If someone had asked you early last year to predict the key figures in a hypothetical war between Russia and Ukraine, you probably wouldn’t have named Elon Musk. But as we’ve seen over the past 18 months, the world’s richest man and the mogul behind Tesla, SpaceX and now X, has played a surprisingly pivotal role in the war thanks to Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite broadband network.
First deployed in 2019, the Starlink network now has more than 4,000 satellites in orbit around the Earth, and the company continues to launch a couple of dozen or so on a weekly basis. Unlike previous attempts at satellite internet, what makes Starlink unique is that satellites are much closer to the ground, in Low Earth orbit (LEO), which reduces signal latency and increases speeds. As each satellite covers a much narrower patch, it can
