Elon Musk's satellites for the war in Ukraine

 

By Manlio Dinucci (CNGNN – Associazione per un Mondo senza Guerre, Italy)

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world whose wealth nearly doubled in the two pandemic years, offered $44 billion to buy Twitter, which he says would become "the platform for free speech across the country world". Elon Musk owns SpaceX, an aerospace company based in California.

SpaceX makes rockets and satellites to build Starlink, a broadband Internet system that once is completed will cover the entire world. SpaceX has so far put 2,500 satellites into orbit with rockets carrying 50 satellites at a time and plans to place 42,000 Starlink satellites in low orbit occupying 80% of this space.

 

Starlink was presented as a commercial satellite system but has fundamental military applications. In fact, satellites in low orbit transmit signals at a much higher speed than those in geosynchronous orbit around the equator. The US Army and Air Force fund and test Starlink to use its military capabilities. For example, last March, the US Air Force reported that conventional and nuclear dual-capacity F-35A fighters had carried out data transmission using Starlink satellites at speed 30 times faster than traditional connections.

SpaceX's Starlink satellites are already being used by the Ukrainian military to guide drones, artillery shells, and missiles into Russian positions. This is confirmed by General James Dickinson, head of the US Space Command, who declared to the Senate that "Elon Musk's Starlink demonstrates in Ukraine what the mega-constellations of satellites can do". 

Elon Musk's SpaceX is part of the group of ten largest commercial satellite operators collaborating with US Space Command at the Vandenberg military Space Force base in California.