SpaceX’s Starlink Satellite Internet Was Tested by the US Air Force | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX’s Starlink Satellite Internet Was Tested by the US Air Force

teslarati.com

13 pointstoomuchtodo7 comments

Key points:

> The technical viability and utility of beaming high speed, low-latency broadband internet directly into the cockpits of military aircraft is being tested under a program called Global Lightning. SpaceX has engaged the initiative and was awarded $29M to pursue development and testing, far more than any other contract recipient. In October 2019, SpaceX and the USAF began publicly discussing the latest results of that effort to test Starlink’s capabilities in the realm of in-flight connectivity. As reported by SpaceNews, SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell revealed that Starlink had successfully demonstrated a data link to the cockpit of a military aircraft with a bandwidth of 610 megabits per second (Mbps), equivalent to a gigabyte ever ~13 seconds.

> Up next, the USAF has plans to install Starlink terminals and test connectivity with an AC-130 gunship and a KC-135 tanker aircraft.

Iridium was recently awarded a $700 million contract for 7 years of data services by the DoD [1]. That is Starlink's opportunity.

[1] https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2019/09/1...

Getting 610 Mibps of data connectivity to/from a Fighter Jet is likely game changing.

Starlink connectivity is from the jet to a satellite back to a ground station, making jamming the signal much more difficult from Jet to ground. I assume the starlink satellites can bounce the signal from one another as well.

> I assume the starlink satellites can bounce the signal from one another as well.

Not yet, future iteration. Bent pipe currently (Ground->Sat->Ground).

Ah if they could do Ground->Sat->Sat->Ground. You could always have the Sat->Ground communication over the USA.

In that setup, to jam the signal would require equipment between the USA<->Sat link (difficult), Sat<->Sat (even more difficult), or Plane->Sat (very difficult)

I was just thinking about this the other day. I wonder how much Tesla spends on LTE connectivity to their fairly large fleet of cars - (especially given they just recently included Netflix / Youtube over in-car LTE at no cost to the end-user). If these receivers are capable of working in a military aircraft at a high rate of speed I'd bet we see Tesla use Starlink for in-car connectivity once the arrays are mature.

Maybe. Tesla vehicles might get the ground station (phased array antenna roughly the size of a pizza box) built into the vehicle, but you'll pay a premium to turn it on (like XM radio). The margins are likely higher selling data access to StarLink than what Tesla is paying per vehicle for LTE data from AT&T.

I know Elon is all about vertical integration and using Starlink seems like it would be pretty low hanging fruit to wean them off a land-based cell provider and recover some costs - even if those costs are flowing into SpaceX coffers instead of ATT it could be a massive benefit to the Elon family of companies.

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