Without Starlink in Kherson and Crimea: what alternative can the Armed Forces use - expert

To spread: Ukraine's Armed Forces can handle Starlink, as there are at least two alternative systems in Europe. In addition, multiterminals begin to work, which will be cut off from the recurrence of incidents with disconnections in the Crimea and in the Kherson region.

Starlink has been able to correct the failure of 7 thousand satellites within two hours, said expert on space activity, exader of the head of the State Space Agency of Ukraine Andriy Kolesnyk in an interview with "Ukrainian Radio". In his opinion, if another such case occurs and the Armed Forces will be prepared, then there will be no collapse. However, alternative systems have some problems, heard on air.

Kolesnik explained that instead of the satellites of entrepreneur Ilona Mask it was possible to attract Oneweb and Intelsat systems. According to him, they complement Starlink, but they cannot completely replace it. "Starlink gives today the highest speed, the highest time of withdrawal. According to Kolesnik, alternative terminals have already appeared on the battlefield, but there are too few: there are hundreds of units, while the terminals of the mask - about 50,000.

Satellites are located at an altitude of 36 thousand km (geostationary orbit), 20 thousand km (middle orbit) and 500-1000 km (Starlink orbit). In this way, you can use several types of satellite communication with special multiterminals. The peculiarity of multiterminals is the ability to switch between different satellites depending on the needs and the problems available, he explained.

"In the next year, [multiterminals] will already work and allow you to not be dependent on any one system at all, and the rapid switching between other systems will be the main task for those terminals," Kolesnik summed up. It should be noted that on July 24, the commander of the unmanned system Robert "Magyar" Brody announced a failure of Starlink on the front in Ukraine. Then the company's press service confirmed that there were problems with 7,000 satellites. After 2.

5 hours, Vice president Michael Nichols reported that the system was restored and the cause of the problems was "failure of key internal software services". Military and Radio Engineer Sergey Beskrestnov "Flash" told what happened at the front during a Starlink failure. According to him, some of the commanders prepared for such a scenario and the units did not lose combat capacity.