The article doesn't even mention AWS, which I think is the obvious implication being overlooked here. AWS has Government and defense contracts, with DoD notably. This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers (of which there are a lot) and of course, to any point on the Earth. The idea that this is for "underserved communities" is probably a sly nod to battlefield logistics.
They will undoubtedly sell some aspect of Kuiper through AWS. They already have IP addresses and DNS in the AWS product list, and they have all kinds of data transport services.
I don’t know if the government implication is as big as you think, as the US government has been doing secure satellite communications for decades and has already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield. So undoubtedly Kuiper would love a piece of the action but there is already competition and Kuiper is a bit late to the game.
The federal acquisition regulations have fairly strict rules against acquiring duplicate systems. It totally permits buying systems from multiple vendors, but there are interoperability requirements, and these would have to be interpreted and negotiated. If Kuiper wants to provide services to the government, I’d expect that they would have to be compatible with the Starshield user equipment at a minimum. The military doesn’t want to be lugging around multiple satellite terminals to connect to both the SpaceX and Kuiper versions of Starshield. I doubt the government would go so far as to require SpaceX and Kuiper make their constellations interoperable in space, but even just requiring compatibility with the ground terminals is a pretty big hurdle.
SpaceX has proprietary info in practically all of their comm layers, so interoperability is not easy. The government probably did not buy full rights to the protocols. So the first step to Kuiper getting a piece of the pie is convincing the government that it is worth paying to license SpaceX’s comm standards so Kuiper can use them. That is not an easy task.
There are a dozen hypothetical ways that Kuiper might get a portion of government programs, but the fact is that SpaceX has been embedding themselves into the US government’s space infrastructure for years without competition, and has used that lack of competition to build up a bunch of technical hurdles to purchasing services from other contractors. For the past several years there has been no reason for the government to spend money and effort to prevent these hurdles because there was no other contractor that might be able to offer a similar service. So SpaceX has got a pretty sweet position right now, and Kuiper is going to have to invest heavily before the government changes course.
Starshield is like a private totally separate Starlink for the US government (and controlled/operated by the US government). I am not sure what sort of neutrality you were expecting as US government is SpaceX's biggest customer and is obviously a critical infra company.
Why would you assume any space company anywhere can be neutral to their nations military. These companies depend on government for far too many things (projects, permits) and are much more tied to government than other industries.
Currently “space” as an AWS region is only ground stations communicating with satellites the customer owns, so nothing from AWS is actually in space. But with the way AWS allows customers to configure their network configurations, I expect there will be an option to communicate between AWS data centers using Kuiper for people who have a use case and care enough to pay for it. I expect it to be pretty niche, as most customers are fine with public fiber and Amazon’s own fiber, but I’ll bet they sell it to someone, like a remote AWS Outpost with Kuiper terminal on it for people that work in the field.
I suppose in any realistic scenario we should assume that the enemy may be listening to all our communication at all times. This is the assumption behind such daily things as WPA3, SSH, TLS.
Yes, so all in all for satellite vs. fiber in backbone applications, I'd say that it's a wash (or slight win for fiber) when it comes to security, and a definitive win for fiber when it comes to jamming resistance.
In the field it's a completely different story, of course – you can't always pull fiber (although it does appear in unexpected scenarios, such as fiber-operated UAVs or torpedoes).
Wire-guided drones and missiles seem to be increasingly common, probably due to the cost of instantaneous radio jamming being so low - that's a short-lived signal that is going to a vehicle near your adversary. Torpedoes make a lot of sense for other reasons because radio has a very hard time getting through water (and things like sonar have too low bandwidth as well as giving away your position).
However, it's very easy to cut a fiber in a way that is hard to repair. Fishing trawlers do this all the time. In that sense, fiber can be "jammed" (sabotaged) much more easily than radio/satellite.
FHSS[1] has made jamming difficult in US military communications for decades. It doesn’t make it impossible but jamming the entire spectrum is nearly impossible at scale for almost everyone. At best it would affect small areas until the US sent rf seeking missiles (HARM are designed for this) at the jammer source. Also note that modern satcom like Starlink uses AESA digital phased array antennas much like a F35’s radar. It’s so much more complex than legacy analog stuff.
It’s easily possible to jam a frequency spread signal from a satellite, assuming you can get the directionality right (i.e. you need to be in the beam of whoever you’re trying to jam, or you’ll need even more power to overcome their receive directionality, which is never perfect).
Signal strength (satellites are power constrained) and distances involved are tough.
GPS uses frequency spreading too, and locally jamming that (even the military version with a secret/unpredictable spreading code) is trivial, for example.
US military gps is encrypted and heavily used FHSS. It is jam resistant, and can’t be jammed without significant expertise and know how.
Russia has some of the best EW chops in the world (after the NSA perhaps), and they struggled to successfully jam Starlink after some defensive work was carried out by SpaceX. They use Starlink in the “sea baby” USVs that attacked Crimea just last night.
GPS uses DSSS, not FHSS. The military version has a higher processing gain than the civilian signal, but it can still be overpowered by sheer signal strength.
I'm not saying that that's trivial against moving targets in a large area (especially if they can use directional antennas), but it's still very possible. GNSS jamming is a big concern of the militaries of the world, and there's currently somewhat of a renaissance of high-precision inertial navigation systems as a result.
Jamming a stationary satellite terminal, if you can get reasonably close, doesn't seem harder than cutting a fiber (although as a sibling comment has mentioned, jammers have the nice property that communication is restored once they're disabled, unlike damaged cables, so maybe the two can complement each other?)
With some satellites, you just point a dish at the satellite and get the same data everyone else gets. With more advanced ones, you have to be in roughly the same place as the intended recipient because the satellite has different antennas pointed in different directions. In either case, it's presumably encrypted data so what good is intercepting it?
If you have a dedicated circuit, you can send dummy data 24/7 to mitigate any traffic analysis. Even if you don't, you configure each link to send dummy data, so eavesdroppers can't do any traffic analysis without compromising the node itself.
Traffic analysis tells your adversaries who you communicate with, and what apps you're using, inferring what communication was caused by what preceding communication, etc which lets your adversary guess what the communication was about. Esp when compared against what other people is communicating about just then.
Yes, which makes it a particularly bad idea to run unencrypted metadata over satellite connections if it can be avoided – and that's the case for communication between data centers, arguably.
That might change once lasers or extremely tight radio beams can be used for ground stations, but for the latter you'd still need to make sure that nobody can get reasonably close to your ground stations, which might be possible for remote military bases, but probably not for AWS data centers.
