Russia has deployed advanced Su-34 bomber jets, along with Tornado rockets and kamikaze drones, to target Western satellite internet terminals across Ukraine. AFP PHOTO / POOL / ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO (Photo credit should read ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP via Getty Images)
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For lionhearted journalists who parachute into hotspots around the world, satellite outfits Intelsat and Satcube have crafted leading-edge “backpack” sat terminals to help them begin broadcasting moments after touching down on terra firma.
The incredibly miniaturized transceivers sculpted by the Swedish space-tech group Satcube, which link up with Intelsat’s world-leading ring of giant satellites in geostationary orbit, 35,000 kilometers above the Earth, allow these parachutists to rapidly transmit high-definition video from virtually any point on the planet.
Journalists are using these super-mobile terminals to report live from disaster zones across the continents, including from Ukraine, whose cities, tv towers and ground-based internet infrastructure have been shell-shocked by Moscow’s unending missile barrages, says Joel Schroeder, a onetime director at Intelsat.
Schroeder headed Intelsat’s decade-long campaign to foster increasingly light, portable transceivers for journalists and first responders venturing into extreme-risk regions, from hyperactive battlefields to earthquake epicenters.
The American Space Shuttle lifts off with one of Intelsat’s super-satellites. Intelsat, which recently merged with fellow sat titan SES, has helped foster leading-edge mobile satellite terminals that courageous journalists are using to report from wartime Ukraine. (Photo credit should read SULLIVAN/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
One of the world’s leading experts on celestially beamed internet connections delivered to terrestrial broadcasters, Schroeder tells me in an interview that foreign correspondents covering Russia’s blitzkrieg on democratic Ukraine have tapped Intelsat’s constellation and Satcube stations since the start of the invasion.
Director of Intelsat’s mobile technologies until its summertime merger with fellow satellite powerhouse SES, which is headquartered in Luxembourg, Schroeder says the satellite designer and its most inventive partners, like Satcube, have been racing to develop compact sat-gear that reporters and humanitarian aid workers can set up in seconds, in areas where missiles have taken out local cell-phone towers and internet cables.
Robert Mellberg, a partner at Satcube, based in the Swedish seaport city of Gothenburg, says journalists despatched by leading American, British, Norwegian and German television studios are now using these mobile terminals to report across wartime Ukraine.
Aid envoys representing the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Red Cross likewise depend on Satcube stations to stay in constant contact with their home base, to coordinate with other rescue workers and to receive security updates on the latest missile target zones.
While SpaceX has grabbed the global limelight for sending satellite terminals into Kyiv, Mellberg tells me in an interview: “At the beginning of the war there were no Starlinks at all in Ukraine.”
Yet before the conflict erupted, he says, Satcube “had established clients with ABC News and CBS News in the United States using our secure terminals and our services.”
“So when the war started they used the [Satcube] equipment they had at hand.”
Journalists opted to deploy Satcube’s transceivers, which are the size of a laptop and simple to activate, because they are “easy to bring out to the [battle] front, and work without any 5G or 4G or fiber connectivity.”
Even in regions that have been pummeled in aerial assaults, he says, “You can easily move around and get connectivity back to headquarters.”
In the early days of the invasion, as Kremlin troops attempted to capture the capital, he adds, a British ITV team began using the Satcube gear to transmit a series of features on Russia’s onslaught and on Ukraine’s widely popular resistance.
Satcube’s almost instant connections, and integrated Wi-Fi, are likely helping save lives inside the mobile field hospitals and makeshift broadcasting centers that now move across Ukrainian cities, even as Russian rockets and Iranian drones streak across the skies above.
“We’ve seen these constant attacks on the IT infrastructure in Ukraine for the last three years,” he says, but Intelsat’s satellites are high above the fray.
Intelsat’s broadband-beaming satellites orbit 35,000 kilometers above the planet, beyond the reach of Russia’s ASAT missiles
Image courtesy of MAXAR and Intelsat
“Of course geostationary satellites are hard to take out,” Mellberg points out.
Since the first days of his campaign to conquer liberal, pro-Western Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has attempted to trap its scholars, statesmen, university students and religious celebrants inside a digital Iron Curtain, bombing the foundations of internet communications while organizing cyber-shock troops to ambush Viasat, the American satellite operator that had been keeping the democracy’s rulers plugged into the Web.
Infuriated when satellite titans Intelsat and SpaceX rushed to provide alternative sat-based internet lifelines to Ukraine’s blitzed citizenry, Putin sent his lieutenants off to a series of UN gatherings to threaten Moscow could begin shooting down any Western satellites aiding the besieged nation.
During the countdown toward the invasion, Russia demonstrated to rival space powers its ability to destroy any satellite in low Earth orbit.
While amassing tanks and troops along the borderlands, the Kremlin fired off a Nudol ASAT missile to crash into a Soviet-era spy satellite; this space kamikaze mission created a hyper-speed minefield of shrapnel that crossed the orbit of the International Space Station, and blasted out a warning that any European or American spacecraft could be similarly targeted.
General James Dickinson, then-commander of U.S. Space Command, said right after Russia’s anti-satellite weapons demo that it posed a risk to the ISS astronauts, who were ordered to temporarily seek shelter inside their escape capsules.
Hyper-speed shrapnel from Russia’s demonstration of its Nudol anti-satellite missile threatened all the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (Photo by NASA/Getty Images)
Getty Images
“Russia’s tests of direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons,” Commander Dickinson said, “pose a threat to all nations.”
The Nudol’s range, estimated to reach up to 800 kilometers into low Earth orbit, could place SpaceX’s Starlink constellation in its cross sights, but not Intelsat/SES’s, which is tens of thousands of kilometers higher.
“When the media companies have been using Satcubes in Ukraine they are using a managed service consisting of many satellites” that make up Intersat’s ever-expanding constellation, Mellberg says.
“It’s actually a multi-satellite service.”
“So it means that even if the Russians take out one satellite or or jam one satellite there is another satellite to choose from.”
Intelsat’s geostationary satellites orbit over the equator at nearly 36,000 kilometers in altitude. Because their movement is synchronized with the Earth’s rotation, they always appear to fly above the same region. (Photo by: QAI Publishing/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Universal Images Group via Getty Images
“The media organizations have good resilience to cover stories,” with around-the-clock broadband available despite the drone wars that criss-cross occupied Ukraine.
Still aiming to blast Ukraine into an informational black hole, the Kremlin has launched an all-out assault on SpaceX ground terminals across Ukraine. Russia’s state-run TASS news agency has been chronicling this campaign, reporting Moscow has ordered advanced Su-34 fighter bombers, Tornado-S multiple launch rocket systems and Lancet kamikaze drones to seek out and destroy SpaceX Starlink transceivers.
Black paper planes are strung across the front of the Iranian Embassy in Ukraine during a protest against Iran’s alleged supply of kamikaze drones to Russia after Kyiv was hit in a series of deadly drone strikes. (Photo by Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Russian drone pilots have also begun targeting foreign journalists deployed to cover Putin’s campaign to annex Ukraine, according to Le Monde, France’s top broadsheet. Just days ago, the Paris-headquartered newspaper reported French photojournalist Antoni Lallican had been killed in a drone attack far from the battle zones in Ukraine.
Russian first-person view drones are equipped with high-resolution cameras that allow remote pilots, wearing headsets connected to these imagers, to identify potential targets.
Lallican, whose Ukraine photos had been published in Le Monde, was wearing a bulletproof vest featuring clear “identification marks,” the newspaper reported, and etched “with the word ‘PRESS’.”
French President Emmanuel Macron said the photographer “was the victim of an attack by Russian drones,” Le Monde recounted, while the European and International Federations of Journalists jointly “condemned what they called a ‘war crime’ and called for an investigation.”
“At least 17 journalists have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine,” Le Monde reported.
Meanwhile, Satcube’s Robert Mellberg says Russia’s sending squadrons of armed drones over Polish territory, and jet fighters into Estonian airspace, is galvanizing NATO nations across Europe to arm for the potential air and space battles of the future, in part by stocking up on mobile satellite internet stations in case their own ground-based systems are targeted in aerial strikes.
“Right now in the news almost every day we hear that this kind of hybrid war is going on with NATO countries.”
“If you listen to German news or English news you can hear that their space assets are targeted by Russian” cyber-soldiers.
“It means that almost all countries in Europe right now are waking up and must take more progressive strategies to overcome this kind of space war.”
As a result, space-tech outfits like Satcube “can see a lot of demand coming out from various governments around Europe.”
“We can see that the defense sector in Europe is accelerating,” he says, “and space will be one important factor to have more defense systems in play.”
And while Russia is expanding its cyber-attacks on Western satellite systems, from orbiting spacecraft to terrestrial transceivers, Mellberg says, “our systems and services are resilient to electronic warfare.”
Yet with the missile and electronic attacks on Allied satellite terminals and escalating Kremlin threats against the spacecraft orbiting the Earth, that means Russia’s first space war with the West has already begun.
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