Study: Starlink Could Be Jammed Using Hundreds of Drone Aircraft

One of Ukraine's key advantages in the defense against Russia is the "unjammable" over-the-horizon communication service provided by Starlink, the low earth orbit satcom service provided by Elon Musk's SpaceX. Among other applications, the service has powered Ukraine's long-range drone boats, enabling Ukrainian special forces to dominate the battle for the Black Sea. All major naval powers are developing similar concepts for unmanned, autonomous, remote-controlled and networked drone vessels, and that means a long-term demand for resilient satcom - as well as the means to defeat it.

For an adversary, the 10,000-strong Starlink satellite fleet is a tough nut to crack. The satellites move in and out of view quickly in low earth orbit, and the user terminal hops just as quickly from one satellite to the next. The orbits and the number of satellites in range change constantly and unpredictably. This creates a problem for would-be jammers, which would have to switch just as quickly to match the user terminal's adjustments. So far, Russian forces have yet to find a permanent way to defeat Starlink, despite many attempts and a powerful incentive to succeed: to block Starlink would deprive Ukraine of a key weapon.

However, a team of researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) believes that they may have a solution to this arms race. The team proposes to mount the jammers on high-flying aircraft - lots of them - and target the terminals with narrow-beam antennas. They estimated that with jammer drones flying at about 60,000 feet, coverage per drone would be about 15 square miles.

At this rate of coverage, jamming an area the size of Taiwan - the relevant scenario for Chinese war planners - would take upwards of 900 drones. Even more would be required to add coverage of the Taiwan Strait and Strait of Luzon.

In the event of a conflict, jamming via aircraft would require air superiority and extensive resources, but it could be a more palatable alternative to eliminating or disabling Starlink satellites in space. "Hard kill" destruction of a satellite releases a cloud of debris, with unpredictable effects for everything else in that orbit; even if such strikes were pursued, the constellation is huge and has extremely high redundancy. Chinese defense researchers have publicly discussed the challenge of building anti-satellite capabilities to target the Starlink fleet, responding to evidence of the constellation's military potential and its resiliency.

"As a distributed space system, the Starlink mega-satellite constellation lacks a clear functional center; the failure of a few nodes does not affect its overall functionality," wrote a Beijing-based research team in an article for Modern Defense Technology in 2022. "It is necessary to further develop related technologies and establish response capabilities, strengthen space strategic planning, vigorously research and develop countermeasures, and employ a combination of soft-kill and hard-kill methods to disable some Starlink satellites and disrupt the constellation's operational system."