[bjornasm]

Just in case why people are wondering why cutting of internet for an arctic island is a big deal.

What many might not know is that Svalbard is home to the northernmost satellite station in the world. It is just one of two stations that can communicate with polar orbiting satellites each day. ESA and NASA as well as other civilian organisations are present there, and the station communicates with well over a hundred satellites, and are pretty vital for much of the satellites that look back at us.

[Sanzig]

To be pedantic - most places on Earth can get a contact with a polar orbiting satellite at least once or twice per day, however the number of contacts per day increases the closer you get to the poles. Svalbard is far enough north that you get lots of contacts per day. I forget the exact number and I don't have STK open in front of me to simulate it, but from memory it's something like 15 or so contacts per day for a typical earth observation orbit. This gives you lots of data and relatively frequent contacts to maximize the freshness of the imagery.

There are tons of commercial observation satellite operators that use Svalbard for downlink (downlinks at Svalbard can be procured commercially through a company called KSAT which operates the station). Ukraine has been purchasing a lot of imagery from these companies, including both optical and radar imagery. If I had to hazard a guess at a possible motive, that'd be it.

[bjornasm]

Thx, that was a huge brain fart, I meant each revolution.

[bjornasm]

Correction: not one per day, one per revolution. Since the satellites go from north to south pole while the earth is spinning, the polar areas is the inly the pass each time.

[paganel]

Most probably Russia will claim sovereignty over all of the Svalbards after the next big war and redrawing of borders, Stalin was too circumspect in not scaring the Americans into WW3 the first time when they had the chance to do it.

All that because whoever controls the North Pole controls most of the Northern Hemisphere, it’s actually one of the very few “ways in” inside North America and control of the continental United States (there were a few US geopoliticians/geographers who first became aware of that in the early 1940s).

[neffy]

I for one welcome our new Polar Bear Overlords. (Hope the Russians don´t forget their rifles when they move in.)

[paganel]

I thought this forum still wanted to be on the serious side, so under that view look at the works of George T. Renner, in particular his World Map for the Air Age, published in 1942-1943. [1] [2]

As air-power started to be taken seriously with the advent of WW2 (some) geographers started realising that one of the shortest ways of getting from Europe to North America is via the North Pole, or close to it, anyway. Hence those maps I've linked to, which had the North Pole at their center, and that is because Renner thought that the control of the North Pole was similar to the control of the Northern Hemisphere. Related, a little bit later on ICMBs were meant to take the same route, give or take, hence why NORAD became a thing.

But, again, we can choose to take the "lol! lol! lol! The Russians and their shovels!" angle, which won't benefit anyone involved in this conversation, intellectually speaking.

Later edit: Additional resource, this study [3] titled: "The Hot Struggle Over the Cold Waters: The Strategic Position of the Arctic Region During and After the Cold War"

This paragraph there is a good start on how important were the views of people like Renner when it came to the Arctic, that is in the context of the US vs. the USSR/Russia (potential) confrontation:

> The first to focus his interests on the significance of the strategic position of the Arctic was George T. Renner, when in the 1940s, based on a map with the North Pole at the center, he estimated the opportunities and threats associated with this new perspective. However, the increase of the Arctic’simportance is inextricably linked with the development of technology which allowed greater exploration of the region. Shortly after the outbreak of the Cold War, in the rhetoric of the United States, the High North began to be identified as a “mighty” and “important” region.44 Hence, the geostrategic role of the Far North was fully revealed during of the Cold War, when it was possible to observe real military and political tensions on the polar waters and islands.

[1] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-renner-world-...

[2] archive.org link that should work, but doesn't: https://archive.org/details/dr_rand-mcnally-world-map-for-th...

[3] https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

[chiph]

This is why when the USS Nautilus became the first submarine to transit the arctic entirely underwater, traveling from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the North Pole, it was such an important event in the Cold War. It gave credibility to the submarine fleet becoming part of the nuclear triad, the use of nuclear power for propulsion and life support, and long distance navigation without any external references (can't use a compass up there!)

https://ussnautilus.org/1014-2/

[mgoetzke]

Time for a Starlink backup then

[onnimonni]

You can look at the https://satellitemap.space/ to see that starlink isn't (yet) too feasible in the northern/arctic areas. Even in the Nordic countries the connections are not that great.

[partomniscient]

Its the groundstation that needs backing up and the location is surrounded by the sea.

[ViewTrick1002]

Which Starlink solves utilizing the laser links between satellites.

[tedivm]

You're grossly underestimating the bandwidth needs of the site. You're not going to replace a cluster of fiber optic cables with Starlink.

[inemesitaffia]

10 Gbps in Ka and 100 in E band

[ViewTrick1002]

We're talking backup vs. primary. Of course the backup is not going to be as good.

[sandworm101]

>> We're talking backup vs. primary. Of course the backup is not going to be as good.

Then it isn't really a backup. A lower-bandwidth failover capacity is properly described as an alternative or degraded pathway. To be a proper "backup" a thing has to actually do the primary job at least temporarily.

[tedivm]

Starlink has an upload speed between 5 and 20 Mbps. The Svalbard cable is a 10Gbps link. It's still a major difference.

That said apparently they do have a satellite backup, just not through Starlink.

[sunbum]

That's not how satellites work.

[ViewTrick1002]

Starlink can act as a backup for the ground station utilizing the laser links.

[chtitux]

Maybe just use Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station.

Starlink Ground Station Network is global, spread in many different countries and look more resilient than a single one.

[amarant]

It's a good idea for future satellites, but upgrading existing satellites is probably not feasible.

And these polar orbit satellite typically live a lot longer than the relatively short lived starlink satellites, potentially opening you to a (perhaps unlikely?) scenario where starlink moves to new and incompatible hardware for inter-satellite communications, and your satellite is then made obsolete.

Vertical integration is not cheap, but it does have it's upsides.

[tedivm]

That would require replacing all the satellites with new ones capable of doing that, which doesn't seem feasible. Starlink also doesn't have great coverage of the polar regions.

[cbeach]

Starlink's laser system is already up and running. Back in January it was delivering over 42 petabytes per day:

https://uk.pcmag.com/networking/150673/starlinks-laser-syste...

“We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,” SpaceX engineer Travis Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window.”

[red-iron-pine]

definitely not. volumes just aren't there and Elon Musk is openly in bed with dubious characters.