Ukraine's Army and NASA Came to Depend on One Man's Satellites

The American government let one businessman become essential infrastructure for its army's communications and its space launches.

That warning comes from Ronan Farrow, who reports for The New Yorker and worked on a documentary about Elon Musk. Farrow said American officials told him they were alarmed that Washington "had let one man become infrastructure": his satellite communication network, Starlink, for Ukraine's army, and his rockets for NASA and Pentagon missions. In Farrow's account, officials felt they "increasingly had no way to compel him to comply with their policy directives."

Ukrainian units used Musk's network to stay connected when they needed to talk to each other, call for help and coordinate movement. NASA and the military relied on Musk's rockets for launches. In both cases, a public mission ran through a private switch.

The danger became clear in the fall of 2022, Farrow said. Ukrainian troops were pushing into ground held by Russia when their Starlink connection began dropping. The Ukrainians signaled that they were in peril because of the outage. With, in Farrow's account, no way to compel action, American officials called Musk to plead with him to restore contact.

In Farrow's account of a more recent cutoff, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said people were dying from the loss of connectivity, while Musk attributes any cutoff decision to the Defense Department rather than his firm. Farrow said the administration equivocated for days and then said narrowly that the president had not ordered it, and the truth is outsiders still do not know who cut the signal.

The bigger problem is who decides when these services stop. When communication in a war zone, or access to space, rests with a private owner, turning service on or off can have the life or death stakes of a military decision, without the public accountability that usually goes with one.