Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack(notesfrompoland.com) |
Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack(notesfrompoland.com) |
These are the large clusters of antennas that communicate with the satellites and connect the Starlink network to the Internet on Earth. Looks like one of these was set on fire.
https://starlink.com/support/article/45d1d256-171e-0f67-4895...
From the perspective of network design, the fact that this certainly is not exhaustive list of places where SpaceX has physical DC presence and physical reality it comes that some of these datacenters are selected based on the fact that the ground station is somewhere nearby (I would be surprised if there is even just one place on the list where nearby means "on the roof", because there is a lot of technical, logistical and administrative reasons why you do not want to put such a thing at a roof of a datacenter).
Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
1) you send a signal to the satellite
2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
The signal can go from:
customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.
the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
There's a lot of RF emissions right there.
https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-attacks-disrupt-intern...
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/lka-brandanschlag-muenchen-...
I must say a web/world without them and the quatari /iranian influence operations would be pleasant.
When they have to conscript in Moscow Putin will be in trouble.
One thought is to pretend to not know that it's Russia, and invoke it against an "unidentified adversary".
Macron famously said that he would "have to send troops to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has captured even more territory and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.
Probably not as likely as you think.
First, these things intentionally fall short of clear "armed attacks" and are designed around plausible deniability.
Second, Europe/NATO are not looking for a fight. Russia is in a bad spot right now, but NATO is not in a great spot for a kinetic conflict with Russia either.
Lastly, I don't think NATO countries are eager to test America's willingness to defend Europe under the Trump administration because they already know the likely answer when they call for help.
It is a sad state of affairs.
The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.
If you know something the world doesn't know, you'd better get cracking at updating the Wikipedia article documenting the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
also, a friendly reminder that all willing parties are free to go fight Russia right now. https://ildu.mil.gov.ua/
Sufficient assistance can be given to the Ukrainians without deploying troops to the battlefield so that the Russians are pushed out completely. Losing Crimea would be Putin's death knell.
It would still be extremely unpleasant, painful and expensive, of course; winning an exchange of blows still means taking a load of punches to the face. So the true winner would be China.
The defender is fundamentally at a disadvantage with all or nothing clauses like article 5
That's why USA is bombing Iran without everyone else bombing Iran. Article 5 hasn't been invoked.
What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.
I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare or hybrid warfare is designed to avoid full military action. But the tit for tat escalation in kind can lead to real war.
No one wants to go near that because everyone will reliably die.
When Israel starts bombing Turkey with US made weapons, NATO may invoke Article 5 again but I doubt the US will do anything.
This might've been the reality three years ago. A lot has changed in the US in the last three years.
Nobody wants to invoke article 5, I do agree. But I think they might understand that it's more likely that A5 is invoked than the US brokers a peace to with anybody. They're the department of war now.
Still seems like any of Russia, Ukraine or Ukrainian citizens on their own initiative could have dove it.
Frankly, "the West" doesn't care about Russia. They were a gas station masquerading as a country, but now they aren't even a gas station. Let's just fund Ukraine to the gills and in no time they won't even be good for petty vandalism.
Yes it must be obvious for Ukraine to use people who are already in Russia to help with local sabotage. It could be as as crude as putting rocks on a rail line or as simple as floating toy balloons across a strategic installation until the local Russian defenses get tired of the false alarms, stop paying attention and don't see an incoming drone.
It's surprising that there are apparently no strong claims of this from either side, but especially from the Russian side. I don't agree that Russia has nothing to gain from arresting people for such activities. Wouldn't it deter others?
> On 6 June 2023, The Washington Post reported that an intelligence agency of an unnamed European "close ally" had notified the CIA of a Ukrainian military plan for a covert attack on the pipeline. The plan was to be carried out by a team of divers reporting to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, but the Post did not report any evidence that it had been put into action. The US reportedly learned of the plan three months before the destruction of the pipeline, and shared the intelligence with Germany and other allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage...
- you got Kushner and his ilk who basically wants to flatten Gaza to turn it into a real estate hotspot to make untold amounts of money
- you got the Evangelical nutcases who legitimately believe that this mess is a holy war and will bring back Jesus [1]
- you got your usual old-school falcons, MIC lobbyists etc. that stand to make a lot of money and/or want this war to happen for ideological reasons
- you got a ton of isolationists who want "an end to the US wars that cost taypayer money"
- you gotTrump himself who openly admires strongmen and (wannabe) dictators, and I think it's fair to classify Netanyahu as both.
And that is a loooot of different to incompatible interests to balance against each other.
[1] https://theconversation.com/evangelical-holy-war-why-some-ch...
It's a significant step to escalate to attacking those countries.
> Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now
It is an interesting argument to choose to invade a country, act with faux outrage when they find allies willing to supply them with arms and then call it a proxy war.
Russia got themselves into this mess. They have an easy way to get out of it.
My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.
That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.
There is no argument that they are neutral.
But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
North Korea is supplying actual troops to Russia, and that doesn't mean Ukraine is at war with North Korea. Belarus and Iran have both supplied arms to Russia and Ukraine isn't at war with either.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Yeah, they probably didn't expect it to turn into that when they attacked - they probably hoped it'd be all over in a week with a regime change in Kyiv. It's now they're thinking, shit, we were goaded into another Afghanistan. Which again, is not a way western hawks are shy of talking about it.
As I point out in a other thread, supplying weapons is pretty normal and attacking random infrastructure in a country that happens to be allied to Ukraine is a significant escalation.
Let me highlight the important part "RUSSIA VIEWS IT AS..."
And that's exactly what they communicate towards their population AS PROPAGANDA.
Whether Putin really sees it that way doesn't matter.
And if stating this makes me a Russian Propagandist, then so be it.
> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?
"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
>> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
> But their [Russia's] problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia
That reads exactly like an argument justifying Russia's actions.
Seems like a completely reasonable analysis of Russia’s motivations. I don’t see any moral justification there.