The European Union should build its own Starlink

Europa über alles

Starlink is a satellite communications network, owned by Elon Musk, that allows people to connect to the Internet.

According to the Guardian, last year Musk ordered Starlink turned off so Ukraine couldn't attack Russian ships near Sevastopol:

A senior Ukrainian official has accused Elon Musk of “committing evil” after a new biography revealed details about how the business magnate ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast last year to hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships.

According to Ukraine, this allowed Russia to subsequently murder Ukrainian civilians with Kalibr missiles:

“By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian fleet via Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, and children are being killed,” Podolyak wrote.

Ukrainian Naval Drones

The Ukrainian naval drones in question looked like this:

The Starlink antenna is the square-shaped object towards the back.

It makes sense for Ukraine to use a Starlink antenna as otherwise they would have to use other means to communicate with the drone, possibly relaying signals through aerial drones. This can be done but takes time, costs money, and makes operations more complex (and therefore more likely to go wrong).

Elon Musk

Some people have reacted angrily towards Musk, calling him a "traitor" or using similar language.

That may or may not be a fair characterisation of him, but I'm not really interested in whether he's a traitor. To me, a more interesting question is what can we do to avoid this happening in future?

The European Union

By "we" I principally mean the European Union as that is the main organisation for co-ordinating European activity. (On a personal note, I used to be an EU citizen until the UK government took that citizenship away, against my will and against the will of Scotland; and I see myself as European.)

Musk was able to cut off Starlink because he owned it. The fix, therefore, is for the EU to own and control a similar competing system. Starlink cost USD 10 billion to set up, which sounds like a lot, but if the EU took 10 years to build its competing system, It would cost 0.005% of its GDP over that period, which is equivalent on a personal level to the money one loses down the back of the sofa.

Since this would be a quasi-military program, it would make sense for the satellites to have other functions, e.g. spy satellites with visual/IR/radar grounding imaging. It might make sense for this to be part of the Galileo programme as this is another EU satellite system with military applications.

It has long been the view of this blog that the European Union needs to control its communications and computing infrastructure. For example, here I argued:

the EU needs to achieve technological independence throughout its computing and communications infrastructure. This needs to be done at several levels:

Integrated circuits for example CPUs, graphics and AI co-processors.

Assemblies of circuits such as circuit boards, computers, mobile phones.

Operating Systems. There needs to be an EU operating system, with versions for servers, desktop/laptop computers, tablets and phones. It needs to be open source, developed within the EU, be secure against hacking, and enable secure encrypted communications by default. It makes sense for this to be based on Linux.

Network infrastructure, including colocation, internet hosting services, cloud services like AWS or Azure, etc.

Social Media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok etc.

Internet-based services and APIs such as Google search, Gmail, Google Maps (and its API).

The EU is slowly (very slowly) realising it needs to control its IT, and the Starlink fiasco may be the push it needs to move quicker.