Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack

None of the original 5 buildings at Telehouse in London have any dishes on the roof but the new Telehouse South a few hundred yards to the South seems to have some on the roof but they don't look like they are for a SpaceX groundstation.

SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.

Here's an example in the UK: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zy61dfdyp5xrq4w1A

It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.

SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.

(I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)

> when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet

Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.

All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)

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.

But the servers are not in space (yet), so the signal needs to come back down somewhere.

It is. But at some point traffic had to hit the ground to connect to other parts of the internet. That happens at these ground stations.

Their phase one was you have a dish that goes to a satellite, but then that bounces straight back down to a ground station. Phase two was to have satellite-to-satellite comms, which they're doing with lasers. I imagine either some satellites can't do this yet, so ground stations are still needed, or they are using the ground stations for something else.

the real difference is cash. they can afford literally hundred launches costing billions upfront and hundreds of millions in upkeep.

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.

I believe many of these sites do not belong to Space X but are rented by companies offering such services. So they uplink for other companies as well and deal with regulatory stuff etc.

In many jurisdictions, you need a license to operate a teleport, and the applications are public and require a precise location.

There's a lot of RF emissions right there.

these seem to be just operator hq locations, not necessarily the station street addresses. but yeah, the locations would be public information.

How would you know you live close enough to one for a physical link with it otherwise? I guess they could put "General 10km area here" but would still be kind of bad for people living on the opposite end of the "general area".

Nobody actually wants to invoke Article 5. The European countries talk a lot, but they don't actually want to do anything serious.

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.

This isn’t new though, and Russia has conveniently provided the west with exactly the avenue to respond. Just further increase support to Ukraine, and make it clear that further sabotage and really anything unfortunate that happens will result in even greater support.

In fact, Russia should be investing heavily in ensuring that nobody else goes asymmetric against NATO countries.

Induction has always been a poor way of thinking

What?

> 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

> My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it.

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.

The last one is the strongest one. Our prior allies know they just can't count on us at all, when it comes to Russia, especially.

It is a sad state of affairs.

Every hybrid attack will increase spending towards Ukraine.

Europe could respond without invoking article 5 though, so it's not really "all or nothing".

That's why USA is bombing Iran without everyone else bombing Iran. Article 5 hasn't been invoked.

It would be interesting to see graphs of how similarly "unprovable" sabotage actions have developed in Russia over the past few years. I doubt we'd ever see accurate reporting out of Russia, but it seems like an obvious thing to do for both Ukrainian intelligence and also for the wider West. It's also be likely to be underreported on because neither the perpetrator nor the victim gains all that much from reporting these kind of things.

Sounds very like what happened in London a couple of years back:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04g5x1wq5vo

There is absolutely no reason why triggering article 5 will end with nuclear annihilation, MAD doctrine remains in effect.

It will lead to a gradual escalation, probably air spaces closed over Kaliningrad, Belarus and Ukraine for Russian planes and army mobilization towards the eastern flank of NATO in the first steps.

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.

Maybe like destruction of Russian military command structure sparing just the silo based nuclear force?

NATO does not need to win a war. They just need to hurt Russia bad enough Ukraine wins.

Invoking Article 5 and winning a war are entirely separate operations.

In terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_Doctrine if article 5 was invoked, one could set much clearer victory conditions - chase Russia back into Russia. Maybe arrest Putin war crimes or something.

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.

>did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?

Neither Putin nor his associates are religious fanatics happy to die for their cause, they're just money-loving strongmen. If faced with real danger they'd much rather do whatever they could to avoid dying, not risk being martyred.

I am pretty sure every bigger German company has active sales team waiting for the end of the sanctions to fly on the same day to Moscow and continue/start new business. Construction materials, cars&trucks, oil refinery equipment, new deeper bunkers… everything is needed in russia. The west doesn’t see an enemy. Enemy of freedom, free speech and free thinking. Freedom to be a gay or autistic person in public. Euros and dollars matter though.

Ukraine is currently striking facilities deep inside Russia.

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.

I'm very curious about the downvoting here, which looks suspicious. I do realize that what I wrote might not be popular with a certain country (and its online trolling teams), but it is factually correct.