Elon Musk’s Starlink Stirs Indian Security Concerns

Experts have warned countries about the security risks associated with the Starlink satellite-based internet service given its close links with the US military.

American entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite-based internet service is set to enter India following New Delhi’s decision to assign spectrum on the basis of an administrative decision and not an auction.

India’s decision came shortly after the Starlink owner, Elon Musk, criticised the auction route proposed by Mukesh Ambani, owner of the rival Indian telecom company, Reliance Jio.

Musk had argued that it is international practice (as per the International Telecommunication Union regulations) to award the spectrum administratively rather than by auction. Reliance Jio’s Ambani argued in favour of auction to ensure a level playing field. But the Indian Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia rejected Ambani’s plea.

He announced that the spectrum would be allocated administratively “as per Indian laws, and its pricing will be determined by the telecom watchdog.” Scindia added that deviating from this approach to conduct an auction would set India apart from the rest of the world.

Thus, Musk won hands down, and Ambani lost a huge market.

The Indian internet market is projected to show a 36% annual growth. The market is expected to reach US$ 1.9 billion by 2030. India now has 42 million wired broadband internet users and 904 million telecom users on networks like 4G and 5G. India is the world's second-biggest telecom market after China.

However, internet penetration is still inadequate. Penetration stood at only 52.4% in 2024. There are still 25,000 villages without internet. And even in cities, many areas don't have fibre-based fast internet connection. Therefore, it can be argued that satellite-based internet will definitely help cover the entire country.

Be that as it may, Indian experts are worried that India’s security may be compromised given Starlink’s close links with the American armed forces.

As it is, telecommunication is a very sensitive domain in India. India has barred Chinese companies from entering this sector. Sensitivity is so great that a permit is needed even to use a satellite phone. People, including a erala fishermen at sea and a foreigner, were reportedly arrested for using a satellite phone

Expers ask the following questions: “Would India be able to control Starlink when India-US relations deteriorate? Could Starlink cease its services on the orders of the US Government? Would Indian regulators be able to keep an eye on the use of the Starlink system and ensure that it is not used for espionage or for tampering with vital Indian communications?

India-US relations are at a low now. The US has alleged the involvement of Indian intelligence personnel in an attempt to murder a US citizen of Indian origin, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York last year. The case is now in a New York court and an Indian suspect is in custody in the US. In addition, India has differences with the US over Ukraine, Iran, Russia, QUAD, and now Bangladesh too. Relations could therefore deteriorate.

In his paper entitled “Cyber Threat Landscape Analysis for Starlink Assessing Risks and Mitigation Strategies in the Global Satellite Internet Infrastructure,” Karwan Mustafa Kareem of the University of Sulaimani, in Iraq, says that the technical dangers from Starlink are the following: Denial-of-Service (DoS); Man-in-the-Middle (MitM); Jamming; Spoofing, and Physical tampering.

Kareem emphasizes the importance of encryption algorithms, authentication protocols, and intrusion detection systems in safeguarding satellite networks against unauthorized access and data breaches.

He stresses the need for continuous monitoring and threat intelligence sharing to detect and respond to emerging threats effectively. India has to make sure that it has all these safeguards in place.

India had asked Starlink about its shareholders to know if any country in the neighbourhood with which it was at odds was in the list. India was particularly worried about China and Pakistan, the latter believed to be in cahoots with China. Starlink replied that no neighbourhood entity is a shareholder.

Starlink’s ties with the US military were set out by Yan Jiajie and Yu Nanping in their paper in the Journal of International Security Studies dated September 14, 2024. (See: https://interpret.csis.org/translations/the-u-s-starlink-project-and-its-implications-from-the-perspective-of-international-and-national-security/).

Yan and Yu give an impressive list of projects SpaceX and Starlink have with the US military. SpaceX is Starlink’s parent company.

In March 2019, the US Air Force’s Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation Office signed a US$ 28 million contract with SpaceX requiring the company to conduct military service demonstration and verification using the Starlink constellation.

In November 2019, the US Air Force awarded SpaceX a contract called the Defence Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI), which aims to explore the use of commercial low-orbit communication satellite constellations to build a globally resilient, highly available, high-bandwidth, low-latency communication infrastructure for the US Air Force in space to support various Air Force combat operations.

In May 2020, the US Army signed a three-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with SpaceX to test the feasibility of connecting the broadband network provided by Starlink’s low-orbit internet constellation to the military communication network.

On March 14, 2017, SpaceX won a US$ 96.5 million contract with the US Air Force to launch GPS-III, the next generation of Global Positioning System satellites. SpaceX is to provide launch vehicle production, mission integration, and rocket launching, as well as follow-up value assessment and original research work for GPS-III.

On October 5, 2020, the Department of Defence’s Space Development Agency (SDA) and SpaceX signed a U.S. $149 million contract that includes construction of four ballistic missile and hypersonic missile detection and tracking satellites.

In October 2020, It was announced that SpaceX would get a US$ 149 million contract to build four military satellites for the “Tracking Layer Tranche 0” of the United States’ “Next Generation Space System,” which will be used to provide early warning and tracking information for defence against ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles.

Space X launched the Falcon 9 rocket carrying more than 20 tons of payload into Low-Earth Orbit. The controlled recovery and soft landing of the first stage of the rocket and its reuse was achieved, greatly reducing launch costs. SpaceX has also undertaken the development and launch of the Dragon spacecraft.

Each Starlink satellite can transmit high-definition pictures and videos it takes over a war zone to front-line commanders. At the same time, the huge amount of data collected by UAVs over the battlefield will no longer need to be compressed locally, but will be transmitted in raw form directly to a command centre on the other side of the earth via Starlink, and then analysed by supercomputers to extract useful data and analyse battlefield situation more precisely, enabling commanders in the war zone to make decisions more quickly and accurately.

On January 3, 2020, the US used an UAV to take out Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. On November 27 of the same year, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, head of Iran’s nuclear program and its chief nuclear scientist, was assassinated near Tehran.

These actions were made possible by the global high-speed communication and space-air coordination capabilities achieved via satellite networks.

If Starlink is used on a large scale in the military field in the future, it will further enhance the US military’s satellite communication and unmanned combat capabilities, and be a threat to the national security of rival States, Yan Jiajie and Yu Nanping concluded.

In addition, as analyst Zhou Yuzhe points out, the Starlink project intends to commandeer frequency and orbital resources. Since the International Telecommunication Union’s principle for obtaining orbits and spectrum is “first come, first served,” once Starlink has occupied a large amount of orbital and spectrum resources, it will compress the room for others.

Yan Jiajie and Yu Nanping maintain that the growing deployment of Starlink satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) will give the company control over a large amount of data, challenging the security of other countries.