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Starlink and Ukraine War discussion

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The ground stations are in nearby countries.

Thank you for that link. It appears - from my limited understanding - North & West of Ukraine is served by a station in Warsaw, and south Ukraine is perhaps covered by the one in northern Turkey and that leaves a hole in central Ukraine.

What is the purpose of these ground stations? they serve to bounce off the signals between satellites?
 
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What is the purpose of these ground stations? they serve to bounce off the signals between satellites?
They connect Starlink to the rest of the Internet. A Starlink satellite with no laser interlink will be a single hop between an end user with a dish and a ground station. Satellites with laser interlinks can send traffic along a satellite chain to find a better (less congested, faster) ground station. Also, over long distances, the laser-based path will (probably) be faster than a ground-based fiber path, due to the increased speed of light in a vacuum and possibly shorter overall length.
 
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The ground stations are in nearby countries.

Thanks for this link. Very interesting map.
It looks like Ukraine is covered by gateways in Poland and Lithuania. Looking at the satellites now, there are a few over Ukraine and these are connected to these two gateways so most of the country should have good coverage with existing gateways. The Turkey gateway covers the south of the country.
 
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Complete speculation here.

I think it is not impossible that Putin starts shooting down Satrlink satellites in response to this.

Sheer speculation - let's not go down a big rabbit hole about this.
Considering that there are over 2000 Starlink satellites in orbit, it would be difficult to take many out of service.
Distributed systems are robust.
 
Considering that there are over 2000 Starlink satellites in orbit, it would be difficult to take many out of service.
Distributed systems are robust.

Sort of.

As noted a while back, Kessler is the vulnerability with megaconstellations, and that vulnerability increases as the size of the constellation goes up (and as the altitude comes down). At the massive quantity of Starlink It doesn't take a lot of kinetic impacts to all but nullify the use of an orbital shell--and if the satellites move to a different altitude to avoid the debris clouds the aggressor just does a rinse-and-repeat attack.

The important factor here is that the aggressor doesn't actually need Kessler to take out a material number of satellites to have a significant impact on service. One of the major differentiators for Starlink is that the conops/COLAs are highly automated--that's what actually enables them to fly so many satellites in close proximity versus old school human-in-the-loop satellite operations. The downside to that implementation is that there are TONS of automated maneuvers happening every day to ensure the satellites don't run into each other (or other objects crossing their orbits).

When a satellite is performing one of these maneuvers it, at best, provides reduced service. This is partially a function of available power (electric propulsion requires hundreds of watts) and partially a function of pointing (the satellite has to orient the thrust vector for the COLA). That's no biggie when there are a gazillion satellites because there's plenty of other satellites to pick up the slack of the relatively few satellites that are COLAing at any one time. In the Kessler scenario though, one could easily imagine orders of magnitude more COLAs in the constellation, to the point where--assuming processing power and predictive algorithms can keep up--a material number of satellites are constantly dodging debris rather than providing service. So basically an aggressor just needs to keep the rate of attacks out ahead of the rate at which the constellation can maintain a useful number of in-service satellites.


The OTHER big thing with satellite service is that the user terminals (regardless if for a LEO constellation or a GEO sat) are pretty obvious beacons. They operate in a strictly defined frequency range and a predictable power level. An aggressor could quite easily and quickly pinpoint [active] terminals with a pretty standard airborne platform and then execute strikes on those terminals. Obviously that's an extreme scenario that we all hope doesn't come to fruition ever, let alone in this conflict, but imagine if Vlad authorized--and advertised--airstrikes specifically on Starlink terminals... He'd just need to take out a handful of them before most everyone else shut theirs down.
 
Sort of.

As noted a while back, Kessler is the vulnerability with megaconstellations, and that vulnerability increases as the size of the constellation goes up (and as the altitude comes down). At the massive quantity of Starlink It doesn't take a lot of kinetic impacts to all but nullify the use of an orbital shell--and if the satellites move to a different altitude to avoid the debris clouds the aggressor just does a rinse-and-repeat attack.

The important factor here is that the aggressor doesn't actually need Kessler to take out a material number of satellites to have a significant impact on service. One of the major differentiators for Starlink is that the conops/COLAs are highly automated--that's what actually enables them to fly so many satellites in close proximity versus old school human-in-the-loop satellite operations. The downside to that implementation is that there are TONS of automated maneuvers happening every day to ensure the satellites don't run into each other (or other objects crossing their orbits).

When a satellite is performing one of these maneuvers it, at best, provides reduced service. This is partially a function of available power (electric propulsion requires hundreds of watts) and partially a function of pointing (the satellite has to orient the thrust vector for the COLA). That's no biggie when there are a gazillion satellites because there's plenty of other satellites to pick up the slack of the relatively few satellites that are COLAing at any one time. In the Kessler scenario though, one could easily imagine orders of magnitude more COLAs in the constellation, to the point where--assuming processing power and predictive algorithms can keep up--a material number of satellites are constantly dodging debris rather than providing service. So basically an aggressor just needs to keep the rate of attacks out ahead of the rate at which the constellation can maintain a useful number of in-service satellites.


The OTHER big thing with satellite service is that the user terminals (regardless if for a LEO constellation or a GEO sat) are pretty obvious beacons. They operate in a strictly defined frequency range and a predictable power level. An aggressor could quite easily and quickly pinpoint [active] terminals with a pretty standard airborne platform and then execute strikes on those terminals. Obviously that's an extreme scenario that we all hope doesn't come to fruition ever, let alone in this conflict, but imagine if Vlad authorized--and advertised--airstrikes specifically on Starlink terminals... He'd just need to take out a handful of them before most everyone else shut theirs down.
Do you have any idea of how much space there is in space? Do you know how hard it would be to hit/block even a single satellite?
Starlink was functional with less than 1000 satellites. Now it's over 2000. How are you going to take out a few thousand satellites?
User terminals have a low power highly focused signal. Very difficult to find even if right above it and even then, it's pointed at the moving satellite, not straight up so even if you do find the signal, finding the terminal will be nearly impossible since it will be within a very wide cone.
 
Sort of.

As noted a while back, Kessler is the vulnerability with megaconstellations, and that vulnerability increases as the size of the constellation goes up (and as the altitude comes down). At the massive quantity of Starlink It doesn't take a lot of kinetic impacts to all but nullify the use of an orbital shell--and if the satellites move to a different altitude to avoid the debris clouds the aggressor just does a rinse-and-repeat attack.

The important factor here is that the aggressor doesn't actually need Kessler to take out a material number of satellites to have a significant impact on service. One of the major differentiators for Starlink is that the conops/COLAs are highly automated--that's what actually enables them to fly so many satellites in close proximity versus old school human-in-the-loop satellite operations. The downside to that implementation is that there are TONS of automated maneuvers happening every day to ensure the satellites don't run into each other (or other objects crossing their orbits).

When a satellite is performing one of these maneuvers it, at best, provides reduced service. This is partially a function of available power (electric propulsion requires hundreds of watts) and partially a function of pointing (the satellite has to orient the thrust vector for the COLA). That's no biggie when there are a gazillion satellites because there's plenty of other satellites to pick up the slack of the relatively few satellites that are COLAing at any one time. In the Kessler scenario though, one could easily imagine orders of magnitude more COLAs in the constellation, to the point where--assuming processing power and predictive algorithms can keep up--a material number of satellites are constantly dodging debris rather than providing service. So basically an aggressor just needs to keep the rate of attacks out ahead of the rate at which the constellation can maintain a useful number of in-service satellites.


The OTHER big thing with satellite service is that the user terminals (regardless if for a LEO constellation or a GEO sat) are pretty obvious beacons. They operate in a strictly defined frequency range and a predictable power level. An aggressor could quite easily and quickly pinpoint [active] terminals with a pretty standard airborne platform and then execute strikes on those terminals. Obviously that's an extreme scenario that we all hope doesn't come to fruition ever, let alone in this conflict, but imagine if Vlad authorized--and advertised--airstrikes specifically on Starlink terminals... He'd just need to take out a handful of them before most everyone else shut theirs down.
Here's a more detailed description of how difficult it would be to find the terminals:

don't the dishes provide screaming bright targets for the Russians?
No. They are small and focus their radio beacon straight up at the satellites. Hard to find visually and hard to locate the radios since low power and focused in a narrow beam straight up
Steered at the particular (moving) satellite they're talking at, actually. Further, they're phased array antennas, not horn-and-parabola dishes which have a lot of sideways leakage.
They're low power and very broad band, with a signal "sounds almost like thermal noise" if you're not listening for exactly the small bits with the timing patterns synchronize the decoding of the rest.
They're extremely directional: "Dishy" isn't a dish. It's a flat disk of printed circuit, paved with a phased-array beam-former antenna - a sea of hundreds of little antennas and their scattering of tiny driving chips. When transmitting they each run at a particular phase and amplitude with respect to the others, with the relative phases of the little antennas adjusted occasionally to change the aim. This add up in one particular direcion and cancels out in others, throwing pretty much all the energy in some direction as a tight beam to some small patch of sky, only a very little leaking in unintended directions. It doesn't have the strong sidewise energy leakage of a horn-and-parabola arrangement. (It does the complimentary trick in reverse, several times in parallel, to "listen" to several other (also moving) patches of sky where it expects to "hear" particular satellites.)
So if you're not almost directly between it and the particular satellite it's beaming at, the signal is far weaker still. Elsewhere, even the best receiver looking exactly for its timing pilot would have a tough, maybe an impossible, job even determining something was out there.
 
Do you have any idea of how much space there is in space?

Yes. Fun fact: nobody uses hundeds of km's of LEO altitude anymore because of the kosmos-iridium collision.

Do you know how hard it would be to hit/block even a single satellite?

Yes. Fun fact, kinetic weapons are a thing and Russia performed an ASAT test just a few months ago. I'm sure the timing of that ASAT relative to this invasion is totally coincidental though. ;)

Other fun fact: Blocking or otherwise decommissioning a single a satellite is very easy. It as easy as a space rendezvous, which is something that's been done since the 60's. It hasn't been done in anger, as its a crazy act of aggression. The Russians have maneuvered sats close to US assets on orbit though...

How are you going to take out a few thousand satellites?

Please re-read. ;)

User terminals have a low power highly focused signal. Very difficult to find even if right above it and even then, it's pointed at the moving satellite, not straight up so even if you do find the signal, finding the terminal will be nearly impossible since it will be within a very wide cone.

Yes, I acknowledge that the aspiration with a phased array is that the hyper narrow beams are difficult to track.