Laser Hack Dark Orbit Tested

Another downside to these attacks is that a laser is much more effective and easily spotted at night than a flash. And of course, the more powerful the attack, the more people can see it. Starlinks lasers, while certainly bright and effective, are comparatively weak. There is no chance of hitting a device by pointing it in its general direction. And because of the 150mW limit, they can only be activated by sending a text message to the device.

laser hack dark orbit | tested

None of these attacks are particularly useful in the Dark Orbit phase. But the attacks are important to demonstrate the potential of lasers in the long-term, once the Starlink constellation is fully operational. Once the satellites are able to communicate directly with one another, requests can be relayed over the laser links and data sent down closer to the earth, allowing for lower latency connections and potentially even lower latency connections in the future.

Starlink is expected to begin its first space tests in May and has already launched the S5 booster into orbit. The initial tests of the system should include demonstrating the communications from the satellites to the ground stations. I suggest following the manufacturer and contacting them directly, or in my case, their customer support site

Its possible to imagine some generic attack, in the dark orbit phase, where a Starlink laser is directed upwards to blinding the camera. As no device can hide in the dark, perhaps GPS signals could be jammed. If that happened, the device would have no way to route the data back home, and thus, no data could be transmitted to the internet. However, this attack would be similar in scale and impact to sending text messages to dozens of devices and generally not good enough to actually cause harm.