Musk’s Starlink in Iran only works if things don’t go wrong in outer space

It is difficult to know exactly what has been happening in Iran since the government Turn off the internet on January 8, plunging a nation of more than 90 million people into digital darkness.

Raids against Anti-government protesters have resulted in at least 2,600 deaths, although some estimates suggest otherwise The death toll is over 20,000. According to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, there were more than 18,000 protesters arrested.

The protests began in late December in response to the poor economic situation and took on a broader anti-government character as people demanded the end of Ali Khamenei's rule. The Iranian Rial is now the least valuable currency in the world. The country has an inflation rate of around 40 percent, meaning most people cannot afford basic necessities. Iran is struggling with a protracted economic crisis. driven by sanctionsGovernment austerity and the war with Israel last year. Many parts of the country, including the capital Tehran, are affected by a severe and prolonged drought. as I reported in November.

Also the government Cutting telephone lines on January 8th. While the government eased some of those restrictions on Tuesday, some Iranians the ability to make international calls Many people left the country this week, sensibly Fear of government surveillance. People outside the country still cannot call Iranians. Several people in Tehran called the Associated Press on Tuesday to say that text messaging services remained unavailable and that internet users could access local government-approved websites but not international ones.

So Elon Musk's Starlink — which provides high-speed internet access in hard-to-reach places via satellites that receive radio signals from user terminals on the ground — has become a lifeline for Iranians trying to communicate what's happening on the ground. SpaceX did Starlink free for its tens of thousands of Iranian users, but since then Iranian government criminalizes Using satellite internet services such as Starlink last year puts them at significant risk of accessing them illegally.

And yet many Iranians still use it.

According to Iranian internet rights group Filter.Watch, the government has tried and is actively trying to jam signals from Starlink satellites hunting People they believe are using the Service.

New updates to the Starlink terminals nullified some of these The government's efforts to jam the signal. Since Starlink launched in 2022, activists have smuggled terminals into the country, and there are now about 50,000 hidden in the country. Developers have created Tools for sharing Starlink connections beyond a single terminal.

“A big problem with Starlink is that it ultimately represents a single point of failure for communications,” Steve Feldstein, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me by email. Still, Starlink is the best option Iranians have. “No other tool offers Iranian citizens this level of scalability and affordability,” Feldstein said.

At a time when disinformation and deliberate obfuscation can downplay the extent of death or hide the fact that atrocities are even occurring, satellites – and not just Starlink ones – are proving valuable in uncovering humanitarian crises. Without them the world remains in darkness.

Satellites are a human rights issue

Satellites are virtually the only way to track humanitarian crises when information fails or no one can get in or out. My colleague Sara Herschander reported on this in November Sudanese civil warin which the violence is so severe that the bloodshed is visible from space. Only satellite images and geolocated social media posts provided evidence of the atrocities due to a communications blackout.

Um There are currently 15,000 satellites orbiting the Earth the earth; The number has risen rapidly in recent years as companies set up large satellite networks, called mega-constellations, to provide broadband Internet access. Most of them are in there low earth orbitup to 1,200 miles above the Earth's surface. More than two thirds of them active satellites in low Earth orbit belong to the Starlink mega constellation.

Bear with me for a moment, but if you care about what happens on Earth, there's one thing we need to care about: space traffic.

By 2040 there will be more than 560,000 Satellites in orbit. The more satellites we send up, the greater the risk that they will collide with each other or with pieces of space debris. This could lead to massive service disruptions or, in the worst case scenario, a phenomenon called Kessler syndrome. Then, in a chain reaction, a cascade of new collisions will occur, potentially rendering low-Earth orbit unusable – meaning no more satellites will be launched, our space exploration ambitions will come to an end, and technologies such as GPS, weather warnings and satellite internet will be severely impacted.

But that's a worst-case scenario, and SpaceX knows it. The company announced Jan. 1 that it plans to lower 4,400 of its satellites from 342 to 298 miles above the Earth's surface over the course of the year Reduce collision risks.

In 2023, the United Nations International Telecommunications Union will be founded appreciated that 2.6 billion people – a third of humanity – do not have an internet connection. The UN is considering Internet access is a human right. An underappreciated consequence of the increasing unusability of low Earth orbit is the loss of satellite Internet access and the images that allow us to discern the rhetoric of the past.

Satellite images help us know what is happening in conflict zones like Ukraine and Sudan. When satellites are in danger, truth itself is in danger.