n February 2022, as Russian tanks rumbled into Ukraine, a cyber-attack took down the satellite system run by Viasat that was providing high-speed communications for Ukrainian military forces, rendering them instantly blind, deaf and dumb. With his forces knocked offline, the Ukrainian digital minister sent a plea to an American billionaire, one Elon Musk, for help. Within hours, Musk responded that hisPause for context update.
, an innovative firm that has found a way of building reusable heavy rockets that can launch cargo into Earth orbit, which is a very big deal, and probably why Nasa has become one of its regular customers. In 2019, SpaceX started launching smallish – “sofa-sized”, according to the– communications satellites into low-Earth orbit with the aim of eventually providing a global mobile phone system called Starlink.
The service is available in the UK, by the way. So if you live in a remote part of the Highlands and have given up hope of ever getting a terrestrial broadband connection from BT, Musk could come to your aid. The necessary terminal costs £499 and you can get 100Mbps download speeds with low latency for £75 a month. Or so the website says.
At the moment, there are something like 42,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine – in use by the country’s armed forces, hospitals, businesses and aid organisations. The service has clearly been vital to the war effort. It has given Ukrainian forces a major advantage over their adversary – sometimes reducing the time from finding an artillery target to hitting it from 20 minutes to two. “Without Starlink, we cannot fly, we cannot communicate,” one Ukrainian commander told the.
I’m sure it is, but complacency would be unwise, for there is one unknown variable in this fraught equation: Elon Musk, who is famously erratic, volatile and occasionally incomprehensible. He’s in total control of the Starlink service and reportedly has used that power to determine where and how Ukrainian forces can use it.