A company largely owned by the French and U.K. governments is pitching Canada on a roughly $250-million plan to provide the military with secure satellite broadband coverage in the Arctic, CBC News has learned.
Eutelsat, a rival to tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink, already provides some services to the Canadian military, but wants to deepen the partnership as Canada looks to diversify defence contracts away from suppliers in the United States.
A proposal for Canada’s Department of National Defence to join a French Ministry of Defence initiative involving Eutelsat was apparently raised by French President Emmanuel Macron with Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of last year’s G7 summit in Alberta.
“We also give them the ability to not be under the control of a singular individual who could decide to disconnect the service for political or other reasons.”
What van Dyke is referencing, more than anything else, are reports that Musk ordered Starlink switched off in Ukraine during a pivotal push by the Eastern European country to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022.
I had heard it will be littered, and then a collision or explosion will create a debris field that starts taking other satellites out until that whole zone is a hazard to pass through.
This isn’t a long-term problem in LEO, and the higher orbits aren’t very crowded.