Inside Starshield, SpaceX's Secretive Satellite Network for the US Military

Starlink, so the commercial element, is just the number of satellites. I mean, over 10,000 in orbit. I mean, it's an extraordinary number. So that's the kind of first thing I've always, when I think about this, I've always got to say to myself, actually, you're talking about orders of magnitude larger numbers of satellites up there. In terms of what the difference is, Starshield is really the military governmental element, if you like, which kind of almost sits on top of Starlink, but not quite because there are some capabilities within StarShield that you can't get with Starlink. Starlink's commercial. Well, in a way, if you kind of think about the whole... Starlink is fundamentally infrastructure. It's a communications network which allows voice and imagery to be moved around. Starshield sits on top of that does the same but at a higher level of security so if you were concerned about um you know vulnerability jamming hacking uh you would you would look to a higher level of security a higher level encryption and that's fundamentally what you get in Starshield a buzz phrase but you know it's been around again for a long situational awareness knowing what's going on in your battle space, on the battlefield. And Starlink and Starshield provide that capability. So they allow you to basically network together a whole range of sensors, be they on uninhabited aerial vehicles, drones, or different platforms. and it provides a communications infrastructure as well right across the board so that you can get a sense of where your own forces are, what they are doing more importantly, obviously, what the opponent is doing. And pretty much in real time, what the kind of Starlink, Starshield of this world give you is the ability to communicate with those systems of the uninhabited aerial vehicles basically either to command them or to see the imagery that they're actually looking at maybe 100, 150 kilometres away. So a lot of these UAVs will have electro-optical sensors so you can see on your terminal the image that has been relayed back to you from the UAV and then you can command it to do things or you can build an intelligence and reconnaissance picture um not just from one UAV but from a whole you know range of them so you're building up a picture of the battlefield i think they're extraordinarily important i think you can see that in the sense of how concerned uh nations are becoming about what gets called counter space capabilities so the vulnerabilities of your satellite network and what you're doing to protect that um obviously the U.S. recently said in very general terms it had capabilities to defend its satellites in orbit, and I think that merely reflects how reliant the major military powers are becoming, if in fact they already are, in terms of their reliance on space infrastructure. Well you would lose your comms, you lose your communications, you'd have to find other ways of doing it, there obviously are, um but that would be if you you know and obviously Ukraine has has built a whole approach around access to this kind of technology and this these kinds of systems so that would that would be a negative impact obviously uh in terms of UAV operations again the same kind of thing um so you you're basically looking at your kind of command control intelligence surveillance reconnaissance networks being significantly degraded you know i think there is a kind of renewed concern and interest in what sometimes gets called sovereign capability so actually having a national capability in this area um as soon as you rely on an external provider potentially commercial provider then obviously there's an inherent risk that they make a they may make a decision, or their government may make a decision for them, which is not necessarily in your favor. And these jumps, like you would be, so if you have time after the war, you're very welcome. I invite you. That sounds good. Well, I look forward to visiting once the things are done. The concern of the issue with Starlink, Starshield and Ukraine kind of speaks to that, speaks to the kind of changing nature of the relationship. In the same sense that traditionally military satellite communications was limited to a few providers with a handful of satellites, you now have a very large commercial company which is offering that kind of capability, if not quite globally, then very broadly. But if you're a customer, you are kind of dependent on that availability being there. US decision-making processes is opaque. It's difficult to see what was actually happening. Obviously, there have been some recent tensions between Washington and Kyiv. Whether the Starlink-Starshield situation reflected that is, I think, an interesting thing to speculate about. It does appear that, at least for the moment, it may have been resolved, but it's an area that I'm sure Kiev will be very keen to see that That channel, if you like, is kept open, that whole communications architecture.