china is preparing to block starlink ??
Defence affairs analysis
China might be preparing to attack Taiwan soon, the US military must prepare all of its critical systems for attacks—including its space assets.
Rumors abound that the Chinese military might be preparing for an invasion of Taiwan. Defense experts have speculated that China’s military, in a prelude to any attack on neighboring Taiwan, will first target key US military installations in the Indo-Pacific, as well as sensitive US satellite constellations in orbit.
In fact, since SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system was first gifted to Ukraine in their war against Russia by Elon Musk in 2022, both China and Russia have been assiduously working on methods to render Starlink inoperable.
While SpaceX protests that Starlink is merely a civilian communications tool, both China and Russia believe that this system is a backdoor next-generation military communications and surveillance platform. They are probably right.
Starlink is a clear example of the dual-use nature of space technologies. What can be used to beam high-speed internet to previously isolated regions in Africa or Asia can also be used to help Ukraine’s military mount an effective defense of their homeland against invading Russian forces. The same systems could be used to keep Taiwanese defenders in a fight with Chinese invaders for far longer than they would last without internet access. That’s because Starlink is a disaggregated, disbursed, and decentralized satellite constellation.
It brings high-speed communications via relatively cheap, easy-to-replace satellites that are spread out above the Earth. This system is redundant by design, unlike most existing legacy satellite systems used by the United States and others. And that redundancy makes it highly survivable in the event of conflict. The brilliance of Starlink—and Starshield, the US military’s version of Starlink—is that if an enemy takes down one satellite in the constellation, it will not end that satellite constellation’s utility.
In other words, the cheaper, smaller satellites that comprise the Starlink constellation are easily replaced. If traditional Chinese and/or Russian anti-satellite (ASAT) attacks were conducted against Starlink constellations, the Starlink system could endure in ways other, older US military constellations could not.
How China Plans to Kill Starlink
So China’s military has been working on proposals to counter the unique capabilities of Starlink. These proposals range from a mix of surveillance, “soft kill” (non-destructive disruption), and “hard kill” (physical destruction) methods—recognizing the challenges posed by Starlink’s scale (over 6,000 satellites as of mid-2025), decentralization, redundancy, and low-Earth orbit positioning.
Bear in mind that these Chinese proposals are still in their early stages of development.
The first thing China wants to do is deploy surveillance systems specifically tasked with tracking Starlink satellites in real time. China plans on deploying advanced spy satellites and other ground-based systems capable of monitoring every Starlink satellite with high precision, including small optical telescopes for detailed observation. Using multiple sources, such as radar or optical sensors, China’s military intends on predicting the orbits and vulnerabilities of Starlink and potentially coordinating with other forces for position guidance.
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