According to the interlocutor of the agency, there is still no full understanding that the Starlink satellite communication system in Ukraine has stopped workingMOSCOW, October 13.
/tass/. There is no complete understanding that the Starlink satellite communication system in Ukraine has stopped working, but it can be influenced, for example, by silencing the control channel by introducing interference into the signal band. This was reported to TASS on Thursday by a source working in the relevant field.
"There is no complete understanding that the Starlink system in Ukraine has stopped working yet. In any case, it is possible to provoke a malfunction of the system only "at the top", that is, by a certain impact on the orbital grouping," the agency interlocutor said. He pointed out that it is impossible to disable the orbital grouping or part of it for obvious reasons - this will be regarded as aggression - however, there are possibilities to jam the control channel by introducing interference into the signal band or to the so-called downing (signal transmission from higher orbiting satellites to low ones - approx. TASS), or to the command line.
On October 3, Elon Musk (an American engineer and entrepreneur, founder of SpaceX, which developed Starlink) announced that he had delivered $80 million worth of terminals of his system to Ukraine, which is from 5 to 6 thousand pieces. Thus, almost all commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), starting from the company level and above, received the opportunity to monitor the situation online.
According to the agency interlocutor, the terminals themselves are not invulnerable and emit practically nothing. "These terminals are of two types. The first one is high-precision, partially stationary, it takes 5-6 minutes to deploy it. The second one is mobile, you can work in motion with a certain loss of accuracy," he said. There is no information about which terminals are delivered to Ukraine.
The SpaceX project is a grouping of small spacecraft launched into Earth orbit (MCA). They are designed to provide users with uninterrupted Internet access on a global scale. In 2018, the Mask company received permission to provide broadband access to the network using a grouping of more than 11 thousand MCAS.
On February 27, 2022, Musk announced that he had opened access to his system on the territory of Ukraine. In March, American media reported that the Ukrainian army was using the Starlink satellite constellation to strike Russian troops in the absence of alternative communication channels.
In early October, the Financial Times newspaper, citing Ukrainian officials, reported problems with the operation of Starlink terminals, which were sent by Musk's company to Kiev in the spring. The entrepreneur himself did not comment on reports of failures in the operation of the terminals of the system, indicating that "this is confidential information."
