China's Starlink Response

extract

Paddy Stephens writes about space, security, and energy for The Wire China, Resilience Media and others. He’s based between London, Nice and Taipei. This is Part 1 of his two-part investigation of China’s Starlink challengers! The test lacked the cool confidence of the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s dependable workhorse rocket that slows itself down before landing gently on four legs. Nor was it as elegant as SpaceX’s super-heavy Starship rocket booster, which the company has managed to catch on three occasions with two “chopstick” arms. But as the first stage of the Long March 10B slowed itself into a netted metal box on a sea barge in July this year, the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) joined SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin to become the third entity in the world to have successfully recovered a rocket booster. Three soon became four. On its first attempt in December, the booster of the Zhuque-3, a reusable model developed by LandSpace, one of China’s leading commercial rocket companies, ended up as a fireball that smashed spectacularly into the Gobi Desert. Since then, its engineers have clearly been busy. On 18th August, it touched down softly on its extended legs, in size and landing style much like the Falcon 9. The two tests don’t mean China has cracked rocket reusability — it’ll take multiple successful launches of each of the models to prove their reliability. Then it will take more time still to actualize the falling costs and increased launch capacity that reusability has brought SpaceX. Blaine Curcio, the founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting and an authority on China’s space industry, told me that the Long March 10B test is “a meaningful step forward, but the short term impact [on launch capacity] is not huge”. Nevertheless, with these two tests and other commercial Chinese rocket companies due to test reusable models later this year, the US monopoly on reusable rockets is coming to an end. These two tests are particularly important for China’s long-term ambitions to build its own equivalents to Starlink, which will require the kind of launch capacity that, as of right now, only SpaceX has. Starlink’s more than 10,0000 satellites account for 70% of the total satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). China launched 371 satellites in 2025; SpaceX managed 3,169. How China views Starlink SpaceX’s Starlink, the world’s largest low Earth orbit satellite constellation, started operational launches in 2019 and conducted a beta launch from the US in 2020. By the end of 2022, the company had over 3,300 working satellites in LEO — half of the global total. As Ukraine demonstrated the tactical utility of Starlink, SpaceX’s orbital dominance started to worry decisionmakers in Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was concerned that Starlink gave the US and its partners an edge, with obvious benefits on the battlefield. In May 2022, PLA Daily wrote of the constellation: “[Starlink] will provide high-bandwidth, high-speed military communications worldwide, establishing a robust command-and-control network linking U.S. combat platforms.” Even in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, it was clear how useful this capability could be on the front line. As researchers affiliated with the PLA and state space apparatus noted in a piece republished in Security Insider 安全内参, a cybersecurity think tank publication, in January 2023, Starlink had already enabled Ukraine to maintain communication despite disruption, support military coordination and send intelligence from civilian mobile phones via military intelligence to combat units. It had also supported drone operations. Analysts from Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications Technology 北京跟踪与通信技术研究所 (BITTT) , a PLA Aerospace Force research institute, concluded that with its thousands of satellites, “this mega-constellation … poses a major challenge to our existing situational awareness and traditional defense capabilities.” China had no clear way to disable the rapidly growing megaconstellation either. As PLA Daily highlighted, the system offers low latency and is difficult to jam. With thousands of satellites, it has plenty of redundancy to keep providing coverage even if China ever managed to take out tens or even hundreds of its satellites by kinetic means. And it is able to rapidly respond to cyber or electronic warfare, as the Security Insider paper noted. Other worries were more far-fetched, such as that Starlink could be used to threaten and attack China’s own satellites, deepening US dominance in orbit. At the end of February 2022, PLA Daily warned that Starlink could be deployed to disable or destroy other countries’ satellites. The BITTT analysts wrote that Starlink satellites are highly maneovurable and “capable of carrying on-orbit operation devices such as robotic arms to achieve the approach and disposal of space-based targets”. This was pure panic. The PLA, convinced that the US military was “deeply involved” in the development of Starlink, has tended to exaggerate the capabilities of the constellation’s satellites – for example, stating that they could conduct reconnaissance and surveillance of ground targets. It is, however, true that Starshield, a spiced-up version of Starlink developed for the US military and announced in December 2022, has some of these capabilities. Alongside the tactical military advantage Starlink offers the US and its partners, analysts also note that Starlink could offer other strategic benefits to the US to China’s detriment. Satellite internet is rapidly growing globally, offering low-latency connection even in remote areas. That could ultimately reduce the need for terrestrial infrastructure, which in developing countries is often built by Huawei or ZTE. “Longer term, if satellite internet becomes a quasi-competitor to terrestrial internet, then [satellite internet] becomes a really important strategic interest for China – and everyone else,” said Curcio. In the absence of a Chinese satellite internet provider, Chinese companies wishing to use fast satellite internet would be left dependent on Western providers, especially Starlink. There are two main ways China is responding. China is pursuing two strategies in response to Starlink. The first is targeting it: slowing its growth, developing the capability to degrade and destroy it if necessary. The second is building its own equivalents, strengthening its own capabilities while nullifying the strategic edge it gives the US and its partners. It’s worth saying the most extreme form of the first is in tension with the second. If China ever actually tried to physically destroy Starlink, the campaign would generate a huge amount of debris that would threaten some of China’s own assets in space, stifling the country’s space ambitions and ability to maintain its current capabilities by replenishing existing satellites. More on that below. Option A: How China thinks it could (maybe) stop Starlink In November 2023, officials from CASC — the state-owned enterprise (SOE) aerospace behemoth behind China’s first reusable rocket — met with Russian military officials to work out a three-tiered proposal about how to stop Starlink. The details were reported in a recent investigation by Der Spiegel, Le Monde and The Insider. The first proposal was to stop the rapidly growing megaconstellation from getting much bigger, taking advantage of outdated global satellite regulations arguably unfit for a world of Starlink, megaconstellations and superpower competition in LEO. Under this system, ‘paper filings’ – plans for satellite constellations that exist on paper only – become a strategic move to hog orbital slots and spectrum, preventing others from using or filing for them. Claiming sought-after frequency bands and orbital slots through joint filings at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) would deprive Starlink from using them in its further expansion. China and Russia could also build an international coalition to impose regulatory limits on the constellation’s expansion, making the argument that Starlink’s satellite density increased the risk of collisions in LEO. These were proposals — it is not clear that China and Russia have actually acted jointly on this, and no joint filings have been submitted to the ITU. But on its own, China is filing to claim spectrum and orbital bands, sometimes with constellations that exist on paper only. At the end of 2025, Chinese spacecraft operators filed plans for two megaconstellations totalling almost 200,000 satellites. If none of these satellites ever launch, the newly-formed, Xiong’an-based “Institute of Radio Spectrum Utilization and Technological Innovation” 无线电频谱开发利用和技术创新研究院 will just lose its rights to the orbital slots and spectrum, while having blocked off these slots to other users into the early 2030s. It seemed to be part of a concerted protest against Starlink: also in December, China lodged an informal complaint at a United Nations Security Council meeting against Starlink for “gobbl[ing] up frequency and orbital resources, increasing the risk of spacecraft collisons [sic] and space debris.” But if China is trying to stop Starlink’s growth, it’s not succeeding. In July, SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a 100,000-satellite constellation, presumed to be an updated version of Starlink. Launches continue apace. Option B: To be able to turn off Starlink when needed The second level in the proposed escalation ladder against Starlink was for China and Russia to develop the means to turn off Starlink at will. The two discussed developing a joint electromagnetic jamming architecture to block Starlink in certain geographic areas. It’s unclear whether this has actually happened, but Chinese scientists themselves seem to be researching ways to jam Starlink.1 The constellation has so many satellites that if a signal from one is jammed, another can easily provide coverage, meaning simple individual jammers are ineffective. One option would be to use lots of jammers at once: a theoretical paper in November from Zhejiang University and Beijing Institute of Technology found that jammers deployed in a grid formation at 20km altitudes (probably drones) could theoretically cover an average of 38.5 km2 per jammer. But from a back of the envelope calculation based on the area of Taiwan, to jam Starlink across the country would require coordination of almost a thousand aerial jammers.2 That might be possible on paper, but seems difficult to effectively coordinate in a conflict scenario. There are other options for disrupting access to the system, as the Iranian regime demonstrated earlier this year when protesters turned to Starlink. To connect to the right satellite overhead at any given time, Starlink terminals need an accurate time signal and location, generally supplied by GPS, which is easy to jam. The regime degraded the system in parts of Iran, limiting Starlink access. In any conflict around Taiwan, China would likely employ GPS jamming to hamper US and Taiwanese GPS-dependent missile and other systems, which could degrade connection to Starlink – and other LEO constellations like OneWeb – in areas subject to jamming. Updates, though, are making the system less vulnerable to GPS denial. New V5 terminals, while not designed to be used on the move, rely on Starlink’s own highly jam-resistant position, navigation and timing (PNT) source instead of GPS. The third and most extreme proposal for joint Sino-Russian collaboration from the investigation was to destroy Starlink. The documents mentioned in the reporting propose starting with cyber warfare to paralyse the system, followed by kinetic attempts to eliminate the satellites themselves. By itself, China seems to have the capability to take out satellites in LEO. The Secure World Foundation says that China has ‘at least one, and possibly as many as three’ programs to develop direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons, and it destroyed a weather satellite with a ground-launched SC-19 missile in 2007. But taking out Starlink via kinetic means would be extreme and damaging to China’s own interests. Space debris is already a serious problem — a mission bringing Chinese taikonauts back from the country’s Tiangong space station late last year was delayed after the vessel was hit by suspected debris. Taking out over 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit would create enough debris to make certain orbits unusable for years, potentially damaging some of China’s over 1,200 satellites in LEO, and making it much harder to launch through these key orbits, thereby hampering China’s own space ambitions. Some analysts are skeptical that China and Russia would even be able to take out Starlink with kinetic, conventional means. As Starlink continues to grow, it will become increasingly difficult to destroy the whole constellation without some insane escalation like detonating a nuke in space.3 The bottom line is that, while some of the PLA’s writings have exaggerated Starlink’s capabilities, it is clearly a versatile dual-use asset for the US and its partners. Perhaps equally worrying for China is how difficult it is to disable. Attempting to take out thousands of satellites by kinetic means would directly hamper China’s space ambitions. More appealing would be electronic warfare techniques, but the constant iteration of Russian measures and Ukrainian counter-measures shows there is no simple stable solution here either. Cyber warfare may offer other options, but Russian hackers have struggled to cause anything more than brief disruption. Russia has developed the Volna Kupol Garant (Wave Dome Guarantor), which can jam Starlink connections across an area of about 20 square km (7.7 square miles). But given how large and conspicuous it is, it doesn’t tend to last long on the battlefield. Russia has recently deployed the system away from the frontline to protect infrastructure from Ukrainian Starlink-enabled drone attacks. Given the cooperation between the two countries, China may well have access to similar technology, but it’s not a silver bullet for jamming Starlink in a conflict scenario. Taiwan does not currently have access to Starlink. The country’s parliament eased foreign ownership restrictions on satellite communications in July, likely to allow Starlink to enter the market. Given Musk’s business interests in China and previous comments about Taiwan, it’s not clear — even if Taiwan did get access to Starlink in peacetime — that access would continue in a conflict. Taiwan already has access to smaller LEO constellations including Eutelsat OneWeb.