Introduction
The title of this article is a (bad) reference to a translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”.
An article in The Maritime Executive reminded me that China has been actively seeking to research ways of blocking Starlink, in particular, and other LEO satellite arrays from being used for drone guidance. A solution was proffered in 2022 from the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications Technology and the Beijing Institute of Radiation and Measurement Technology, set out in an article for Modern Defence Technology entitled “The Development Status of Starlink and Its Countermeasures.” Their solution was many high-flying drones at 18,000m jamming the receiver terminals. However, there are a considerable number of issues with this approach.
Do As You Would Be Done By
China is currently growing its own LEO satellite constellations, namely the state-backed Guowang constellation, the commercial Qianfan constellation (also known as SpaceSail), and the Geespace constellation, and would be equally vulnerable to jamming. It also has the BeiDou global navigational satellite system (GNSS), consisting of 18 satellites in various geostationary orbits and 23 satellites in Medium Earth orbit. China’s own LEO constellations make the hazards of trying to take out Starlink or other LEO constellations would be fraught with significant risk and ultimately self-defeating, as the debris would impact all space travellers sooner or later.
Jamming signals would allow any counter-operations to pinpoint the location of the jamming signal and send killer drones to destroy the jammers, and the debris from drone dogfights at 60,000ft doesn’t bear thinking about.
Drones are probably not the optimal carrier for jamming technology; steered and height-controlled weather balloons would have a far lower radar silhouette and be infinitely cheaper.
As mentioned in previous articles, using LEO constellations to navigate is not the only solution. Currently, the Starlink connection is doing wonders for Ukraine’s fight against the invaders by allowing navigation deep inside the invaders’ territory to destroy energy and military infrastructure.
Still, the same effect could be achieved using alternative methods?
What To Do?
Starlink is primarily a civilian and commercial product that provides high-speed Internet services. It also has a strong military interest. The Vandenberg Air Force Base in California hosts some of the launch sites, and an encrypted interconnection between the satellites and US Air Force fighters has been included in their technical verification tests. The US Army also has an agreement to use Starlink broadband to transmit data across military networks. Indeed, Starlink satellites might be mounted with reconnaissance, navigation and meteorological devices for use in the US military’s combat capability.
Military budgets help Starlink maintain its market position but also make it vulnerable to counteroperations by inimical forces. If this is part of Starlink’s remit, then it goes without saying that both China and Russia, whose LEO constellations are much less developed, will be doing the same.
It is not thought that even cyberattacks on a distributed system such as Starlink would be successful as the company has developed a stringent “defence-in-depth” approach so that even an attack on one satellite would not be distributed across the system.
Which brings us back to the problem of how a bad actor can disrupt communication between an LEO satellite and its user closer to Earth. The main categories of disruption are jamming and corruption, kinetic systems (blow the user up) and energy weapons. The latter two are expensive ways of swatting a fly, even if the fly is carrying a major plague.
Summary
The problem of denying service from LEO constellations is a system problem, and it would be rather foolhardy to try to approach the issue using either the Chinese suggestion offered or a hard kill of each satellite.
At the moment it is believed that states are trying soft-kill strategies such cyber-attacks on each other’s constellations. Clearly that is only working intermittently although there have been reported attacks in 2007 when hackers reportedly interfered with two US satellites, Landsat-7 and Terra AM-1, through a ground station in Norway and again in 2015 when hackers suspected of being affiliated with Russia hijacked a satellite to broadcast Russian propaganda to Ukraine during a Victory Day parade, replacing the usual programming with images of military hardware.
The fact that it has so far been largely impossible to disrupt LEO constellation signals is a good thing for civilian and commercial users but it should be borne in mind that state actors are actively trying to develop an ability in this direction and, maybe with the help of AI, they might one day have that capability.
On the plus side, it would make the danger of the Terminator’s Skynet substantially less.
If you’re interested in any bespoke research studies on GPS signals, spoofing, GMDSS safety services, please reach out to us here.
Joshua Flood, Director Valour Consultancy
