relatively small satellites of their own into these empty slots.

These little satellites weren't just there to fill up space, though—they were part of a growing network of smaller satellites that were being positioned around the planet at strategic locations, approximately equidistant from each other, building out the Starlink constellation.

This constellation was started in 2019, when the first of these satellites reached orbit, and is meant to ultimately consist of nearly 12,000 satellites, and possibly up to 42,000 of them, spaced-out around the globe in such a way that several of them will always be visible from every point on the planet, allowing little receivers on the ground to always be able to pick up a signal from at least one of them.

These satellites are then able to beam internet, essentially, anywhere on the planet.

They create a connection between on the ground transceivers and the network of satellites up in Low Earth orbit, and that opens up all sorts of possibilities, including things like providing mobile phone services anywhere on the planet—and that's an extension to this service that's currently planned for 2023—but at the moment, it allows SpaceX to provide internet services to places that generally don't have reliable, ground-based versions of the same; so rural areas, super-remote parks, cruise ships, RVs; anything that isn't currently well-served by ground-based fiberoptic cables, basically.

This service has had its ups and downs.

But for those currently under-served use-cases, people have generally been pretty happy with what SpaceX has been able to do, and the business is doing well enough that they expect to make more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025, which is six-times the revenue they expect to be making from their core, space-launch business that year.

So, a pretty profitable expansion on the main concept of a space company, if that estimate pans out.

Now, part of why Starlink was started in the first place was to help make that launch business make more sense, but part of it is intended to help SpaceX build-out a solar system-wide internet, expanding connectivity all the way to Mars; the colonization of which is considered to be a guiding goal for the rest of the company's efforts.

In the meantime, though, they've expanded into other riffs on their core business model, making versions of their transceiver for RVers and ship-owners, while also providing services for mobile phone companies, like T-Mobile, which announced back in August of 2022 that they'll be using Starlink to fill in gaps in their service map beginning in 2023.

They're also developing a more rugged, secure version of Starlink for the US military, and that's in the process of being tested by the various interested parties who may someday give it the go-ahead to be integrated with their other communication options.

At the tail-end of February 2022, just a few days after Ukraine was invaded by Russia, Musk announced that the Starlink network would be turned on in Ukraine, at the request of the Ukrainian government, to sub-in, basically, for internet infrastructure that the Russians had destroyed.

By the first week of April, more than 5,000 Starlink terminals, the ground-based transceivers, had been sent to Ukraine, and SpaceX covered the bill for some of those terminals and the monthly service fees on the connectivity they provided, while the United States Agency for International Development, and the French and Polish governments, covered the rest.

More than 20,000 Starlink terminals were in use across Ukraine by August, some provided by Starlink, some brought in by volunteers and international entities, and Ukrainian officials have said that this connectivity has been fundamental to some of their most successful maneuvers, while also allowing soldiers on the front lines to stay in touch with their families.

Musk has estimated that the cost of all the terminals and services they're providing to Ukraine, free of charge, currently adds up to something like $20 million per month.

And though Musk reportedly told the Pentagon that Starlink couldn't keep footing that kind of bill every month without financial assistance, pushback against his announcement that the company might stop supporting Ukrainian troops with these donations seems to have nudged Musk into backing down from that request.

It's unclear if the company will receive any kind of under-the-table kickback from some government or other agency for their efforts and donations, though there have been recent, mid-October reports that the Pentagon is considering funding the continued use of Starlink services in Ukraine via one of their many budgets.

But either way Musk seems to have read the writing on the wall, in terms of public sentiment on this, and has decided to keep—publicly at least—making these donations at this scale for the foreseeable future; though the size of their donations have also been called into question, as other entities seem to be paying for a sizable amount of the Starlink subscriptions being used in Ukraine, right now.

Now, possibly important additional context here is that Starlink services in Ukraine have reportedly, several times, sputtered out at important moments, including one major outage across the front lines at the end of September that Ukrainian forces have called "catastrophic."

Around that same time, Musk began to propose approaches to ending the war in Ukraine on terms that sounded like they were being voiced by Russian President Putin; some analysts have suggested that this is a common Putin ploy, to essentially flatter powerful people into believing they can be part of something big and historical, and then using them to communicate a message to the rest of the world that's in Russia's best interest, but which seems reasonable to some.

It may also be that Musk simply didn't realize how offensive his proposal that Ukraine give up a significant portion of its territory to Russia in the hopes that doing so would make Russia back down and never invade again; it's hard to say.

In any event, that drop in services at a horrible and deadly moment for the Ukrainian forces, paired with several days of Musk seeming to unthinkingly parrot Russian propaganda, sparked a conversation about whether Musk might be in Russia's pocket, might be working for Russia on the down-low, while only seeming to help Ukraine; there's been more than a little drama and public worry about all this. And though there's no factual backing for believing that Musk is in any way connected with Putin or Russia, beyond the connections many wealthy businesspeople have with world leaders, it has raised concerns that using Starlink for important military or espionage purposes, while Musk is involved, might not be such a great idea.

All that said, in late-September, another opportunity to show off Starlink's capabilities arose when the US Secretary of State gave Starlink a General License to provide digital communication services to Iranian citizens.

Iran is under severe sanctions by the US and other nations, ostensibly at least because of their refusal to stop surreptitiously creating the components required to build a nuclear weapon, and their ostensible funding of quite a few terrorist organizations around the world.

In practice, this license gave Starlink the go ahead to start beaming internet down to ground-based receivers in Iran, at a moment in which protests had recently been sparked by the death of a 22-year-old woman who died while in the custody of the so-called morality police for apparently not wearing her head scarf correctly.

These protests started small but got big, fast, and a huge swathe of the population has since gotten involved—and the protests are ongoing as of the day I'm recording this, about a month after they started.

Iran's government, as is typical for them, began to shut down the internet in order to prevent the spread of photos and videos of their security forces clamping down on these protests, brutally, and often with deadly force, and to keep the protestors from organizing using messaging apps and social networks.

The idea here, then, was to provide the Iranian people, who are being brutalized by their government, even more so than usual, with the communication tools required to connect with each other and organize better, but also to show the world what's happening, what their government is doing to them.

We don't yet know the extent to which this activation in Iran has been effective, as getting transceivers to the right people seems like quite the hurdle, in this case, but folks have asked Musk on Twitter if he might consider doing the same in other countries run by authoritarian regimes, like Cuba, and he responded, "OK," which seems like a generally positive sentiment in that direction—but again, the practical reality of trying to get the right hardware into the right hands so that these signals from space can be used might be insurmountable in some areas, even if the idea is interesting and possibly somewhat frightening to the folks running these authoritarian countries. And Musk's twitter-based commentary hasn't always led to real-world outcomes, so we'll see.

One more point worth making here is that Starlink isn't the only player in the internet-beamed-down-from-space industry.

OneWeb has a much smaller constellation of satellites and a far smaller operational area, but has been scheduled to finish their satellite deployments by the end of 2022—though that's been pushed back into 2023, due to the war in Ukraine, which has made booking flights on Russian rockets by western entities a legally dubious proposition.

Hughes Network Systems, which has long been the largest satellite internet provider in the US, and the first to provide legally defined broadband internet via satellite in 2017, still functions and dominates a lot of this market, though because its satellites are located a lot further out, away from Earth, there are latency issues with the service that make it more applicable for slower, steadier applications, and not-so-good for things like videoconferencing and playing online games.

Viasat and O3b also provide mostly somewhat sluggish services to people around the world, but again, their offerings are hampered by the nature of their constellation: fewer, larger satellites located much further from earth, which means pretty bad latency issues, and overall less reliable service to a more limited number of places.

There are two major planned networks that will likely be more similar to Starlink, in that they use a lot of smaller satellites and closer-to-earth orbits, rather than the fewer satellites further out models used by those other three, older networks, and these new ones should be arriving within the next few years.

The first is called Kuiper Systems, and it will include more than 3,200 low earth orbit satellites. It's owned by Amazon, so they have some money and talent to throw at this project, which doesn't hurt with this kind of enterprise.

And the other is a satellite constellation planned by the Chinese government, which also has a lot of talent and money, and which has been criticizing SpaceX, and the US government because of SpaceX, for the sheer number of satellites they've been lobbing into orbit, of late, saying it's been gumming up important orbits and dramatically increasing the risk of collisions, which is a complaint other entities have echoed—but it's unclear how they'll make their own constellations without adding to that problem.

So while previously the best technology had to offer in terms of avoiding internet shutdowns and censored services were tools like VPNs, which allow users to, in some cases, conceal who they are and where they are, and anonymous services like Telegram, we may soon see a future in which many devices, not just purpose-built terminals, can connect to internet services that're always being beamed down from the sky, whether the folks making the laws in a given area want it to be beaming into their territory or not.

This opens up all kinds of new issues, including how and whether these governments can counter these sorts of efforts, and what that might look like if they do—if they're able to jam on-the-ground receivers, for instance, or if they try to take out the satellite using kinetic weapons; basically, long-range missiles shot into low earth orbit to crash into a satellite and shatter it into bits, creating all sorts of new problems as a consequence.

This may also end up being a non-issue, if the costs associated with providing these services turns out to be too extreme.

Because of the asymmetric potential in providing protesting citizens with these sorts of tools against their government's wishes, though, there's a good chance the prices on this will actually go down sooner than would have otherwise been the case, had it remained purely a service for people on cruise ships and in RVs, because of the government and military pocketbooks that sort of potentiality will probably crack open.

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Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_(American_company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Network_Systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation

https://www.axios.com/2022/09/30/iran-protests-vpn-google-jigsaw-outline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1574467355752554496

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/15/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-funding

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33256378