SpaceX - low orbit, and what it does to the latency floor

The trade is not free and it is the reason nobody did this earlier. A satellite at that altitude is only overhead for minutes, so continuous coverage needs thousands of them, constant handover between them, and a launch economics that makes replacing the constellation routine rather than catastrophic.

Read beside the Hughes entry it makes a general point about limits: the geostationary latency floor was never a technology problem to be solved by better modems. It was a consequence of a choice of orbit, and it moved only when the choice did.

The orbit is the technical story. The one that belongs beside the Huawei and Atos entries is what happened when the constellation became a battlefield network. After the February 2022 invasion SpaceX shipped terminals to Ukraine, at first free of charge and with no military contract, and they became the communications layer for a great deal of the war.

In September 2022, according to the biography of the company's chief executive, Ukraine sent six explosive-laden drone submarines toward the Russian fleet at Sevastopol, guided by Starlink. The book's first account said coverage had been switched off within a hundred kilometres of the Crimean coast; the executive replied that the regions had never been activated and nothing had been deactivated, and the biographer then clarified that Ukraine had believed coverage reached Crimea when it did not, had asked for it to be enabled, and had been refused. The drones lost connectivity and washed ashore. The executive's stated reason was that agreeing would have made the company complicit in a major act of war, and that the service's terms prohibit offensive military use.

Which of the two verbs is right - disabled or declined to enable - was argued over for a week and should be recorded as contested, because it is. What is not contested is the part that matters to this catalogue: on one night, whether a stretch of coastline had connectivity during an allied state's military operation was decided by one private individual, on the basis of a conversation with a foreign ambassador and a company's terms of service. No treaty governed it and no legislature was consulted. A vendor's terms of service were, for that night, the law of a battlefield.

The remedy is the instructive part, and it is the same remedy the Atos entry records from a different direction. The US military subsequently contracted for the service on its own terms, and the company began building a separate constellation for the government that would be owned and controlled by it. The customer that cannot accept a supplier's discretion buys the supplier's discretion. Three senators asked the Defense Secretary to explain what had happened; the questions they asked were the ones that apply to every supplier, and the answer was the same as everywhere else: it depends on who owns the switch.