Elon Musk announced on March 5 that SpaceX will be “reprioritized to cyber defence & overcoming signal jamming” at the price of “slight delays” in Starship and Starlink V2, citing Starlink jamming “near conflict regions.”
Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, said the business was transferring resources in response to terminal jamming, probably in Ukraine, in a series of nocturnal tweets. He said that a recent update to the Starlink software “bypasses the jamming,” but he didn’t clarify.
The steps came a week after Musk agreed to provide Starlink service in Ukraine in response to a request from Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s minister of digital transformation, to secure access if Russia cut down other lines of communication. On February 26, Musk said that Starlink service had been activated in Ukraine, and two days later, a first shipment of at least a dozen Starlink terminals arrived in the nation.
Neither SpaceX nor Ukrainian officials have revealed how many Starlink stations are now operational in the nation. Other software updates made by SpaceX to lower the terminal’s power consumption, allowing it to be charged by a cigarette lighter in a car, and to permit roaming on moving vehicles, Musk tweeted on March 3.
Musk claimed that Starlink “is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution.”
However, since the invasion began on Feb. 24, Viasat’s KA-SAT broadband geostationary satellite, which delivers service to Ukraine and other regions of Europe, has experienced service outages, which the firm has blamed on a “cyber incident.”
Starlink V2 is the service’s second iteration, with satellites designed to be launched by Starship vehicles. Few specifics about the capabilities of those satellites have been given by SpaceX. SpaceX has been developing Starship vehicles at its Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas, but it won’t be able to launch them into orbit until it has a permit from the Federal Aviation Administration. That permit, in turn, is contingent on the FAA completing an environmental review by March 28, a deadline that has already passed.
Other SpaceX endeavours, such as the launch of additional current-generation Starlink satellites, look unaffected by the resource transfer. The launch of 47 Starlink satellites by SpaceX from the Kennedy Space Center on March 3 was the third in the last two weeks. Another Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is planned on March 8 at the earliest.
Starlink would not prohibit Russian news sites from its network “unless at gunpoint,” Musk added. Russian state-controlled channels, such as Russia Today and Sputnik, have been barred from operating in European Union countries. Internet service providers, as well as cable and satellite television businesses, are all subject to the prohibition.
