starlink

Starlink: Here’s a free satellite dish—if you pay $120 a month instead of $90

Policy, starlink / Paul Patrick / May 8, 2025

There are 15 US states in which Residential Lite is offered: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Hawaii. This territory generally overlaps with the larger territory in which the free Starlink kit is available.

Some states, such as California, Texas, New York, and Massachusetts, have access to the free kit offer but not the Residential Lite plan. When attempting to order service in one of the overlap areas where both are available, an address in Maine, I was given three options.

One option was to get the hardware for free and pay $120 a month with a 12-month commitment. Another option was to pay $349 for the kit and get the standard residential plan for the same $120 monthly price, but with no minimum term commitment. The third option was to pay $349 for the kit and get the worse Residential Lite plan for $80 a month, with no commitment. The $90 price for full-speed service wasn’t available.

Ordering Starlink’s lite service.

If you don’t mind the Lite plan’s slower speeds and deprioritization during peak hours, it’s cheaper during the first year to buy the kit at full price and pay $80 a month ($1,309 compared to $1,440). If you want to avoid the lite plan and you live in a place where the $90 full-speed plan isn’t available, it’s significantly cheaper to get the free kit because you’d have to pay $120 either way. You presumably would be able to switch to the $80 lite plan after the 12-month commitment, assuming Starlink still offers it a year from now.

In summary, if you were thinking about getting Starlink already, check out the free-kit offer and see if it makes sense for you. Just don’t hit the buy button immediately without examining the other options.

Starlink: Here’s a free satellite dish—if you pay $120 a month instead of $90 Read More »

A Chinese-born crypto tycoon—of all people—changed the way I think of space

crew dragon, fram2, human spaceflight, Space, spacex, starlink / Paul Patrick / April 22, 2025

“Are we the first generation of digital nomad in space?”

Chun Wang orbits the Earth inside the cupola of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. Credit: Chun Wang via X

For a quarter-century, dating back to my time as a budding space enthusiast, I’ve watched with a keen eye each time people have ventured into space.

That’s 162 human spaceflight missions since the beginning of 2000, ranging from Space Shuttle flights to Russian Soyuz missions, Chinese astronauts’ first forays into orbit, and commercial expeditions on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Yes, I’m also counting privately funded suborbital hops launched by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.

Last week, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin captured headlines—though not purely positive—with the launch of six women, including pop star Katy Perry, to an altitude of 66 miles (106 kilometers). The capsule returned to the ground 10 minutes and 21 seconds later. It was the first all-female flight to space since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo mission in 1963.

Many commentators criticized the flight as a tone-deaf stunt or a rich person’s flex. I won’t make any judgments, except to say two of the passengers aboard Blue Origin’s capsule—Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen—have compelling stories worth telling.

Immerse yourself

Here’s another story worth sharing. Earlier this month, an international crew of four private astronauts took their own journey into space aboard a Dragon spacecraft owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Like Blue Origin’s all-female flight, this mission was largely bankrolled by a billionaire.

Actually, it was a couple of billionaires. Musk used his fortune to fund a large portion of the Dragon spacecraft’s development costs alongside a multibillion-dollar contribution from US taxpayers. Chun Wang, a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire, paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum to fly one of SpaceX’s ships into orbit with three of his friends.

So far, this seems like another story about a rich guy going to space. This is indeed a major part of the story, but there’s more to it. Chun, now a citizen of Malta, named the mission Fram2 after the Norwegian exploration ship Fram used for polar expeditions at the turn of the 20th century. Following in the footsteps of Fram, which means “forward” in Norwegian, Chun asked SpaceX if he could launch into an orbit over Earth’s poles to gain a perspective on our planet no human eyes had seen before.

Joining Chun on the three-and-a-half-day Fram2 mission were Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian filmmaker and cinematographer who took the role of vehicle commander. Rabea Rogge, a robotics researcher from Germany, took the pilot’s seat and assisted Mikkelsen in monitoring the spacecraft’s condition in flight. Wang and Eric Philips, an Australian polar explorer and guide, flew as “mission specialists” on the mission.

Chun’s X account reads like a travelogue, with details of each jet-setting jaunt around the world. His propensity for sharing travel experiences extended into space, and I’m grateful for it.

The Florida peninsula, including Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, through the lens of Chun’s iPhone. Credit: Chun Wang via X

Usually, astronauts might share their reflections from space by writing posts on social media, or occasionally sharing pictures and video vignettes from the International Space Station (ISS). This, in itself, is a remarkable change from the way astronauts communicated with the public from space just 15 years ago.

Most of these social media posts involve astronauts showcasing an experiment they’re working on or executing a high-flying tutorial in physics. Often, these videos include acrobatic backflips or show the novelty of eating and drinking in microgravity. Some astronauts, like Don Pettit, who recently came home from the ISS, have a knack for gorgeous orbital photography.

Chun’s videos offer something different. They provide an unfiltered look into how four people live inside a spacecraft with an internal volume comparable to an SUV, and the awe of seeing something beautiful for the first time. His shares have an intimacy, authenticity, and most importantly, an immediacy I’ve never seen before in a video from space.

One of the videos Chun recorded and posted to X shows the Fram2 crew members inside Dragon the day after their launch. The astronauts seem to be enjoying themselves. Their LunchBot meal kits float nearby, and the capsule’s makeshift trash bin contains Huggies baby wipes and empty water bottles, giving the environment a vibe akin to a camping trip, except for the constant hum of air fans.

Later, Chun shared a video of the crew opening the hatch leading to Dragon’s cupola window, a plexiglass extension with panoramic views. Mikkelsen and Chun try to make sense of what they’re seeing.

“Oh, Novaya Zemlya, do you see it?” Mikkelsen asks. “Yeah. Yeah. It’s right here,” Chun replies. “Oh, damn. Oh, it is,” Mikkelsen says.

Chun then drops a bit of Cold War trivia. “The largest atomic bomb was tested here,” he says. “And all this ice. Further north, the Arctic Ocean. The North Pole.”

Flight Day 3 pic.twitter.com/vLlbAKIOvl

— Chun (@satofishi) April 3, 2025

On the third day of the mission, the Dragon spacecraft soared over Florida, heading south to north on its pole-to-pole loop around the Earth. “I can see our launch pad from here,” Mikkelsen says, pointing out NASA’s Kennedy Space Center several hundred miles away.

Flying over our launch site. pic.twitter.com/eHatUsOJ20

— Chun (@satofishi) April 3, 2025

Finally, Chun capped his voyage into space with a 30-second clip from his seat inside Dragon as the spacecraft fires thrusters for a deorbit burn. The capsule’s small rocket jets pulsed repeatedly to slow Dragon’s velocity enough to drop out of orbit and head for reentry and splashdown off the coast of California.

Lasers in LEO

It wasn’t only Chun’s proclivity for posting to social media that made this possible. It was also SpaceX’s own Starlink Internet network, which the Dragon spacecraft connected to with a “Plug and Plaser” terminal mounted in the capsule’s trunk. This device allowed Dragon and its crew to transmit and receive Internet signals through a laser link with Starlink satellites orbiting nearby.

Astronauts have shared videos similar to those from Fram2 in the past, but almost always after they are back on Earth, and often edited and packaged into a longer video. What’s unique about Chun’s videos is that he was able to immediately post his clips, some of which are quite long, to social media via the Starlink Internet network.

“With a Starlink laser terminal in the trunk, we can theoretically achieve speeds up to 100 or more gigabits per second,” said Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president for Falcon launch vehicles, before the Fram2 mission’s launch. “For Fram2, we’re expecting around 1 gigabit per second.”

Compare this with the connectivity available to astronauts on the International Space Station, where crews have access to the Internet with uplink speeds of about 4 to 6 megabits per second and 500 kilobits to 1 megabit per second of downlink, according to Sandra Jones, a NASA spokesperson. The space station communications system provides about 1 megabit per second of additional throughput for email, an Internet telephone, and video conferencing. There’s another layer of capacity for transmitting scientific and telemetry data between the space station and Mission Control.

So, Starlink’s laser connection with the Dragon spacecraft offers roughly 200 to 2,000 times the throughput of the Internet connection available on the ISS. The space station sends and receives communication signals, including the Internet, through NASA’s fleet of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites.

The laser link is also cheaper to use. NASA’s TDRS relay stations are dedicated to providing communication support for the ISS and numerous other science missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope, while Dragon plugs into the commercial Starlink network serving millions of other users.

SpaceX tested the Plug and Plaser device for the first time in space last year on the Polaris Dawn mission, which was most notable for the first fully commercial spacewalk in history. The results of the test were “phenomenal,” said Kevin Coggins, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation.

“They have pushed a lot of data through in these tests to demonstrate their ability to do data rates just as high as TDRS, if not higher,” Coggins said in a recent presentation to a committee of the National Academies.

Artist’s illustration of a laser optical link between a Dragon spacecraft and a Starlink satellite. Credit: SpaceX

Edwards said SpaceX wants to make the laser communication capability available for future Dragon missions and commercial space stations that may replace the ISS. Meanwhile, NASA is phasing out the government-owned TDRS network. Coggins said NASA’s relay satellites in geosynchronous orbit will remain active through the remaining life of the International Space Station, and then will be retired.

“Many of these spacecraft are far beyond their intended service life,” Coggins said. “In fact, we’ve retired one recently. We’re getting ready to retire another one. In this period of time, we’re going to retire TDRSs pretty often, and we’re going to get down to just a couple left that will last us into the 2030s.

“We have to preserve capacity as the constellation gets smaller, and we have to manage risks,” Coggins said. “So, we made a decision on November 8, 2024, that no new users could come to TDRS. We took it out of the service catalog.”

NASA’s future satellites in Earth orbit will send their data to the ground through a commercial network like Starlink. The agency has agreements worth more than $278 million with five companies—SpaceX, Amazon, Viasat, SES, and Telesat—to demonstrate how they can replace and improve on the services currently provided by TDRS (pronounced “tee-dress”).

These companies are already operating or will soon deploy satellites that could provide radio or laser optical communication links with future space stations, science probes, and climate and weather monitoring satellites. “We’re not paying anyone to put up a constellation,” Coggins said.

After these five companies complete their demonstration phase, NASA will become a subscriber to some or all of their networks.

“Now, instead of a 30-year-old [TDRS] constellation and trying to replenish something that we had before, we’ve got all these new capabilities, all these new things that weren’t possible before, especially optical,” Coggins said. “That’s going to that’s going to mean so much with the volume and quality of data that you’re going to be able to bring down.”

Digital nomads

Chun and his crewmates didn’t use the Starlink connection to send down any prize-winning discoveries about the Universe, or data for a comprehensive global mapping survey. Instead, the Fram2 crew used the connection for video calls and text messages with their families through tablets and smartphones linked to a Wi-Fi router inside the Dragon spacecraft.

“Are we the first generation of digital nomad in space?” Chun asked his followers in one X post.

“It was not 100 percent available, but when it was, it was really fast,” Chun wrote of the Internet connection in an email to Ars. He told us he used an iPhone 16 Pro Max for his 4K videos. From some 200 miles (300 kilometers) up, the phone’s 48-megapixel camera, with a simulated optical zoom, brought out the finer textures of ice sheets, clouds, water, and land formations.

While the flight was fully automated, SpaceX trained the Fram2 crew how to live and work inside the Dragon spacecraft and take over manual control if necessary. None of Fram2 crew members had a background in spaceflight or in any part of the space industry before they started preparing for their mission. Notably, it was the first human spaceflight mission to low-Earth orbit without a trained airplane pilot onboard.

Chun Wang, far right, extends his arm to take an iPhone selfie moments after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: SpaceX

Their nearly four days in orbit was largely a sightseeing expedition. Alongside Chun, Mikkelsen put her filmmaking expertise to use by shooting video from Dragon’s cupola. Before the flight, Mikkelsen said she wanted to create an immersive 3D account of her time in space. In some of Wang’s videos, Mikkelsen is seen working with a V-RAPTOR 8K VV camera from Red Digital Cinema, a device that sells for approximately $25,000, according to the manufacturer’s website.

The crew spent some of their time performing experiments, including the first X-ray of a human in space. Scientists gathered some useful data on the effects of radiation on humans in space because Fram2 flew in a polar orbit, where the astronauts were exposed to higher doses of ionizing radiation than a person might see on the International Space Station.

After they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at the end of the mission, the Fram2 astronauts disembarked from the Dragon capsule without the assistance of SpaceX ground teams, which typically offer a helping hand for balance as crews readjust to gravity. This demonstrated how people might exit their spaceships on the Moon or Mars, where no one will be there to greet them.

Going into the flight, Chun wanted to see Antarctica and Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago where he lives north of the Arctic Circle. In more than 400 human spaceflight missions from 1961 until this year, nobody ever flew in an orbit directly over the poles. Sophisticated satellites routinely fly over the polar regions to take high-resolution imagery and measure things like sea ice.

The Fram2 astronauts’ observations of the Arctic and Antarctic may not match what satellites can see, but their experience has some lasting catchet, standing alone among all who have flown to space before.

“People often refer to Earth as a blue marble planet, but from our point of view, it’s more of a frozen planet,” Chun told Ars.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

A Chinese-born crypto tycoon—of all people—changed the way I think of space Read More »

Here’s how a satellite ended up as a ghostly apparition on Google Earth

airbus, Earth, france, Google, google maps, pleiades, Science, Space, spacex, starlink / Tim Belzer / April 16, 2025

Regardless of the identity of the satellite, this image is remarkable for several reasons.

First, despite so many satellites flying in space, it’s still rare to see a real picture—not just an artist’s illustration—of what one actually looks like in orbit. For example, SpaceX has released photos of Starlink satellites in launch configuration, where dozens of the spacecraft are stacked together to fit inside the payload compartment of the Falcon 9 rocket. But there are fewer well-resolved views of a satellite in its operational environment, with solar arrays extended like the wings of a bird.

This is changing as commercial companies place more and more imaging satellites in orbit. Several companies provide “non-Earth imaging” services by repurposing Earth observation cameras to view other objects in space. These views can reveal information that can be useful in military or corporate espionage.

Secondly, the Google Earth capture offers a tangible depiction of a satellite’s speed. An object in low-Earth orbit must travel at more than 17,000 mph (more than 27,000 km per hour) to keep from falling back into the atmosphere.

While the B-2’s motion caused it to appear a little smeared in the Google Earth image a few years ago, the satellite’s velocity created a different artifact. The satellite appears five times in different colors, which tells us something about how the image was made. Airbus’ Pleiades satellites take pictures in multiple spectral bands: blue, green, red, panchromatic, and near-infrared.

At lower left, the black outline of the satellite is the near-infrared capture. Moving up, you can see the satellite in red, blue, and green, followed by the panchromatic, or black-and-white, snapshot with the sharpest resolution. Typically, the Pleiades satellites record these images a split-second apart and combine the colors to generate an accurate representation of what the human eye might see. But this doesn’t work so well for a target moving at nearly 5 miles per second.

Here’s how a satellite ended up as a ghostly apparition on Google Earth Read More »

Trump plan to fund Musk’s Starlink over fiber called “betrayal” of rural US

BEAD program, elon musk, Policy, starlink, trump administration / Kris Guyer / March 18, 2025

“Some states are on the 1-yard line”

Republicans criticized the Biden administration for not yet distributing grant money, but the NTIA said in November that it had approved initial funding plans submitted by every state and territory. Feinman said the change in direction will delay grant distribution.

“Some states are on the 1-yard line. A bunch are on the 5-yard line. More will be getting there every week,” he wrote. “These more-sweeping changes will only cause delays. The administration could fix the problems with the program via waiver and avoid slowdowns.”

The program is on pause, even if the new government leaders don’t admit it, according to Feinman. “The administration wants to make changes, but doesn’t want to be seen slowing things down. They can’t have both. States will have to be advised that they should either slow down or stop doing subgrantee selection,” he wrote.

Delaware, Louisiana, and Nevada had their final proposals approved by the NTIA in January, a few days before Trump’s inauguration. “Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection,” Feinman wrote.

The three states with approved final proposals are now “in limbo,” he wrote. “This makes no sense—these states are ready to go, and they got the job done on time, on budget, and have plans that achieve universal coverage,” his email said. “If the administration cares about getting shovels in the ground, states with approved Final Proposals should move forward, ASAP.”

Other states that were nearing the final stage are also in limbo, Feinman wrote. “No decision has been made about how much of the existing progress the 30 states who are already performing subgrantee selection should be allowed to keep,” he wrote. “The administration simply cannot say whether the time, taxpayer funds, and private capital that were spent on those processes will be wasted and how much states will have to re-do.”

Trump plan to fund Musk’s Starlink over fiber called “betrayal” of rural US Read More »

Starlink benefits as Trump admin rewrites rules for $42B grant program

access, and Deployment program, BEAD program, Broadband Equity, elon musk, Policy, starlink / Kris Guyer / March 7, 2025

Don’t be “technology-blind,” broadband group says

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society criticized what it called “Trump’s BEAD meddling,” saying it would “leave millions of Americans with broadband that is slower, less reliable, and more expensive.” The shift to a “technology-neutral” approach should not be “technology-blind,” the advocacy group said.

“Fiber broadband is widely understood to be better than other Internet options—like Starlink’s satellites—because it delivers significantly faster speeds, is more reliable due to its resistance to interference (from weather, foliage, terrain, etc), has higher bandwidth capacity, and offers symmetrical upload and download speeds, making it ideal for activities like telehealth, online learning, streaming, and gaming that require consistent high performance,” the group said.

It’s ultimately up to individual states to distribute funds to ISPs after getting their allocations from the US government, though the states have to follow rules issued by federal officials. No one knows exactly how much each Internet provider will receive, but a Wall Street Journal report this week said the new rules could help Starlink get nearly half of the available funding.

“Under the BEAD program’s original rules, Starlink was expected to get up to $4.1 billion, said people familiar with the matter. With Lutnick’s overhaul, Starlink, a unit of Musk’s SpaceX, could receive $10 billion to $20 billion, they said,” according to the WSJ report.

The end of BEAD’s fiber preference would also help cable and fixed wireless providers access grant funding. Lobby groups for those industries have been calling for rule changes to help their members obtain grants.

While the Commerce Department is moving ahead with BEAD changes on its own, Republicans are also proposing a rewrite of the law. House Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) yesterday announced legislation that his office said would eliminate “burdensome conditions imposed by the Biden-Harris Administration, including those related to labor, climate change, and rate regulation, that made deployment more expensive and participation less attractive.”

Starlink benefits as Trump admin rewrites rules for $42B grant program Read More »

Starlink profit growing rapidly as it faces a moment of promise and peril

Space, spacex, spacex starlink, starlink / Tim Belzer / February 3, 2025

Estimates of Starlink’s consumer revenues. Credit: Quilty Space

Both of the new analyses indicate that over the course of the last decade, SpaceX has built a robust space-Internet business with affordable ground terminals, sophisticated gateways around the world, more than 7,000 satellites in orbit, and a reusable launch business to service the network. There is new technology coming, with larger V3 satellites on the horizon—to be launched by SpaceX’s Starship vehicle—and the promise of direct-to-cell Internet connectivity that bypasses the need for a ground terminal.

There is also plenty of room for growth in market share in both existing territories as well as large nations such as India, where SpaceX is seeking access to the market and providing Internet service.

Some risk on the horizon

In all of this, Starlink now faces a moment of promise and peril. The company has all of the potential described above, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk has become an increasingly prominent and controversial figure both in US and global politics. Many people and governments are becoming more uncomfortable with Musk’s behavior, his insertion into domestic and foreign politics, and the power he is wielding within the Trump administration.

In the near term, this may be good for Starlink’s business. The Financial Times reported that corporate America, in an effort to deepen ties with the Trump Administration, has been “cozying” up to Musk and his business empire. This includes Starlink, with United Airlines accelerating a collaboration for use of the service on its fleet, as well as deals with Oracle and Apple.

At the same time, Musk’s activities may make it challenging for Starlink in the long term in countries that seek to punish him and his companies. For example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported Monday that Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford will rip up Ontario’s nearly $100 million contract with Starlink in the wake of US tariffs on virtually all Canadian goods.

The contract, signed in November, was intended to provide high-speed Internet to 15,000 eligible homes and businesses in rural, remote, and northern communities by June of this year. Musk is “part of the Trump team that wants to destroy families, incomes, destroy businesses,” Ford said at a news conference Monday. “He wants to take food off the table of people—hard-working people—and I’m not going to tolerate it.”

Starlink profit growing rapidly as it faces a moment of promise and peril Read More »

Italy’s plan to buy Starlink data deals a serious blow to European space network

elon musk, italy, Space, spacex, starlink / Rejus Almole / January 8, 2025

Developed by the European Union and European Space Agency, with Italian participation, this constellation of 290 satellites is planned to come online by 2030 at a development cost of $10.5 billion. During the lengthy negotiations, Italy even managed to secure one of the three primary ground stations in the Abruzzo region of the country.

The response from some Italian and European officials to the potential agreement between Italy and SpaceX has been ferocious.

Antonio Misiani, former deputy finance minister for Italy and senator for the opposition Democratic Party, told Politico that a completed agreement would represent an “unacceptable sell-out of national sovereignty.”

An Atlantic Council senior fellow and former policy advisor to the Italian government, Beniamino Irdi, told the Financial Times, “It sends a political signal to the EU,” Irdi said. “Iris² is a symbol of Europe’s strategic autonomy, and a key EU member shifting to a different solution can be interpreted as a sign of divestment from that.”

There are multiple layers of frustration here beyond Iris². One concerns Musk, who, since the election of Trump, has turned his attention toward advancing far-right political causes in Europe, particularly in Germany and the United Kingdom. Meloni, a conservative leader of Italy, considers Musk a friend and ally. Andrea Stroppa, one of Musk’s advisers in Italy, explained in September that “Elon recognizes Giorgia Meloni’s leadership. And he sees in her the same thing he sees in Donald Trump, someone who can defend Western values in danger.”

Battling with Breton

Musk has also had a long-running feud with French businessman Thierry Breton, who was Commissioner for the Internal Market of the European Union for five years until last September. Breton spearheaded the Iris² initiative to provide secure communications from low-Earth orbit. He also championed the Digital Services Act, which aims to curb misinformation published online in Europe. The European Commission has been energetically investigating Musk’s social media site X under the law.

Italy’s plan to buy Starlink data deals a serious blow to European space network Read More »

FCC approves Starlink plan for cellular phone service, with some limits

Policy, starlink / Kris Guyer / November 27, 2024

Eliminating cellular dead zones

Starlink says it will offer texting service this year as well as voice and data services in 2025. Starlink does not yet have FCC approval to exceed certain emissions limits, which the company has said will be detrimental for real-time voice and video communications.

For the operations approved yesterday, Starlink is required to coordinate with other spectrum users and cease transmissions when any harmful interference is detected. “We hope to activate employee beta service in the US soon,” wrote Ben Longmier, SpaceX’s senior director of satellite engineering.

Longmier made a pitch to cellular carriers. “Any telco that signs up with Starlink Direct to Cell can completely eliminate cellular dead zones for their entire country for text and data services. This includes coastal waterways and the ocean areas in between land for island nations,” he wrote.

Starlink launched its first satellites with cellular capabilities in January 2024. “Of the more than 2,600 Gen2 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, around 320 are equipped with a direct-to-smartphone payload, enough to enable the texting services SpaceX has said it could launch this year,” SpaceNews wrote yesterday.

Yesterday’s FCC order also lets Starlink operate up to 7,500 second-generation satellites in altitudes between 340 km and 360 km, in addition to the previously approved altitudes between 525 km and 535 km. SpaceX is seeking approval for another 22,488 satellites but the FCC continued to defer action on that request. The FCC order said:

Authorization to permit SpaceX to operate up to 7,500 Gen2 satellites in lower altitude shells will enable SpaceX to begin providing lower-latency satellite service to support growing demand in rural and remote areas that lack terrestrial wireless service options. This partial grant also strikes the right balance between allowing SpaceX’s operations at lower altitudes to provide low-latency satellite service and permitting the Commission to continue to monitor SpaceX’s constellation and evaluate issues previously raised on the record.

Coordination with NASA

SpaceX is required to coordinate “with NASA to ensure protection of the International Space Station (ISS), ISS visiting vehicles, and launch windows for NASA science missions,” the FCC said. “SpaceX may only deploy and operate at altitudes below 400 km the total number of satellites for which it has completed physical coordination with NASA under the parties’ Space Act Agreement.”

FCC approves Starlink plan for cellular phone service, with some limits Read More »

A year after ditching waitlist, Starlink says it is “sold out” in parts of US

Biz & IT, Policy, starlink / Paul Patrick / November 19, 2024

The Starlink waitlist is back in certain parts of the US, including several large cities on the West Coast and in Texas. The Starlink availability map says the service is sold out in and around Seattle; Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Sacramento, California; and Austin, Texas. Neighboring cities and towns are included in the sold-out zones.

There are additional sold-out areas in small parts of Colorado, Montana, and North Carolina. As PCMag noted yesterday, the change comes about a year after Starlink added capacity and removed its waitlist throughout the US.

Elsewhere in North America, there are some sold-out areas in Canada and Mexico. Across the Atlantic, Starlink is sold out in London and neighboring cities. Starlink is not yet available in most of Africa, and some of the areas where it is available are sold out.

Starlink is generally seen as most useful in rural areas with less access to wired broadband, but it seems to be attracting interest in more heavily populated areas, too. While detailed region-by-region subscriber numbers aren’t available publicly, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said last week that Starlink has nearly 5 million users worldwide.

A year after ditching waitlist, Starlink says it is “sold out” in parts of US Read More »

A lot of people are mistaking Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites for UAPs

elon musk, military space, Science, Space, spacex, starlink, UAP / Kris Guyer / November 15, 2024

That’s just Elon

But many UAP cases have verifiable explanations as airplanes, drones, or satellites, and lawmakers argue AARO might be able to solve more of the cases with more funding.

Airspace is busier than ever with air travel and consumer drones. More satellites are zooming around the planet as government agencies and companies like SpaceX deploy their constellations for Internet connectivity and surveillance. There’s more stuff up there to see.

“AARO increasingly receives cases that it is able to resolve to the Starlink satellite constellation,” the office said in this year’s annual report.

“For example, a commercial pilot reported white flashing lights in the night sky,” AARO said. “The pilot did not report an altitude or speed, and no data or imagery was recorded. AARO assessed that this sighting of flashing lights correlated with a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the same evening about one hour prior to the sighting.”

Jon Kosloski, director of AARO, said officials compared the parameters of these sightings with Starlink launches. When SpaceX releases Starlink satellites in orbit, the spacecraft are initially clustered together and reflect more sunlight down to Earth. This makes the satellites easier to see during twilight hours before they raise their orbits and become dimmer.

“We found some of those correlations in time, the direction that they were looking, and the location,” Kosloski said. “And we were able to assess that they were all in those cases looking at Starlink flares.”

SpaceX has more than 6,600 Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, more than half of all active spacecraft. Thousands more satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper broadband constellation and Chinese Internet network are slated to launch in the next few years.

“AARO is investigating if other unresolved cases may be attributed to the expansion of the Starlink and other mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit,” the report said.

The Starlink network is still relatively new. SpaceX launched the first Starlinks five years ago. Kosloski said he expects the number of erroneous UAP reports caused by satellites to go down as pilots and others understand what the Starlinks look like.

“It looks interesting and potentially anomalous. But we can model that, and we can show pilots what that anomaly looks like, so that that doesn’t get reported to us necessarily,” Kosloski said.

A lot of people are mistaking Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites for UAPs Read More »

NRO chief: “You can’t hide” from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites

Commercial space, military space, National Reconnaissance Office, Northrop Grumman, Science, Space, spacex, spy satellite, starlink, starshield / Tim Belzer / November 5, 2024

“A satellite is always coming over an area within a given reasonable amount of time.”

This frame from a SpaceX video shows a stack of Starlink Internet satellites attached to the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, moments after jettison of the launcher’s payload fairing. Credit: SpaceX

The director of the National Reconnaissance Office has a message for US adversaries around the world.

“You can’t hide, because we’re constantly looking,” said Chris Scolese, a longtime NASA engineer who took the helm of the US government’s spy satellite agency in 2019.

The NRO is taking advantage of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite assembly line to build a network of at least 100 satellites, and perhaps many more, to monitor adversaries around the world. So far, more than 80 of these SpaceX-made spacecraft, each a little less than a ton in mass, have launched on four Falcon 9 rockets. There are more to come.

A large number of these mass-produced satellites, or what the NRO calls a “proliferated architecture,” will provide regularly updated imagery of foreign military installations and other sites of interest to US intelligence agencies. Scolese said the new swarm of satellites will “get us reasonably high-resolution imagery of the Earth, at a high rate of speed.”

This is a significant change in approach for the NRO, which has historically operated a smaller number of more expensive satellites, some as big as a school bus.

“We expect to quadruple the number of satellites we have to have on-orbit in the next decade,” said Col. Eric Zarybnisky, director of the NRO’s office of space launch, during an October 29 presentation at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

The NRO is not the only national security agency eyeing a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit. The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency plans to kick off a rapid-fire launch cadence next year to begin placing hundreds of small satellites in orbit to detect and track missiles threatening US or allied forces. The Space Force is also interested in buying its own set of SpaceX satellites for broadband connectivity.

The Pentagon started moving in this direction about a decade ago, when leaders raised concerns that the legacy fleets of military and spy satellites were at risk of attack. Now, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a handful of other companies, many of them startups, specialize in manufacturing and launching small satellites at relatively low cost.

“Why didn’t we do this earlier? Well, launch costs were high, right?” said Troy Meink, the NRO’s principal deputy director, in an October 17 discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “The cost of entry was pretty high, which has come way down. Then, digital electronics has allowed us to build capability in a much smaller package, and a combination of those two is really what’s enabled it.”

A constant vigil

NRO officials still expect to require some large satellites with sharp-eyed optics—think of a Hubble Space Telescope pointed at Earth—to resolve the finest details of things like missile installations, naval fleets, or insurgent encampments. The drawback of this approach is that, at best, a few big optical or radar imaging satellites only fly over places of interest several times per day.

With the proliferated architecture, the NRO will capture views of most places on Earth a lot more often. Two of the most important metrics with a remote-sensing satellite system are imaging resolution and revisit time, or how often a satellite is over a specific location on Earth.

“We need to have persistence or fast revisit,” Scolese said on October 3 in a discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit Washington think tank. “You can proliferate your architecture, put more satellites up there, so that a satellite is always coming over an area within a given reasonable amount of time that’s needed by the users. That’s what we’re doing with the proliferated architecture.

“That’s enabled by a really rich commercial industry that’s building hundreds or thousands of satellites,” Scolese said. “That allowed us to take those satellites, adapt them to our use at low cost, and apply whatever sensor is needed to go off and acquire the information that’s needed at whatever revisit time is required.”

The NRO’s logo for its proliferated satellite constellation, with the slogan “Strength in Numbers.” Credit: National Reconnaissance Office

The NRO has identified other benefits, too. It’s a lot more difficult for a country like Russia or China to take out an entire constellation of satellites than to destroy or disable a single spy platform in orbit. Military officials have often referred to these expensive one-off satellites as “big juicy targets” for potential adversaries.

“It gives us a degree of resilience that we didn’t have before,” Scolese said.

The proliferated constellation also allows the NRO to be more nimble in responding to threats or new technologies. If a new type of sensor becomes available, or an adversary does something new that intelligence analysts want to look at, the NRO and its contractor can quickly swap out payloads on satellites going through the production line.

“That’s a huge change for an organization like the NRO,” Zarybnisky said. “It’s a catalyst. Another catalyst for innovation in the NRO is these smaller, lower price-point systems. Rapid turn time means you can introduce that next technology into the next generation and not wait for many years or even decades to introduce new technologies.”

Three-letter agencies

The NRO provides imaging, signals, and electronic intelligence data from its satellites to the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense. Scolese said the NRO wants to get actionable information into the hands of users across the federal government as quickly as possible, but the volume of data coming down from hundreds of satellites presents a challenge.

“Once you go to a proliferated architecture and you’re going from a few satellites to tens of satellites to now hundreds of satellites, you have to change a lot of things, and we’re in the process of doing that,” Scolese said.

With so many satellites, it “means that it’s no longer possible for an individual sitting at a control center to say, ‘I know what this satellite is doing,'” Scolese said. “So we have to have the machines to go off and help us there. We need artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated processes to help us do that.”

“We will deliver data in seconds, not minutes, and not hours,” Zarybnisky said.

The existence of this constellation was made public in March, when Reuters reported the NRO was working with SpaceX to develop and deploy a network of satellites in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX’s Starshield business unit is building the satellites under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021, according to Reuters. This is remarkably inexpensive by the standards of the NRO, which has spent more money just constructing a satellite processing facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida (thanks to Eric Berger’s reporting in Reentry for this juicy tidbit).

Chris Scolese appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2019 during a confirmation hearing to become director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Reuters reported Northrop Grumman is supplying sensors to mount on at least some of the SpaceX-built satellites, but their design and capabilities remain classified. The NRO, which usually keeps its work secret, officially acknowledged the program in April, a month before the first batch of satellites launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

SpaceX revealed the existence of the Starshield division in 2022, the year after signing the NRO contract, as a vehicle for applying the company’s experience manufacturing Starlink Internet satellites to support US national security missions. SpaceX has built and launched more than 7,200 Starlink satellites since 2019, with more than 6,000 currently operational, 10 times larger than any other existing satellite constellation.

The current generation of Starlink satellites launch in batches of 20 to 23 spacecraft on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. They’re flat-packed one on top of the other inside the Falcon 9’s payload shroud, then released all at once in orbit. The NRO’s new satellites likely use the same basic design, launching in groups of roughly 21 satellites on each mission.

According to Scolese, the NRO owns these SpaceX-built satellites, rather than SpaceX owning them and supplying data to the government through a service contract arrangement. By the end of the year, the NRO’s director anticipates having at least 100 of these satellites in orbit, with additional launches expected through 2028.

“We are going from the demo phase to the operational phase, where we’re really going to be able to start testing all of this stuff out in a more operational way,” Scolese said.

The NRO is buttressing its network of government-owned satellites with data buys from commercial remote-sensing companies, such as Maxar, Planet, and BlackSky. One advantage of commercial imagery is the NRO can share it widely with allies and the public because it isn’t subject to top-secret classification restrictions.

Scolese said it’s important to maintain a diversity of sources and observation methods to overcome efforts from other nations to hide what they’re doing. This means using more satellites, as the NRO is doing with SpaceX and other commercial partners. It also means using electro-optical, radar, thermal infrared, and electronic detection sensors to fully characterize what intelligence analysts are seeing.

The NRO is also studying more exotic methods like quantum remote sensing, using the principles of quantum physics at the atomic level.

“There’s camouflage,” Scolese said. “There are lots of techniques that can be used, which means we have to go off and look at very different phenomenologies, and we’ve developed and are developing capabilities that will allow us to defeat those types of activities. Quantum sensing is one of them. You can’t really hide from fundamental physics.”

NRO chief: “You can’t hide” from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites Read More »

Starlink enters National Radio Quiet Zone—but reportedly cut off access for some

national radio quiet zone, Policy, starlink / Tim Belzer / November 1, 2024

Starlink offered to 99.5% of zone, but locals say Roam product was disabled.

Starlink satellite dish. Credit: Starlink

Starlink’s home Internet service has come to the National Radio Quiet Zone after a multi-year engineering project that had the goal of minimizing interference with radio telescopes. Starlink operator SpaceX began “a one-year assessment period to offer residential satellite Internet service to 99.5% of residents within the NRQZ starting October 25,” the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory announced last week.

“The vast majority of people within the areas of Virginia and West Virginia collectively known as the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) can now receive high speed satellite Internet service,” the announcement said. “The newly available service is the result of a nearly three-year collaborative engineering effort between the US National Science Foundation (NSF), SpaceX, and the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), which operates the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO) in West Virginia within the NRQZ.”

There’s a controversy over the 0.5 percent of residents who aren’t included and are said to be newly blocked from using the Starlink Roam service. Starlink markets Roam as a service for people to use while traveling, not as a fixed home Internet service.

The Pendleton County Office of Emergency Management last week issued a press release saying that “customers with the RV/Roam packages had been using Starlink for approximately two years throughout 100% of the NRQZ. Now, the 0.5% have lost coverage after having it for two years. This means that a large section of southeastern Pendleton County and an even larger section of northern Pocahontas will NOT be able to utilize Starlink.”

PCMag wrote that “Starlink is now live in 42 of the 46 cell areas around the Green Bank Observatory’s telescopes.” Pendleton County Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Gillespie told Ars today that Roam coverage was cut off in the remaining four cell areas.

“After the agreement, we all lost effective use within the four cells,” Gillespie told Ars in an email. Gillespie’s press release said that, “in many cases, Starlink was the only Internet provider option residents and emergency responders had. This is unacceptable.”

“The dark ages of communications systems”

Gillespie was quoted as saying in a WBOY article that the restrictions are “keeping a portion of Pendleton and Pocahontas counties in the dark ages of communications systems.”

We contacted SpaceX and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory about any limits imposed on Roam today and will update this article if we get any response.

Residents of the 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone have limited Internet access due to restrictions on radio transmissions first put in place in 1958. In addition to scientific research at Green Bank in Pocahontas County, the National Radio Quiet Zone includes a National Security Agency facility at Sugar Grove Station in Pendleton County.

SpaceX and the NRAO collaborated on testing over the past few years and presumably concluded that the service could only be provided without interference in 99.5 percent of the zone. Chris De Pree, the NRAO deputy spectrum manager, said in the organization’s announcement that “working closely with SpaceX over the past three years has enabled NRAO and SpaceX to better understand each other’s systems and how to actively coexist in this part of the spectrum.”

In that time, “scientists and engineers performed multiple tests and analyses to determine the best way to maximize satellite internet service without hindering the missions within the NRQZ,” the announcement said. During the one-year assessment period for Starlink’s home Internet service, “scientists and engineers will monitor for interference issues and work to resolve them without interrupting Internet service.”

Starlink steers beams away from telescopes

Starlink said in August that it worked with the NRAO “to enable Starlink satellites to avoid transmissions into the line-of-sight of radio telescopes, leveraging our advanced phased array antenna technology to dynamically steer beams away from telescopes.”

Starlink published a summary noting that “direct transmissions from satellites towards the eye of radio telescopes may pose a significant risk of interference to astronomical research.” The technique for steering beams away from telescopes is “made possible by a real-time data sharing framework between radio astronomy observatories and Starlink that provides the Starlink network with a telescope’s planned observation schedule, including the telescope’s pointing direction (aka ‘boresight’) and its observed frequency band. With this information, the Starlink network can ensure that satellites passing near the boresight of a telescope dynamically redirect their beams away from the telescope.”

The redirection happens “in milliseconds” and “protects the telescope’s observations while ensuring Starlink service remains uninterrupted for customers near the telescope.” Starlink is also using the technology with NRAO’s Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Counties want quiet-zone rules scrapped

The quiet-zone rules should be scrapped, a number of local officials say. The Pendleton County press release said that 10 West Virginia counties and one Virginia county “have formally expressed their need for change regarding the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) through Resolutions and Letters of Support.” These counties have a combined 262,296 residents, the press release said.

“We do not seek the closure of these federal entities but rather their commitment to identifying and funding viable solutions that would enable our communication systems to operate effectively, similar to those in the majority of America,” Gillespie said in the press release.

Gillespie told Ars that local communities are hampered by “archaic 1950’s regulations. We are being left behind when it comes to the modern advancements in public safety and personal communications.” He said that “absent some relief in a timely fashion, we will explore taking our plight to the FCC seeking waivers.”

The Pendleton County Commission resolution approved in September called for dissolution of the quiet zone or “total waivers of any NRQZ restrictions imposed on Public Safety Radio Frequency Bands currently in use, as well as all the commercial cellular/wireless Bands, and commercial satellite Internet providers, such as Starlink.”

The county resolution said the quiet zone is effectively “an ever-growing unfunded federal mandate on our county emergency services/911 operation wherein it causes us to spend large amounts of funding building a larger number of tower sites than would be needed absent the NRQZ restrictions.” The restrictions have greatly diminished access to the AT&T FirstNet public safety network and other networks used by first responders and residents, the resolution said.

The Pocahontas County Commission issued a resolution in September calling for total waivers of restrictions imposed on public safety spectrum, or federal funding to offset costs associated with developing public safety communications systems under “the unique burden of NRQZ regulations.”

Limited fiber and cellular access

Starlink service wouldn’t be as necessary for home Internet access if the area had universal access to fiber broadband. Recent government grants could help, as one funded project is designed to subsidize Spruce Knob Seneca Rocks Telephone’s installation of fiber lines in Pocahontas and Pendleton counties.

Ideally, residents would have access to both fiber home Internet and strong cellular networks. But the NRAO still warns that cellular signals could threaten its scientific research.

“Optical fiber as a broadband solution is far better than service from space or via wireless or cellular links, which are less reliable and have the potential to undo much of the coordination work that has happened in the National Radio Quiet Zone over many decades,” Sheldon Wasik, Zone Regulatory Services Coordinator for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said in March 2024.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Starlink enters National Radio Quiet Zone—but reportedly cut off access for some Read More »