The military race for low Earth orbit satellites - and why China is behind

In Ukraine, Russian forces have bombarded telecommunications towers and damaged cables but Ukraine's military bases have stayed online.

Some parts of the country have remained connected through a network of more than 10,000 small satellite dishes plugged into the Starlink system, a constellation of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites owned and operated by SpaceX, a private US aerospace company.

Starlink has become such an essential service that Ukraine's aerial reconnaissance unit has reportedly used it to control surveillance drones and lead artillery units to Russian vehicles.

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Like the 1991 Gulf war, the conflict in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of satellite communications to the military. But whereas the US military's campaign against Iraq was guided by geostationary systems, today's technology is closer to the ground and has some big advantages.

LEO satellite systems promise faster and more reliable internet services than their higher-orbit counterparts and SpaceX is one of a number of private Western tech firms aiming to capitalise on those advantages for military use.

From Germany to Canada and the United States, corporate players are either eyeing the potential of the market or are already players.

But China is late to the game in what is shaping up to be an essential technology. Although Beijing has designated LEO satellite internet as a "new infrastructure", the focus has been economic rather than for defence.

As the name suggests, LEO satellites orbit the Earth at a much lower altitude than their traditional geostationary counterparts - up to 2,000km (1,240 miles) as compared with 36,000km.

That difference means a lower latency, or time lag, in the transfer of data.

"If we were having a call over a geostationary satellite, we would have to pause and say 'over' every time that we finish the sentence so that the other person would hear us. With low Earth orbit, you don't have that problem," said James Pavur, a digital service expert at the Defence Digital Service under the US Department of Defence.

Because of their low orbits, LEO satellites do not require internet service providers to eavesdrop into the connection to speed it up and thereby sacrifice data security. "You can just use a VPN over Starlink and be reasonably well secured," Pavur said.

For militaries, he said, that all added up to better situational awareness and better tactical decision making.

The technology is largely being pioneered by the private sector. In Europe, Germany-based Airbus Defence and Space has teamed up with satellite internet firm OneWeb to provide services to the military.

Canadian firm Telesat, partly funded by Ottawa, is eyeing the US Defence Department as a customer for its global LEO internet service, which is expected to start in 2024.

Amazon's Kuiper project also has been approved to launch 3,236 satellites but has been tight-lipped on its plans in the defence market.

In China, LEO satellite internet is a fledgling industry working to connect remote parts of China and countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative.

GalaxySpace, a private start-up in a field of state-owned giants, launched China's first LEO broadband constellation comprising six satellites in March. But state media reports have described them as commercial and made no reference to military services.

Separate state-owned enterprises also launched test satellites for the Hongyun and Hongyan LEO broadband projects in 2018 but little has been said publicly about them since. Another state-owned company, China Satellite Network Group, aims to create a Chinese version of Starlink but was only formed last year.

Richard Bitzinger, a visiting senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said the big difference between China and the West was Beijing's reliance on the state system.

All seven Chinese firms in Defence News' 2021 top 100 defence companies by defence revenue are state-owned.

Bitzinger said China's success in military technology for decades had relied on engaging in joint ventures between state firms and foreign companies, and improving imported technologies.

"[But] an atmosphere of innovation ... still exists in the West, which encourages a lot of risk-taking," he said.

"The big question is, then, do you use that adaptive capability to develop what you might call 'truly innovative' or 'originalist' type of innovation?

"And it's very hard to do that with state-owned enterprises or with top-down type of innovation models because there's a lot more insecurity, a lot less risk-taking."

That capacity for innovation was on full show when, according to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Russian attempts to jam satellite signals several hours at a time were quickly overcome by a software update.

Dave Tremper, electronic warfare director at the office of the US defence secretary, said the rapid response was "eye-watering" and government systems would take much longer to introduce a fix.

Partnering with the private sector also had the advantages of removing some of the cost and bureaucratic pressures on government, Pavur said.

"The reason we see stuff like SpaceX doing so well, in low Earth orbit constellations at this scale is because a project of that size and ambition would be out of the reach of most governments, and even the governments that could have it in reach may not have the mechanisms in place to really do that kind of thing," he said.

Bitzinger said that while commercial satellite operators had partnered closely with armed forces in the West, top tech firms in China such as Tencent, Huawei Technologies Co. and Alibaba had not developed innovative hardware or software that could be used in military systems or for intelligence.

Chinese President Xi Jinping's drive against "disorderly expansion of capital" and crackdown on Big Tech had only hurt innovation by reasserting state power, he said.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Zhou Chenming, a researcher from the Yuan Wang military science and technology institute in Beijing, said the potential for Starlink to be used in further military purposes depended on what kind of payload could be attached to the satellites.

"Starlink satellites are very small and can carry very little weight. So they could only attach simple equipment that has limited capabilities," he said, adding that they performed adequately as communication satellites.

But Wu Zhengyu, an international politics professor at Renmin University in Beijing, told an academic conference in early April that Starlink was an important technology for anti-missile defence when coupled with quantum computing.

Nevertheless, there are real potential costs for companies like SpaceX - Musk has warned that Starlink dishes in Ukraine might draw the attention of missiles.

Starlink terminals also send radio signals that anyone with an antenna can detect, Pavur said. Even when the antenna was directional, signals still radiated in other directions, potentially thousands of miles away, he said. This means that anyone with the know-how can listen in.

The dual, civilian-military use of the satellites also meant they could be difficult to regulate by international law, said Melissa de Zwart, a professor of digital technology, security and governance at Flinders University in Australia.

De Zwart said that while many space assets had been dual-use for a long time, whether such satellites were targetable under international humanitarian law and principles depended on factors such as the military objective and whether disabling them would cause less harm.

"With Starlink and the low Earth orbit satellites, they could be providing a lot of internet connectivity that could be doing things like ... operating military communications, [or] it could easily be providing services to a hospital," she said.

For example, Viasat, a US satellite communications company, said its modems were targeted by a cyberattack on February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The attack cut off internet connection in Ukraine but also that of around 2,000 wind turbines in Germany and European companies relying on satellite internet.

"Satellites are vulnerable, and they have the potential to be military targets, complicated by the fact that many, many of them will be dual use," de Zwart said.

"In many instances, it will be difficult to know precisely what sort of services that they are providing and to whom they are providing them."

"The rules need to evolve and adapt to the complexity of the space environment."

Additional reporting by Liu Zhen

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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