China is openly discussing ways to destroy thousands of Starlink satellites, the brainchild of Elon Musk, whose goal is to provide high-speed Internet access to any, even the most inaccessible place in the world. No, this is not an April Fool’s joke, but the real statements of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and its military researchers, set out in the voluminous article “Starlink Development Status and Countermeasures”. And the thing is that low-cost satellite Internet from Starlink low-orbit satellites can pose a threat to China’s ideological security – one of the main concerns of the Chinese Communist Party. Recall that the country has a fairly isolated Internet from the outside world, which, however, is easily managed by ordinary users using a VPN.
China itself presents this under the guise of a military threat: “Although Starlink claims that this is a civilian program that provides high-speed Internet services, it has a strong military potential.” Without going into details, two options for countermeasures considered by China can be distinguished: hard and soft. The first includes the direct destruction of satellites (for example, by combat missiles). The second involves turning off satellites in different ways: disrupting radio communications or remotely burning Starlink electronics, blinding satellites with powerful lasers, and directly hacking into satellite networks.
Typical Starlink Receiving Dish
We can only hope that these developments will not go further than theory. By the way, China itself intends to directly compete with Starlink, creating its analogue under the name Xing Wang (Starnet). An English translation of the original article is available here .
© Vladimir Kovalev. mobile phone
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