Fears that Elon Musk is becoming a de facto Star Lord with the ability to define “sovereignty as a service” are bubbling to the surface after an incident pointing toward the singular dependency the U.S. military has on Musk’s Starlink satellite communications constellation.
As reported by Reuters, the U.S. Navy was conducting tests of two dozen unmanned surface vessels off the coast of California when they were suddenly subjected to a “single point of failure” that left the crafts bobbing uncontrolled in the water. The problem was a global outage that shut down Musk’s Starlink system for almost an hour. The incident occurred last August but has only come to light this month. Without Starlink, the vessels were dead in the water.
Starlink photos from SpaceX (Image: Wikipedia Commons)
The U.S. military actually relies on a satellite communications constellation of 480 “birds” called MILNET (aka Starshield), operated by Musk’s SpaceX company, situated in low earth orbit (LEO) that can be viewed as a subset of the much larger Starlink constellation of 10,000 satellites. While little information regarding MILNET is publicly available, it is overseen by Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and tasked with providing a high bandwidth, “heavy lift”, backbone communications network. That isn’t always smooth sailing. Reuters reports that Starlink this month struggled to provide a solid network connection during a swarm test of unmanned boats and flying drones. MILNET also seems to sometimes operate outside of accepted norms, reportedly using uplink frequencies to downlink data in violation of United Nations regulations in an episode last August, according to NPR, that’s indicative of Musk’s flexible interpretation or resistance to government regulation.
Musk’s deep entrenchment into space communications continues unabated. Space Force this week awarded Musk’s SpaceX company a $57 million deal to develop a space-to-space communications system built around a Link-182 protocol for MILNET that would allow satellites to communicate directly with other, bypassing a ground link that may be vulnerable during combat situations. The Link-182 protocol is considered a vital cornerstone of the Trump administration’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense shield.
Musk’s grasp on satellite communications is singular. “If there was no Starlink, the U.S government wouldn’t have access to a global constellation of low earth orbit communications,” said Clayton Swope, a deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as quoted by Reuters.
That global reach means Starlink can influence events around the world. Ukraine credits denial of Starlink service to Russia’s military as the catalyst behind reclamation of territory this spring, the biggest in two and a half years as Russian forces fell into disarray with an inability to coordinate their operations. That’s a flip-flop from when Musk unexpectedly switched off Ukraine’s Starlink service when its military attempted a counteroffensive into Russian-controlled Crimea. Musk’s involvement in Ukraine is being viewed as “wake-up call” in capitols around the world.
On the other side of the world, Starlink service is apparently being denied to Taiwan, a move that critics ascribe to Musk’s business interests in China. Musk has long been dogged as to whether the interests of the world’s richest man dovetail with America’s national interest. The bigger issue, though, is the realization that anything that requires internet access to work is at the mercy of Musk’s on/off button. Starlink now operates in 140 countries.
This amounts to Musk offering “sovereignty as a service,” a phrase coined by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in their new book, “Muskism: A Guide For The Perplexed” which recounts Musk running roughshod over people like Poland’s foreign minister, among others.
“When a single individual owns the infrastructure, he doesn’t need to run a government to shape geopolitics,” write Slobodian and Tarnoff. Musk’s future bet is that sovereignty ultimately will be defined by infrastructure rather than territory.
Musk’s Star Lord ascendancy has not gone unnoticed by countries like China which views Starlink as a threat to its national security and is exploring “soft-kill” counter-measures that include laser weapons and anti-satellite orbiters. Potential commercial challengers like Amazon’s nascent Project Kuiper constellation and Europe’s Eutelsat OneWeb are likely to fall well short of Starlink’s “full-stack” numerical superiority. For now and the foreseeable future, Musk’s first-to-orbit position amounts to an effective monopoly of satellite communications. While Musk may adopt an aw-shucks-I’m-a-benevolent-oddball-Star-Lord persona far to the right of television’s fictional Doctor Who, the reality is that Musk holds the proverbial high ground overlooking the world. That one man holds that spot in space has people looking up.
