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| ▲ | EthanHeilman a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere. The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures. | | |
| ▲ | spacemule a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector. | | |
| ▲ | EthanHeilman a day ago | parent [-] | | Thanks for your comment, I know the ionosphere is used in Electronic Warfare but I didn't realize it was so limited in frequency. Is there really is no way to reflect signals off the ionosphere out of phase so after reflecting they interfere into a higher frequency? |
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| ▲ | H8crilA a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just to add more details. Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt. | | |
| ▲ | HNisCIS a day ago | parent [-] | | This assumes you're jamming very close to the dish. The trouble with jamming is you have to deal with the inverse square law so you really can't deny very much area. If they have a fleet of hundreds of high power modern directional jammers they could degrade this or other networks, but they're just not going to have that kind of sophistication. | | |
| ▲ | H8crilA 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh, I was thinking of jamming the receivers of the satellites. Should have written it explicitly, it is indeed not clear. | | |
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| ▲ | scoofy a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them? | | |
| ▲ | lukan a day ago | parent | next [-] | | In short, likely no(unless the satellites are really sensitive). Otherwise lasers would have negated the fear of ICBMs long ago. Because the atmosphere absorbs a lot of energy of the laser beam and focusing the laser beam to such a distant target is not easy. So you cannot just use some high powered lasers, as it would be just a bright spot at most. It would be different, if the laser would be space based, but that is out of reach of Iran's capabilities. They might have anti satellite rockets, but using them against US property in space would create other problems for them. | |
| ▲ | Yizahi a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Cheaper to launch a barrel of metal trash to the Starlink orbits. Or a few barrels. Iran has rockets for that. | | |
| ▲ | m4rtink a day ago | parent | next [-] | | There are 9400 active Starlink satellites & they can be launched 28 at a time on a partially reusable rocket. The orbit they operate on is largely self cleaning due to being quite low. The satellites operate in many planes and bands + form a mesh network with laster interconnects. Sure, if you want to try that and bankrupt Iran even more via its militarry rocket program, you can do that and maybe destray a handfull satellites, provided you can actually hit them and the rocket/s does not fail. And you might even get a nice casus belli as a free extra. | |
| ▲ | twelvedogs a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | you might be able to hit one but it'd be pretty impressive, like firing a bullet and hitting someone in another country impressive | | |
| ▲ | Yizahi 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not a rocket scientist, but I guess even a single lunch in the retrograde direction should be enough. You lunch a box of ball bearings with a plastic explosive to spread them out, and then just wait. The cloud will pass over Iran every 12h or and will stay in orbit for quite a few weeks, since the orbit is even higher than ISS reboosting once a month, and balls are highly aerodynamic compared to the Starlink flat sails. The cloud won't be very big, but it will repeatedly swipe through quite a lot intersecting prograde orbits. I guess the chance would be quite high. Iran can also split payload into smaller boxes and "deploy" then in sequence while the second stage is firing, then detonate them, to spread out even more. |
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| ▲ | inglor_cz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Possible, yes, but the Iranian government almost certainly isn't capable of doing so, much less across the entire country. Even Russians don't seem to be able to jam Starlink on the Ukrainian battlefields. China, maybe. | |
| ▲ | edoceo a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Multibeam too, right? | |
| ▲ | weregiraffe a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites... | |
| ▲ | almosthere a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
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| ▲ | falaki a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front. | | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. Musk proved quite good at blocking Ukrainian Starlink access too, supporting Russia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264 | |
| ▲ | ReptileMan a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Russians are themselves heavy users of starlink. | | |
| ▲ | null_deref a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you provide a source for this claim? | | |
| ▲ | nfriedly a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Not the person you asked, but here's a couple of sources that back that claim: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-starlink-ukraine-gur-elon-mu... https://kyivindependent.com/nearly-half-of-usaid-starlink-te... Also, as I understand it, a big part of the reason USAID was fed "into the woodchipper" was because they were investigating SpaceX over Russian use of Starlink - see https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating... | | |
| ▲ | JasonADrury 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Also, as I understand it, a big part of the reason USAID was fed "into the woodchipper" was because they were investigating SpaceX over Russian use of Starlink - see https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating... The article you linked contains literally nothing supporting your accusation. Instead, it talks about an investigation targeting the aid recipient: >The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals | |
| ▲ | runlaszlorun a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thx for posting the USAID article. The brazenness of it all is astonishing. Thank God for the incompetence. It's like we're doing "Clown Show Mussolini". |
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| ▲ | iammjm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Here, have a video of the russian cavalry with a Starlink attached to a horse. Yes, you have read that right. 2026 btw.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1q7i...
Also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/08/russia-sat... | | | |
| ▲ | esseph a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain... Scroll down to Russian use. Starlink receivers have been found in use in drones by both sides in the war. There's a lot of Open Source intel on this. | | |
| ▲ | m4rtink a day ago | parent [-] | | I guess it is to a degree unavoidable - ukrainian units are using a lot of crowdfunded starlink terminals on the front, so even if you geo fenced usage only to the virtual cells outside of Russia controlled territory, you would also disable ukrainian sets at the front. So if Russians smuggle sets from other countries, they might not be really easy to tell from the "good" sets crowdsourced by the ukrainians and used at the front. As for use in long range strike UAVs I'm sure ukrainian units have specially registered units that will work anywhere but again, Russian long range kamikaze drones you have a smuggled unit that only activates once on ukrainian territory and be used for terminal guidance or reconnaissance. By the time the system spots a new terminal moving quickly in the wrong place the thing would have rammed into a civilian building somewhere. | | |
| ▲ | rasz a day ago | parent [-] | | It doesnt matter where starlink terminals came from, all end up registered with Ukrainian MOD. Btw Poland pays subscription on ~50K of those. |
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| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | TiredOfLife a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just the latest one https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2009240533944947050 | | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Twitter is a good source for this sort of evidence. It’s Musk, all the way down. |
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| ▲ | darubedarob a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | throw0101d a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | gilrain a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That link says the story was retracted. | | |
| ▲ | throw0101d a day ago | parent [-] | | > That link says the story was retracted. Since the original comment was flagged, the original link with the 2023 story with retraction: * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk... A 2025 article, "Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia": > KYIV - During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity. > “We have to do this,” Michael Nicolls, the Starlink engineer, told colleagues upon receiving the order, one of these people said. Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east. […] > After the book was published, Musk denied a shutdown, saying that there had never been coverage in Crimea to begin with. He said he had, rather, rejected a Ukrainian request to provide service ahead of Kyiv’s planned attack. Isaacson later conceded his account was flawed. A spokesperson at Isaacson’s publisher declined to comment or make him available for an interview. […] > As Ukraine’s counterattack intensified, Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 21, 2022, ordered a partial mobilization of reservists, Russia’s first since World War II. He also threatened to use nuclear weapons if Russia’s own “territorial integrity” were at risk. Around this time, Musk engaged in weeks of backchannel conversations with senior officials in the administration of President Joe Biden, according to three former U.S. government officials and one of the people familiar with Musk’s order to stop service. During those conversations, the former White House staffer told Reuters, U.S. intelligence and security officials expressed concern that Putin could follow through on his threats. Musk, this person added, worried too, and asked U.S. officials if they knew where and how Ukraine used Starlink on the battlefield. > Soon after, he ordered the shutdown. * https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown... |
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| ▲ | zamadatix a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The original claim: > The biography, due out on Tuesday, alleges Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea. He is reported to have said that Ukraine was “going too far” in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin. The amendment on the article: > This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast. So maybe Starlink did turn it off or maybe it was just jammed in some way or maybe, well... anything really. All this says is the source retracts the claim and The Guardian doesn't clarify beyond that. Edit: if you click the hyperlink for the name it actually clarifies it as a full on mistake in where there would be coverage. | | |
| ▲ | mcintyre1994 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | They link to their updated reporting: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/12/elon-musk-biog... > On Friday, Isaacson tweeted a clarification, writing that “the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.” > On Saturday, Isaacson said that based on conversations with Musk, he “mistakenly” believed that the policy preventing Starlink from being used for an attack on Crimea had been decided on the night of the attempted Ukrainian attack. He added that Musk “now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy”. | | |
| ▲ | zamadatix a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Good catch, I should have looked closer at the retraction link than I did! | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | throw0101d 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In July 2025 Reuters re-upped the claim of the shutdown: > KYIV - During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity. > “We have to do this,” Michael Nicolls, the Starlink engineer, told colleagues upon receiving the order, one of these people said. Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east. […] > After the book was published, Musk denied a shutdown, saying that there had never been coverage in Crimea to begin with. He said he had, rather, rejected a Ukrainian request to provide service ahead of Kyiv’s planned attack. Isaacson later conceded his account was flawed. A spokesperson at Isaacson’s publisher declined to comment or make him available for an interview. […] > As Ukraine’s counterattack intensified, Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 21, 2022, ordered a partial mobilization of reservists, Russia’s first since World War II. He also threatened to use nuclear weapons if Russia’s own “territorial integrity” were at risk. Around this time, Musk engaged in weeks of backchannel conversations with senior officials in the administration of President Joe Biden, according to three former U.S. government officials and one of the people familiar with Musk’s order to stop service. During those conversations, the former White House staffer told Reuters, U.S. intelligence and security officials expressed concern that Putin could follow through on his threats. Musk, this person added, worried too, and asked U.S. officials if they knew where and how Ukraine used Starlink on the battlefield. > Soon after, he ordered the shutdown. * https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown... |
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| ▲ | bpavuk a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | there are enough Ukrainian sources that did not retract the claim. one of them might point to the original source outside Guardian, but I'm too lazy to search ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯ you might start with Mezha, Channel 24, and TSN. arm yourself with a translator. | | |
| ▲ | zamadatix a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It was the original author who issued the retraction, The Guardian just had enough credibility to follow up on that. That other news organizations lacked retractions does not make the original reporting of the author's claim any less retracted. If there are reports showing the retraction was bogus and there was separate proof contradicting the original author's retraction that would be something else of course, but you can't just say "I swear you'll find them, just keep looking harder!" or anyone could just make any claim up they wanted. Thanks to mcintyre1994 for noting the link in the retraction does actually go into the details of why the author retracted the claim https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/12/elon-musk-biog... | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | rvnx a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | But isn’t Iran under sanctions? Do sanctions not apply when you are the richest man in the world ? | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz a day ago | parent | next [-] | | There is an official exemption for Starlink, and quite logically so, because Internet access outside government control is actually bad for the mullahs and somewhat advantageous for the US. | | |
| ▲ | syncsynchalt a day ago | parent [-] | | I didn't know this, so I pulled up a cite for anyone else interested: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-expands-sanctions-exception... | | |
| ▲ | rvnx a day ago | parent [-] | | Thank you both! I understand it better now. This is not Elon bypassing the rules but rather that the US wants to support the protests so they make an exemption; so it makes sense from a foreign policy perspective. I really didn't think it like this. | | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's the exact same reasoning that drove the NSA to build Tor. Like, enabling widespread internet use in Iran that cannot be censored has been policy for the US. |
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| ▲ | helloaltalt a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I hate the guy but I will genuinely let it pass if this means that we outside people can know what the fuck is actually happening at ground level in Iran and starlink adds even a 0.1% contribution to it. I hate Elon a lot. but I will hold my grudge some other day if that means that starlink can help outside world to know more and raise internal resistance and support. Edit: thanks for the downvotes team, turns out that the world is really short and I was reading an forbes article sent to me by someone in here and Ima quote it The protests inspired the U.S. Treasury and State Departments to provide an exception to sanctions for communications services, and three days later, Musk turned on Starlink service in Iran. “It requires the use of terminals in-country, which I suspect the government will not support, but if anyone can get terminals into Iran, they will work,” he said at the time. Musk and SpaceX did not respond to a comment request. So tldr: US made special exception considering the protests (the protests are of the "People had taken to the streets over the police killing of 22-year-old Mahsa" |
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| ▲ | adrianpike a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it. | |
| ▲ | throwaway894345 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right? | | |
| ▲ | BenjiWiebe a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Well the better your beam is directed, the less lateral noise there is. A simple 3 element yagi has <1% of the power to the sides. It has more of the power straight behind it, but still 1% or so of the main lobe. | | | |
| ▲ | everfrustrated a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From what I read, the Russians were targeting Starlink terminals based on the built-in wifi access point not the Starlink frequencies. | |
| ▲ | runlaszlorun a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I read the satellite has an omnidirectional antenna? |
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| ▲ | Noaidi a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Destroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions... | | |
| ▲ | bhhaskin a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Iran does not have that capability. But that would also be an act of war. | | |
| ▲ | Noaidi a day ago | parent | next [-] | | No, it wouldn’t be an act of war, it would be “a military operation”. | |
| ▲ | octoberfranklin a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Flinging spacejunk pollution into orbit is extremely simple if you have rockets. Iran has lots of rockets. Iran also has basically zero of their own satellites in orbit that they care about. Spacejunk is a highly asymmetric tactic. | | |
| ▲ | bhhaskin a day ago | parent | next [-] | | They don't have that many rockets that are capable of orbital flight let alone an ASAT capability. Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except
Both cars are invisible most of the time.
They’re moving 17,000 mph.
The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges.
If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles. Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part. | | |
| ▲ | octoberfranklin a day ago | parent [-] | | > Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car Um no. Imagine rendering a highway unusable by driving a semitruck full of tire spikes down it and dumping them out the back. No precision required. | | |
| ▲ | m4rtink 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Um, no - if you do this on suborbital trajectory you totally obliterate a bunch of empty space for the <10 minutes until all your garbage falls back. If you actually manage to make it into an orbit (with a much much bigger and much more expensive rocket) you will most likely do the same (eg. not hitting the intended satellite) with the added bonus of littering random orbits over time and hitting random satellites. And if you want to say "they will deny orbit for everyone!" - well, good luck without far too many orbital class rockets for anyone of their size to have. Not to mention Starlink orbits being (as alterady state so low they are self-cleaning), GPS orbits being far too high to even reach, let alone to saturate with garbage & same for GEO sats. |
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| ▲ | yehoshuapw a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | they do have satellites. I'm less sure about how much they care about them - but they are not cheap | | |
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| ▲ | Noaidi a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | |
| ▲ | some_bird a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites! It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space.
On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one.
On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear... | | |
| ▲ | lxgr 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible. > On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know. | |
| ▲ | m4rtink a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Starlinks are in self cleaning orbits & are actually being moved even lower due to solar minimum & better capacity: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/spacex-lo... And any weaponized junk schrapnel a DiY iranian ASAP missile would deploy would be sub-orbital and would all come down in a couple minutes. | |
| ▲ | octoberfranklin a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | GPS is in geosynchronous orbit, insanely far from the Earth's surface. You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent [-] | | Nitpick, GPS is about halfway to geosync. Your point stands. |
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