This South African turned American citizen is the richest person in the world – good on him as he has had the ideas that, turned into products, that people wish to buy.
From Tesla cars to home energy (solar energy and home batteries) to industrial batteries to SpaceX for private-sector space launch to StarLink (satellite). It’s always a piggyback for him – establish a base with electric cars, extend the car battery capability to serve homes and utility storage to fund SpaceX, and now use SpaceX to service his Starlink space communication biz (offers Internet access to those that don’t have linkages due to being beyond land connections.
It will also aid his pushing out into space by being a “worldwide space-based “terrestrial ground station” will help with his deep space mission communications to the moon and beyond. Always layering one product set on top of another.
But it is the Internet comms that have come to the fore right now. Most satellites require ground reception stations and if a bird is out of range of one, it may as well not even exist for immediate purposes. However, Musk announced that if a ground station went offline, his latest versions can transmit to other Starlink sats, and then to others, and finally to those that can then downlink.
And sometimes, a ground station is going to be deliberately disabled and taken out of service. True, too, a single bird by jamming the signal. But when you have dozens of birds over a single area, there’s no way to “stop the signal” as Russia is now finding out. One of the first things that are done in war is to eliminate your opponents’ communications capability. But what happens when you can’t – and in the case of Starlink, because of redundancies to the max? Reformatted, emphasis mine:
Starlink Activated Over Ukraine, Gives Citizen-Defenders Vital Tool in Fight Against Russia
As freedom-loving citizens do what they can for the people of hard-pressed Ukraine, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has answered a call from Ukraine for help that only he could provide. On Sunday, Musk announced that SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband service was active in Ukraine where the Russian invasion was vastly disrupting internet access, according to Fox Business.
On Saturday, Mykhailo Fedorov, the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, begged Musk for help.
“[W]hile you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand,” Fedorov tweeted.
“Starlink service is now active in Ukraine,” Musk tweeted in response. “More terminals en route.”
Like Dish and others, folks need devices on the ground. Seeing that Ukraine is all but surrounded by NATO countries, I’m betting that those user terminals will get smuggled across the various borders in short order as Fox is reporting “Internet service has been disrupted in several cities throughout Ukraine, including Kyiv, Mariupol, and Kharkiv, and Kherson, according to internet monitor NetBlocks. ”
In the comments on the Fox post, people reported watching Musk’s satellites being moved into position:
- “It is startling if you haven’t seen it or were not expecting to see a string of 60 or so satellites streaming across the nighttime sky from horizon to horizon, evenly spaced and moving in sync.”
- “Yes I saw and I was frozen sitting outside at night on my patio—-they kept coming like stars on a conveyor belt”
And when you have over 2,000 in low orbit, what’s 60 moved over an area that is definitely a “disaster” zone.
This IS going to give a lot of countries pause and consider what Musk can do basically on a whim. How do you jam all those satellites? How do you now stop those signals from all over a country? Right now, Russia is trying hard to occupy the information war and was posing that it was easily winning.
Then, the Ukrainians started posting what they had on the ground with the funniest one being this:
Multiple videos on social media of Russian military out of fuel, food and stuck on highways pic.twitter.com/UTKLmTJf38
— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) February 26, 2022
Old-style war was kinetic in nature with disinformation on the side (think Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw in WWII) supporting that kinetic action. Now, information has become almost as, if not more, important than war actions (differently, to be sure). With the ability of the Ukrainians to get their messages out it’s clear that Putin is losing.
His columns have stalled out, specialized troops have either not taken their objectives or been driven from them (like the airport just outside of Kyiv), and his version of the US’s “100-hour war” in defeating Saddam Hussain is in shambles. No gas, no food, and no bullets. He’s having to call up reserves to get more material into Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russians are hearing these reports – and the one about the mobile crematoriums that are following behind the troops – can’t have the pics of full body bags showing up on the Internet.
