The Ukraine War Is Testing the Myth of Elon Musk(theatlantic.com)

    >But Starlink isn’t an instant fix, and Musk can’t exactly wave a wand at Ukraine’s internet disruptions. “It’s nice for him to offer, but that doesn’t mean it will actually have a meaningful impact right away,” Brian Weeden, a space-policy expert at the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes peaceful and responsible uses of space, told me. The entire sequence—the plea, the response, the actual effect—reveals some of the limits of Musk’s influence: His outsized reputation doesn't always match what he can actually control.

    >These terminals must be within several hundred miles of ground stations that communicate with Starlink satellites before the satellites beam signals down to those dishes. There are no such stations inside Ukraine, but there are enough in neighboring countries to “provide service to the whole of Ukraine without issues,” Mike Puchol, the chief technology officer at an internet start-up who also runs a tracker of Starlink coverage, told me.

    >Even if Starlink worked perfectly, the use of satellite technology can be risky in wartime, John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, told me. Transmissions between ground receivers and satellites can become beacons for air strikes. “None of this is new,” Scott-Railton said. “The only new thing is Starlink, which has never really been tested in a context of battle.”