Star Shield: what Elon Musk is preparing to create for the Pentagon

Elon Musk, or rather his company SpaceX, is going on a war footing. The new Starshield project, according to Reuters, will be aimed at creating reconnaissance spy satellites. How it will differ from the existing 5,000-strong “army” of Starlink communication satellites, we talked with the head of the Space Policy Institute, Ivan Moiseev.

According to Reuters, the Pentagon, under a new agreement with Musk, becomes not only a customer, but also a provider of a number of services, including communication services. According to journalists, according to the $1.8 billion contract signed by the company with the US National Office of Military Space Intelligence, the Starshield division is responsible for creating the network.

– Ivan Mikhailovich, what do you think the new constellation, consisting of hundreds of spy satellites, will be like?

– SpaceX, like many private American space companies, initially has very good connections with the Pentagon. The Pentagon is both their customer and the one who develops such companies, because in the future they may be useful to it. Everyone knows that Musk created a huge Starlink constellation of 5 thousand satellites. No one has a bigger one. Even if you put the satellite constellations of all countries together, it will not be possible to achieve the same number as Musk. The purpose of its satellites now is to provide communications and the Internet. Officially, communication services have a number of restrictions, for example, by territory, mobility, and signal quality.

The Pentagon certainly uses Starlink, and we can assume that it doesn’t like these many restrictions.

– Is it prohibited to use Starlink services in Russia?

– Yes, of course, but there is a version that Starlink is already used to control drones. And if it does this over those states that did not allow this, this is already military use.

– That is, it is not excluded that existing satellites could be included in that very “new system” of Starshield?

It’s possible. It is difficult to imagine that the Pentagon is not aware of its capabilities for conducting military operations. But, if you dream up your imagination, they can go very far, beyond the possible control of drones.

– For example?

– The existing constellation of 5 thousand communication satellites is 5 thousand actively maneuvering vehicles. This is necessary so that they do not collide with each other. Now imagine that the satellite maneuvered in such a way that a week later it suddenly ended up on the road of another satellite, which the Pentagon really does not like. A collision occurs. It is impossible to make any claims: a mistake and that’s it. The technical possibility of such a “maneuver” already exists today, and this can overlap the capabilities of any anti-satellite weapon. But whether the US military department is doing this or not is not known.

– What if the country that lost the satellite in this way sues?

– They will theoretically be able to say that exactly the opposite happened.

– Musk recently made an application to expand the constellation of satellites from 5 to 30 thousand. To what extent can space be polluted?

– 30 thousand satellites in the coming years, in principle, is not that much, despite the fact that the United States has the strongest legislation related to space pollution. For example, this year for the first time they issued a fine to some communications company that did not take its vehicle into the burial orbit on time. What saves the mask is that each of its satellites has an engine that can force the device into the dense layers of the atmosphere after finishing work.

– But what about astronomers who complain that a large group prevents them from observing the stars?

– The United States agreed with the astronomical community: to prevent the satellites from reflecting light (this is what bothered astronomers), measures were taken to blacken them.