SpaceX chases government cash with Starshield satellites

[EndtheMadnessNow]

SpaceX chases government cash with Starshield satellites (6 Dec 2022)

If Starshield smells like Space-BACN, that's because it probably is.

The Musk-owned space company didn't so much announce Starshield as it simply added it to its website without many specifics, as is to be expected from a satellite program designed with the national security in mind.

According to SpaceX's Starshield page, the satellites will function as a "secured satellite network for government entities" that will use the same basic tech as Starlink, though with extra capabilities focused on three areas: Earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads.

The latter category refers to Starshield satellite buses, the main body of the satellite, being built "to support the most demanding customer payload missions." In other words, Starshield is modular enough to support lots of different types of hardware built by government customers.

The satellites will also have Starlink's self-proclaimed "unparalleled end-to-end user data encryption" onboard along with additional "high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely." 
SpaceX also said Starshield takes advantage of the company's approach to developing space systems in a "full stack … end-to-end" fashion, which it said will allow government customers to deploy new hardware "with unprecedented speed."

Smells like Space-BACN

Much is known of SpaceX's work with the US government, representatives from which have even described SpaceX as relying on the government's own space operations for continued existence - a fact Musk has acknowledged.

The private space firm has been awarded plenty of government contracts over the years, from military satellite deals, to being arguably the top partner in NASA's public-private space launch program, to supplying Starlink terminals to the US government for the war in Ukraine.

The relationship between Musk and the US government hasn't been entirely smooth. Despite the FCC and SpaceX butting heads, the Biden administration has continued to call on SpaceX to do things like supply Starlink terminals to embattled regions like Iran, where internet connections have been cut due to ongoing protests.

And it seems Starshield may have been on the cards for some time, under a different name. DARPA announced a project called the Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node, or Space-BACN, in 2021 with an aim to get all the various privately-owned satellite constellations floating in Earth's orbits to talk to each other using optical terminals.

Fast-forward to August of this year, and DARPA was still going on about Space-BACN, but this time with a purpose: It tapped SpaceX and other companies to get Space-BACN nodes off the drawing board and into orbit.

Starshield's webpage doesn't mention Space-BACN by name, but it does mention the project's goal as one of the things Starlink, and thus Starshield, already has going for it: Interoperability.

According to the company, connections between satellite constellations can be achieved through Starlink's existing inter-satellite laser communications terminal, which SpaceX said is the only communications laser currently operating at scale in orbit.

Those lasers, which SpaceX uses to connect Starlink satellites to each other, "can be integrated onto partner satellites to enable incorporation into the Starshield network" - precisely what DARPA seems to be looking for, and delivered in a way guaranteed to make SpaceX more money.

There are still a lot of unknowns surrounding Starshield, and we've reached out to SpaceX to learn what we can. Among the things that are unknown is whether any Starshield satellites have already been launched or if any governments, US included, have expressed interest.

Mynaric, Redwire, BigBear.ai partner for DARPA’s laser communications program (Dec 6, 2022)



Mynaric selected a cybersecurity tool from Redwire and BigBear.ai for an inter-satellite laser communications terminal it is developing for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the companies announced Dec. 6.

Laser communications supplier Mynaric is designing an optical communications terminal for DARPA’s Space Based Adaptive Communications Node program known as Space-BACN. The agency is working with multiple vendors to develop a low-cost laser communications terminal that is compatible with government and private-sector optical intersatellite link standards.

DARPA’s goal is to enable seamless communications between government and commercial networks in low Earth orbit.

The Redwire-BigBear.ai cybersecurity technology, called Space Cyber Resiliency through Evaluation and Security Testing, or SpaceCREST, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze data and predict threats.

“SpaceCREST will be a critical tool for the proactive maintenance and protection for government and commercial customers building the next generation of resilient space architectures,” said Dean Bellamy, Redwire’s executive vice president of national security space.

“SpaceCREST will be used to identify vulnerabilities that could affect the terminal or disrupt its operation and then find ways to protect against those vulnerabilities,” he said.

BigBear.ai and space infrastructure provider Redwire signed an agreement in October 2021 to collaborate on SpaceCREST.

The companies said they decided to partner due to the growing critical infrastructure in the U.S. that relies on space systems, and the need for advanced predictive analytics capabilities to identify and protect against potential cyber vulnerabilities.

While Musk bird dramas dominate in the media, StarLink is accelerating its roll-out of tens of thousands of dual-use satellites. They've just started switching on inter-satellite laser comms, so ground-based connections become  less important.

The program manager goes into detail about their 'Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node' in a short video from last year:



DARPA Blackjack & Space-BACON programs looks alot like Starlink.


Blackjack Pit Boss [PDF]
Pit Boss is a constellation-level autonomous functionality suite. It can be viewed as a collection of data services hosted aboard on-orbit processors on Blackjack functional layer nodes, or – at a higher level of abstraction – as a space-based data cloud service.

Apart from StarLink's Space BACN involvement, they also have a military satellite program run by a (early) retired four-star Air Force general who is keen on "lethal follow-on that incorporates machine learning and AI to gather and act upon sensor data quickly."


Starlink wiki

General O'Shaughnessy is an interesting guy. You may remember the 2018 Hawaii false missile alert that caused panic & made world headlines.



Guess who was in charge of the entire Pacific Command at Hawaii HQ during this fictional missile attack? Yep, General O'Shaughnessy. Guess who was in charge of NORTHCOM, NORAD bunker mountain, and Continuity of Gov't (military side) when Covid hit our shores. Yep, same general.

For awhile in early 2020 there was alot of talk suspicion given all the Covid panic that the Trump White House operations was going to move to NORAD mountain. The Pentagon reactivated Cheyenne Mountain due to COVID as backup homeland defense headquarters. I mean it made sense, afterall years earlier they ran a military exercise simulating how the military would stop a horde of 'Zombies' from entering NORAD along with CDC Zombie comic book instructions to the masses to shelter in home, don't freakin go outside. The Air Force Colonel (at the time) leading the exercise is the current general in charge of NORTHCOM & NORAD, Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, nominated by Trump, promoted to 4 stars in Aug 2020, And has direct mil/intel lineage to the famous Roswell incident. If D.C. were nuked this general would be in charge of the Country. Spooky stuff.


Circling back to space bacon...

The expanded acronym (SPACE-Based Adaptive Communications Node) seems a little odd, and perhaps a renaming of an older military tactical technology: "Battlefield Airborne Communications Node". The Naval battlefield tactical encrypted data links was my compartmentalized area of expertise in the Navy.

Land, sea, air, and now space for full spectrum dominance. As above, so below. I assume the Space Force primary mission will be to protect those space based assets which in the near future will house the world's banking cartel transactions & later the storage of every human purchase of anything. Digital devices of every kind (your biometrics, your bank account, your Covid passport, etc.) & flavor linked to satellites.



The Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) is a United States private clearing house for large-value transactions. By 2015, it was settling well over US $1.5 trillion a day in around 250,000 interbank payments in cross border and domestic transactions.

It's the counterpart to SWIFT. Given the globalists mad rush to digital currency I would not be surprised if they are going to attempt to move as much of the Clearing system into space as possible. Now, that right there is going to require asset PROTECTION...namely the satellites and what do we see constantly being launched into space?? This may be for the coming social credit digital currency control system where us poor peasants cannot get to it. Charming. Also, for planetary commerce (including on Mars) they will require a digital currency space based infrastructure system. France, UK, AUS, and now Germany all creating their space commands. The technology will drive the militarization and weaponization of space. The new space race has begun.

Of course media stories on StarLink are all largely framed around providing fast internet to regional people and peoples fishing out in the desert to gamers and larping queens.

Tens of billions of dollars, and taking up so much of SpaceX's payloads to give regional people in Australia and the UK faster internet. Yet, one hardly hears anything about all those secret NRO payloads with the spooky occult mission patches going up, except for Elon tweeting his frequent rocket launches with unknown payloads.

Maybe this is the source of the strange world-wide 'hum'? Who knows.



During the emergence of StarLink, industry analysts made statements claiming limited technical capacity, in an attempt to calm nervous Telco and ISP industry execs. It's not hard to imagine downplaying capacity and capability is a deliberate global strategy.

Starlink's threat to wired broadband 'minimal' – analyst

However, it's not like StarLink's capabilities are totally secret though. Musk has signaled how it will likely be the fastest way to get packets of information around the globe no matter where on the planet, desert, sea, Verizon dead zones, in an RV out in the Canyonlands to a Russian gulag...freedom of speech shall prevail, right?




https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1535394359373443073

Yes, and the gamers will love the low latency too. Praise be Elon.

It's hard to see how over time national telcos and ISPs won't get severely hollowed out by a full-functioning StarLink. (in addition to Bezos' own planned constellation of thousands of satellites with Project Kuiper)

Also imagine in any imminent great power conflict how difficult it will be to protect submarine optic fiber links. (Pipeline sabotage) A series of them could severe to the point that MuskNet and BezosNet become the critical networks for most global traffic. 2/3 of the Internet traffic runs under the sea.

Strategically the US would be happy as they go beyond total information awareness (TIA) to even deeper total information control from an infrastructure perspective. A world where connecting to the internet is really via US satellites connecting the world to US-based servers, fully monitored & controlled by the military via AI algos engineered by private multinational corps.


TIA |IAO

The whole system becomes globally critical, but is very dual-use (civilian / military) and with advances in AI, weapons-systems etc it becomes very much a kind of Skynet. And with Elon's Neurolink chip you won't even need a keyboard anymore, nor ever have to leave your home. Oh what a beautiful utopia it will be to experience. /sarc off.



But while technocrat planners & strategists might be happy with this future, it's hard to see how other great powers will accept it. Or that they won't inevitably take drastic action as what we've seen in the news lately.

Chinese Nuclear Anti-Satellite Study Highlights Problem Of Countering Starlink-Like Constellations (Oct 25, 2022)

Soon we'll see those Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon UFOs come out like X-wing fighters to protect the Space assets. I mean the new B-21 stealth bomber looks like a UFO saucer that's been ingrained into our minds since the 50s.

As what we've already seen in the news, there seems to be a reasonably high probability we'll end up with a severe case of Kessler Syndrome.

Perhaps the only upside in a world where satellites can't survive and submarine cables are cut is that everyone gets a....