The Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, two of South Africa’s most powerful partners in the BRICS economic alliance, are allegedly secretly planning to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink.

A host of internal documents from summits between the two countries held in 2023 allegedly show plans to disable Starlink’s network, as the satellite Internet provider is seen as a national security threat.

These documents were obtained by The Insider, which investigated the matter together with Le Monde and Der Spiegel.

They allegedly revealed that China was providing significant and ongoing military support to Russia, despite its public denials that it is doing so.

Starlink was a major topic in the documents, which the report indicated were one secrecy level above public release and completely internal to both the Chinese and Russian governments.

SpaceX’s satellite Internet network is the primary means of communication on Ukraine’s battlefields. The American company has delivered more than 40,000 Starlink terminals to the defenders since 2022.

Ukraine’s defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said in September 2023 that Starlink had become the “blood of our entire communications infrastructure.”

Russia does not have the same capability, as SpaceX disrupted the unauthorised use of its ubiquitous, high-speed satellite broadband network by Russian forces in Ukraine earlier this year.

It is believed that the lack of Starlink capabilities has significantly damaged Moscow’s efforts in Ukraine, causing confusion among soldiers and giving Ukraine an advantage in field communications.

On the Chinese side, SpaceX and its constellation of over 10,400 satellites in low-Earth orbit are of significant military importance to the United States.

SpaceX is the Pentagon’s largest space contractor, responsible for building and flying U.S. spy satellites into orbit. SpaceX also supplied Starshield to the U.S. government.

Starshield is SpaceX’s secured satellite network for government entities, which the company said uses Starlink technology to support national security efforts.

“While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is for government use, with an initial focus on three areas: Earth Observation, Communications and Hosted Payloads,” SpaceX said.

“Starshield uses additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements.”

China and Russia’s plan to “kill the constellation”

Slide of the Starlink presentation obtained by The Insider showcasing the network’s constellation and capabilities.
Among the secret documents, there is an entire presentation devoted to Starlink and how to counter its capabilities. The Insider reported that China prepared that part of the presentation.

Specifically, it was prepared by two researchers from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), China’s principal state space contractor.

The presentations contain text in both Chinese and Russian, and include information about Starlink and SpaceX, beginning with Starlink’s origins and ending with its military infrastructure capabilities.

It highlighted the power of Starlink: It provides a backup navigation system when GPS is degraded, a platform for high-persistence surveillance and perhaps most importantly, a distributed architecture.

The distributed nature of Starlink makes the network so difficult to disable. There is no central transmitting node to target, no singular ground station to jam.

If Russia or China were to destroy a Starlink relay, it would not meaningfully disrupt or degrade its global coverage.

The researchers from CASC indicated that this resilience is a threat to both countries. They argue that Starlink’s fleet of low-Earth orbit satellites creates a “space blockade” against them.

Finally, the researchers allegedly outlined a three-phase “escalation ladder” that Russia and China can use to disable Starlink’s network and its military threat once and for all.

The first level will make use of joint legal and diplomatic pressure. The researchers outline the scenario as one where Russia and China lobby for global regulations to throttle Starlink.

This regulatory pressure would focus on Starlink’s satellite density, which raises the risk of collisions in low orbit, and argue that the constellation’s further expansion should be limited.

The second level of escalation would see Russia and China physically block access to the orbital slots and radio frequency spectrum Starlink needs to expand.

Russia and China would jointly file for critical frequency bands and orbital slots, using their international influence with regulatory bodies to “obstruct the future deployment of Musk’s company.”

Coordinated military countermeasures against Starlink

Slide describing the physical destruction of Starlink’s satellites. Note the image of space debris. Source: The Insider.
The researchers also allegedly proposed a coordinated military countermeasure: deploying a joint electromagnetic-jamming architecture to block Starlink in designated geographic areas.

According to The Insider, this would merge the two countries’ separate anti-satellite programmes into a single system with common technical standards and complementary coverage.

The final level of escalation was allegedly a military attack on Starlink and SpaceX, with the document proposing that Russia and China begin by launching a cyberwar against the network.

It outlined the possibility of attacking Starlink using “access spoofing, virus infection, and the exploitation of vulnerabilities” to infect it with malware from end-user terminals.

The malware would propagate across the Starlink network and paralyse it. This step is followed by the physical elimination of the satellites themselves.

In this, the researchers outline “low-cost” methods to take down the Starlink constellation. The satellites themselves are cheap to manufacture and replace.

“If the constellation’s resilience comes from its numbers, the answer is a weapon cheap enough to knock out satellites faster than SpaceX can launch replacements,” the report stated.

“The slide doesn’t specify what type of weapon this might be, although it could theoretically consist of a single rocket munition that disperses clouds of high-density projectiles such as ball bearings.”

Another potential method that The Insider speculated could be used to attack Starlink is to ram its satellites with hundreds of low-cost, shoebox-sized cubesats.

“The presentation says nothing about the humanitarian cost of taking down a network relied upon by aid organisations, remote hospitals, journalists in conflict zones, and fishing fleets in dozens of countries,” it said.

“Instead, the documents urge the two countries to pursue all three tracks jointly and to widen the coalition, drawing in ‘relevant interested countries’ to what it openly calls a technical alliance against Starlink.”

Source: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/broadband/657839-south-african-allies-allegedly-in-secret-plot-to-attack-and-destroy-starlink.html?source=newsletter