[Terry_Roll]

This is why SpaceX's StarLink will be interesting because I cant see how some court bailiff can enforce actions on satellites, and what one country bans, another will disagree with.

I can see Govt's in particular NSA, GCHQ, aka 5 eyes, 7 eyes etc losing alot of control over the internet in the foreseeable future.

[er4hn]

Starlink satalites know where they are serving, geographically. Wouldn't they just comply with local laws or risk having their ability to do business in that region disrupted?

[politician]

Countries require satellite operators to obtain licenses “to land signals” in their territory. The laws treat incident EM radiation as a landing as insane as that sounds.

[mr_toad]

Starlink in its current form needs local base stations to operate efficiently. So as a practical matter they need local licenses.

[Terry_Roll]

Which sounds great in practice, but do you know why the military uses those giant golf ball radomes? Its to hide where a satellite is pointing and thus where a satellite is in space. [1]

So another way to find out where a satellite is pointing would be to detect the transmissions its receiving or "landing" right?

So then the military wouldnt need these radomes as anyone near by could detect the overlapping footprint of the signal hitting the ground, unless its no more accurate than using something we can find in mediaportal to work out signal strength and quality. [1]

So then the ground could detect where the satellite is, which renders the use of the radomes somewhat unnecessary.

And then there is the fact Space has its own jurisdiction.

Now I do know HP were working as a Mil contractor in the 90's developing line of sight laser communication for the battlefield namely because it used the property of light to highlight eavesdropping, whether that has developed enough to be an uplink to satellites I dont know, but that is a lot harder to detect for obvious reasons and then the law would seem to be rather ineffective if light is being used to land signals sometime in the future. Anyway off topic so no more from me on this deviation.

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2016/Sep/16/2001635620/-1/-1/0/160... [2] https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/S...

[SkittyDog]

This is all false. The choice of whether to use spheroid radomes has ZERO connection whatsoever to do with concealing satellite locations. The parent comment is complete nonsense.

Antenna operators build radomes because they provide resistance to weather and other sources of environmental damage (birds are a big one). The spheroid/polyhedron "golf ball" shape is mostly used on large antennas because it's a structurally strong shape for the weight. It's also volume efficient for circular & spherical antennas, and handles rotating elements well.

Also, it's impossible to hide a satellite in space. Every nation with a space program tracks every orbiting object that's even remotely big enough to be a functional artificial satellite. It's mostly radar, but also visible light, IR, and UV cameras. There are no "stealth" satellites, mostly because you can't hide a launch... And once you know about the existence of a satellite, it's trivial to track it indefinitely. Civilian satellite spotters even do this with military satellites.

The only important thing you can keep somewhat secret about an orbiting satellite is it's specific capabilities. We don't know exactly what kind of telescopes or radar are deployed on Russian spy satellites, and they don't know the exact details of American equipment... But it's not even that hard for ground observers to guess at a satellite's likely mission and general capabilities, based on its orbit, visible structure, etc.

The parent comment's terminology is kinda strange, but that might just be a non-native English speaker... I'm more focused on the fact that their two "endnotes" in the parent post are just images, they don't actually cite any useful information.

[xoa]

A few small corrections:

>Also, it's impossible to hide a satellite in space. Every nation with a space program tracks every orbiting object that's even remotely big enough to be a functional artificial satellite. There are no "stealth" satellites, mostly because you can't hide a launch...

This isn't entirely true. First, satellites absolutely and do maneuver after launch, so they are not limited purely by the orbit they launch into. That is of course limited by how much propellant they carry onboard, but it is done (and for spy sats particularly). Second and more generally, for any object in space it's impossible to have persistent [0] omnidirectional stealth across all bands (due to thermodynamics). However, it's very much possible to have single band stealth (a shape that is radar stealth for example) as well as unidirectional multiband stealth, and because space is so big often that may be enough for a given scenario. For spy satellites in HEO they may as well be presenting a single side all the time to any Earth-based observers, and while some nations could react to that by launching tracking sats even farther the vast majority of actors (anyone on the level of ground-based amateur astronomers for sure) lack that capability. Transmission out can use the same idea, in space P2P laser links are generally invisible out of path, so a stealth sat could stealthily have comms to a non-stealth relay even further out.

As a practical matter right now it seems extremely doubtful any serious such systems are in place due to the huge hit on mission-effective mass which gets worse at distance, though it wouldn't be surprising if there have been some experiments at least. But with launch systems like Starship and enormously more mass to throw at problems, we may well see a certain number of much more serious stealth spy platforms eventually.

----

0: In principle one could achieve perfect EM stealth temporarily by carrying onboard empty volume, a heat and a cold source (like a whole lot of liquid helium/nitrogen) then running as a closed system performing thermodynamic work averaging those out. Could run for some fixed period of time until the useful differential was exhausted and only be observable by interaction with mass in space or gravity. But who knows if that'll ever actually get utilized, since the unidirectional concept can be extended by an advanced space faring organization too. One can keep going farther and farther away from a target and compensate with a larger aperture with enough space capacity. If we imagine some aliens or something with an Earth observing stealth platform out in the Oort cloud say, it could be a kilometer across and very hot on the extrasolar facing side yet still damn near impossible for us to notice. Or of course someone could hide in the thermal noise of other sources. Interesting to speculate about from a hard scifi perspective anyway.

[SkittyDog]

> This isn't entirely true.

Yes, my original statement is entirely true. You're offering a poorly sketched basket of theoretical ideas, none of which change the reality that no nation has EVER attempted to add low-observability features to it's military satellites... Mostly because none of the ideas you sketched would actually work, in practice, to effectively hide a functional satellite.

Talking about manuvering propellant is completely beside the point... The US, Russia, and China are all perfectly capable of tracking manuverable spacecraft and satellites, and we all do so 24/7/365.

Think about this, for a minute... Ever since the deployment of nuclear-capable ICBMs (~1961), space has been THE primary delivery avenue for the single biggest existential threat (thermonuclear war) to the most paranoid and technologically advanced nations on earth. Space is where you get nuked from! We have all invested MASSIVE resources into making sure we can detect and track literally anything in space, because it is the single most important battlefield in human history.

If effective low-observability spacecraft were a real thing, don't you think that at some point in the last 60 years, one of these nations would have deployed such a weapon... or addressed the concept in an arms control treaty... Or even discussed it publicly?

If you find some credible examples of anybody discussing low-observability ICBMs, I'd gladly walk this back. But I'm pretty confident that you're not going to be able to.

[Eelongate]

> Which sounds great in practice, but do you know why the military uses those giant golf ball radomes? Its to hide where a satellite is pointing and thus where a satellite is in space. [1]

I'm unconvinced of that. Classified satellites are routinely tracked and sometimes even photographed by amateur astronomers; surely the peer competitors of governments can do better. I suspect these domes are primarily intended to conceal which satellite is being talked to.

[ok_dad]

It's actually because the antennas need protection from various things like birds and weather, or the antenna itself is classified. Most of those giant radomes are for active or passive radar rather than satellite connections while the satellite antennas are much smaller.

[Eelongate]

I think military dishes aren't necessarily pointed at friendly satellites. They might be eavesdropping on foreign satellites and the domes might serve to conceal which from prying eyes. I suspect large dishes may have utility in such a role, since they might be listening to low power side-band emissions from those satellites (e.g. Van Eck phreaking.)

Either way though, I don't think radomes are meant to conceal the position of the satellites themselves.

[oneplane]

That is exactly how it currently works, including pre-starlink satellite internet. There was an example about starlink pre-sales in India happening while they don't have a license to operate there yet and therefore can't deliver even if it was operational.

[stephen_g]

I think India has pretty strong bans over (at least foreign) satellite access. I worked at a place that made satellite equipment for various networks, including Inmarsat Global Xpress (GX). We'd sometimes get calls from customers when they were heading to ports in India because their internet would just stop working a few km off the coast.

It was one of the only places in the service area (most of the world, minus near the poles) that I know of that Inmarsat blocked out service.

(There was a way to override the GPS on the terminal to make it report to the network that you were somewhere else, but we tried not to tell customers about that - or Inmarsat obviously!)

[Terry_Roll]

You mean this? https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/elon-musk-starlink-int... "Govt Asks Indians Not To Subscribe To Elon Musk-owned Internet Service Starlink"

StarLink is not licenced for use in India yet, but do you think the US mil or any other Nato mil will want some control over military coup's like when the military rolled into (Burma) Myanmar earlier this year and the internet was shut down? Not the only country to shutdown the internet or censor it when thinking about the Great Firewall of China either. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55901774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Myanmar#Re-censors...

[smoldesu]

Presumably, but that hasn't worked out so well in countries like India. Adding insult to injury (or potentially comedy), the Indian government doesn't have an easy way to hunt down the existing Starlink users, so they're merely asking citizens not to buy them until they can strongarm Starlink into becoming a registered internet provider in India.

[GekkePrutser]

Strange. Currently starlink does not have sat to sat meshing yet. That means that the ground segment must be in view of the same sat while serving. India is pretty big. So they could just ban SpaceX from operating ground stations and that should stop them. Except in the border areas where they could be painted by ground stations from neighbouring countries.

But I'm not sure how big the cells are. It could be that they are as big as to cover most of India? Doubt it though.

But yeah it would be great if we had a truly independent internet provider for an affordable price.

[ummonk]

What are you talking about? Starlink isn’t operating in India yet - why would the government need to hunt down anyone?

And if Starlink did start broadcasting in Indian airwaves without a permit (not really possible since they’d need a ground station but assume they place some ground stations around India’s borders), it would be a good opportunity for India to test its anti satellite weaponry.

[smoldesu]

> What are you talking about? Starlink isn’t operating in India yet - why would the government need to hunt down anyone?

> Reuters states that since Starlink officially registered its business in India on November 1st, it has already seen over 5,000 preorders in the country [0]

That's from The Verge's article a few days ago.

> And if Starlink did start broadcasting in Indian airwaves without a permit (not really possible since they’d need a ground station but assume they place some ground stations around India’s borders)

They don't need to. It could just as easily operate from across the border, the ground station I'm connected to is in Canada even though I live in the United States.

> it would be a good opportunity for India to test its anti satellite weaponry.

Maybe if they had a geostationary satellite, sure. Starlink is a LEO constellation though, so if they took down a satellite this weekend, SpaceX would launch 60 more by next Saturday (and service wouldn't be interrupted since there's considerable redundancy built into the system). Unless India intends to take out a few hundred satellites and be responsible for potentially catastrophic space debris, I think it wouldn't be a good opportunity for them to test their anti-satellite weaponry.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/27/22804830/starlink-india-...

[Xylakant]

How can starlink operate without a ground station in India? Every receiver needs to act as a ground station or you cannot send traffic. If the receivers are unlicensed, running one would be a legal risk.

[ummonk]

They’re taking preorders not sending out receivers and providing internet service.

As to the economics of anti-satellite warfare, you only have to destroy a small number of satellites to create a gap in coverage that will periodically sweep across the whole globe.

[14]

I believe it has registered its business in India but has yet to receive licensing. So taking preorders does not mean they sent those people any equipment just that they are taking orders so when allowed to they can ship equipment to those people.

[MertsA]

They've also already received flak from the Indian government over taking preorders before they're licensed to provide service.

[14]

As mentioned it is under US laws and treaties so not likely going to happen. But possible some other county with less care will one day set up satellite internet and not care. Though I doubt countries like China would sit quietly if their citizens could suddenly access unrestricted internet and would probably take out said satellites. I dream of the day there is unregulated internet with not firewalls or stopping anything.

[RobLach]

Everything lifted into space by a US entity, including StarLink satellites, are under the jurisdiction of the FAA with stringent licensing (or permitting, depending on the payload) procedures and restrictions.

SpaceX is a US entity and will be forever. SpaceX intellectual property cannot even legally be transferred to an entity not approved by the Department of Defense.

[brutal_chaos_]

Forever? For now. Laws will be changed (if they need to be) and Musk or the next Musk will move HQ to a more favorable country because profits.

[OneTimePetes]

Musk has the capability to transport a tungsten godrod into orbit. He is by now as invincible as North Koreas dictator.

Same goes for Bezos, emperors from rods grace.

Urbi at orbi-tal bombardment threat. Government will play nice with a smiling face, cause everyone is happy.

[detaro]

"god rods" are pretty much science fiction. They're not all that practical weapons, and even launching even a single one without the government noticing is rather unlikely. And would at the same time be not that scary.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Imagine one made out of some scrap depleted uranium. Whee!1!!