How Elon Musk’s satellites have saved Ukraine and changed warfare
@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars —Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space—Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand. Mr Musk replied to him within hours, saying that the Starlink service had been turned on over Ukraine and that the hardware would follow. Within days lorries full of the pizza-sized flat dishes used to access the satellites began to arrive in Ukraine.
By May around 150,000 people were using the system every day. The government quickly grew to rely on it for various communication needs, including, on occasion, the transmission of the nightly broadcast by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Because the dishes (some of which are round and some rectangular) and their associated terminals are easily portable and can be rigged to run off a car battery, they are ideal for use in a country where the electricity and communication networks are regularly pounded by Russian missiles.
When Kherson was liberated in November Starlink allowed phone and internet services to resume within days. Crucially, Starlink has become the linchpin of what military types call C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). Armies have long relied on satellite links for such things.
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