Shooting Starlink: The "no limits" partnership between Russia and China
Comments
uxhacker
ben_w
Extremely obvious they would consider this, to the extent that it's one of the independent arguments against valuing Starlink as if it has a shot at being a global monopoly. Ditto space-based data centres.
uxhacker
I wonder if the us has a means of protecting the Starlink satellites?
ben_w
From what I've seen, I believe the only possible option is threatening to use the US military against anyone who attacked Starlink.
Space is hard place to attack in the first place, but even harder to defend against attacks from those who can reach it.
toomuchtodo
I think it’s unlikely. At LEO constellation altitude, you could use ground to space energy weapons (~3-10MW) to disable these satellites, no on orbit anti satellite capability required.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1544/1/...
uxhacker
So they can be disabled from the ground? Why has russia not thought of that? Is that why Starlink is actually concerned about them been used by Ukraine?
The story is a joint joint investigation with Le Monde and Der Spiegel:
Der Spiegel: https://www.spiegel.de/ ausland/china-und-russland-recherchen-zeigen-ausmass-der-militaerkooperation-a-46fa7894-0b2c-411b-ba21-cc7c6b053c3f Le Monde: https://www.lemonde.fr/m- le-mag/article/2026/07/09/entre-pekin-et-moscou-de-tres-secrets-forums-de-cooperation-militaire_6722048_4500055.html