Satellites that are part of the Starshield constellation, essentially a military twin to Starlink made by SpaceX but owned and run by the U.S. government’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), have been caught sending signals that could step on communications to commercial satellites. 170 of the Starshield satellites have been detected within the 2025-2110 MHz range of the electromagnetic spectrum, reserved by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union for sending signals the other direction: from the Earth up to orbit. The Starshield broadcasts, which violate that standard, could interfere with an organization’s ability to send commands to its own satellites.
As reported by NPR, this was all discovered quite by accident by an amateur satellite tracker, Scott Tilley. His inadvertent discovery raises a lot of questions about what exactly Starshield is doing. Details of the NRO program are scant, but according to the joint intelligence-defense agency, we are living through “once-in-a-generation changes” in technology. Historically, the NRO gathers photographic and signals intelligence from space, eyes in the sky that can spy from on high. That has obvious benefits for the military, but the NRO also shares data during disaster relief efforts.
But why would it be signaling down to Earth on the exact spectrum reserved for comms going the other way? Tilley notes that Starshield kept shifting the exact frequency it used, which could indicate that the service is trying to make its signals harder for adversaries to find. I think it’s also worth mentioning that the potential effect here is to disrupt command signals up to satellites… which might be a capability the NRO actively wants. In other words, this whole thing could be a feature, not a bug. Even if that’s the case, though, there’s a risk of accidentally disrupting a legitimate command during a critical moment, like trying to order one satellite to avoid crashing into another.
Militarizing constellations
The NRO wants to get in on the constellation craze that’s sweeping space entities both public and private, but in the process, it’s innovating a whole new operational model. Starlink has already been in use by a number of military forces, including the U.S. Marine Corps and Army Reserve. Of course, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been using Starlink as a critical communications service for the length of their fight against Russia. That has been a fraught undertaking, though, since SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has deactivated them from his satellites before.
That puts a lot of power in the hands of a private company and its less-than-predictable chief executive. Up until now, the Starshield branding has mostly meant military-level encryption that still uses SpaceX-owned Starlink satellites, per Bloomberg. What the NRO is doing instead is purchasing satellites off of SpaceX outright, meaning the U.S. government operates and controls them, not the company. Likely, many other defense and intelligence organizations will follow suit; the Space Force seems very interested in something similar, possibly even diversifying further into satellites made by Amazon’s Project Kuiper as well, per SpaceNews.
That sure sounds like a lot of satellites that will need to communicate with the Earth. As long as they’re using spectrum reserved for military activities, that should be fine. But if Starshield keeps using other parts of the spectrum, especially ones that serve important functions, it could start seriously disrupting critical operations and maybe even causing collisions in space. Whether or not this was an intentional test or an inadvertent slip (170 times over), hopefully this won’t continue for much longer. The threat of crashing space debris is getting bad enough as it is.
