Is Russia Jamming Starlink Satellites? What’s Happening and What It Means

Alex Gizis: SpaceX has an entirely separate constellation of spy satellites known as Starshield. So, what is Starshield?

Brian Prodoehl: At least a hundred modified satellites for use for encrypted military communication and in some cases actually spying.

Alex Gizis: So, are they the same hardware? Like, these are just Starlink's owned by the military?

Brian Prodoehl: So, they're modified Starlink satellites. So, I think they have some slightly different technology on them.

Alex Gizis: So, is this SpaceX by themselves or are there other companies involved here?

Brian Prodoehl: SpaceX worked with Northrop Grumman to develop a lot of this technology here. Obviously, SpaceX brought the base what Starlink offers and I think whatever the NRO wanted to add, Northrop Grumman helped do that.

Alex Gizis: So, isn't there a concern that by militarizing these satellites You're making a target of them?

Brian Prodoehl: Definitely. The more militarized Starlink gets, the bigger a target is for either somebody that's looking to start a conflict or somebody that just wants to flex their might. But absolutely, yeah. Right.

Alex Gizis: So I was reading about Russia's new Starlink killer, Kalinka? Is that what they call it? What is that?

Brian Prodoehl: Kalinka, yeah. So it's a system of jammers to jam the ground terminals. So your dishy or, in the case of Starlink, people in Ukraine, they have ground terminals that are using Starlink. As long as you have a jammer that can put out a signal that's stronger than the satellite that's 300 miles away, you can kind of drown out that satellite signal and just knock out the signal at the ground station. So they're not targeting the satellites themselves. They're more just trying to jam the ground terminals.

Alex Gizis: One of the things that's very obvious about Starlink is right now it's a very open system. I mean, not only is it well published what frequencies they're using, so you know what to jam, but there's a website where you can go look up where each of the satellites will be when. I mean, if they want to point dishes at the satellites, there's a website where they can pull up where to point the dish to jam the satellite.

Brian Prodoehl: Yeah, I think it's difficult to really hide that stuff. So they can make sense to make it all public, but it certainly makes it easy for somebody that's looking to disrupt it.

Alex Gizis: They're really putting themselves in that kind of position. They've given 500 of these Starshield terminals to the Ukraine already, and now the U.S. government is funding them going all the way up to 3,000.

Brian Prodoehl: Yeah, we're providing these terminals and making it an important part of somebody's networking that's in a conflict, and so we're certainly making that, the whole Starlink constellation, a target for somebody that wants to disrupt that, yeah.

Alex Gizis: And disrupting orbital constellations is not difficult, right? Back in 2019, India famously shot down a satellite, which, as I recall, didn't make anyone happy, right? Like, please stop. We know you can shoot down satellites, right? I mean, once you blow up a satellite, you have these little pieces of metal whizzing around that super high speed, which can take out other satellites, leading to more pieces of metal whizzing around.

And we're starting to have a lot of satellites, right?

Brian Prodoehl: Yes, there's a lot of metal floating up there. And so it's...

Alex Gizis: SpaceX now has more than 6,000 satellites. Amazon just announced they're going to put up 3,000 more satellites over the next two years. There's a lot of satellites!

Brian Prodoehl: Yeah, there's a lot up there, and it can certainly lead to some cascading situation where you have a bunch of satellites that are destroyed, and their debris destroys a bunch more, and it destroys a bunch more, and pretty soon all that's up there is a cloud of metal.

Alex Gizis: As someone on Reddit observed, all you need to do to take down one of these constellations is to put a rocket full of gravel into the same orbit as the satellites and then just step back and the gravel will take care of everything. So it's a dangerous game like militarizing space is not such a great idea.

So there's another funny thing here. They're spy satellites, they fall under the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office of the U.S. government. And their director said, and this is actually a quote, "you can't hide because we're constantly looking" about these two Starshield satellites spying on everyone all the time. It seems like an odd thing to say, or to admit, or to brag about.

Brian Prodoehl: Yeah, it's tough to know if it's just bravado, or if that's really how he feels, or if he's just... It's tough to say, but it is an interesting thing to say. I think usually directors of the NRO have been pretty quiet and not really in the limelight, but here we are.

Alex Gizis: You almost imagine that as one of the spy people, everything he says must be a lie, right? So if he says they're not spy satellites, and I would assume they're watching everything, but since he says they're watching everything, does that mean they don't work? I'm never going to figure it out. I can't go down these rat holes.

Alex Gizis: So Is Elon Musk controlling the spy satellites?

Brian Prodoehl: So it's not completely clear. Believable rumors have it that the NRO is controlling them and they're at kind of a different elevation than regular Starlink, so it sounds like no.

Alex Gizis: Yeah, that would make sense that SpaceX gets them up there and then they hand them off. I mean, you wouldn't want to know, right?