FPI / November 28, 2025
By Richard Fisher
China hates the innovative Starlink broadband (Internet) satellite mega-constellation of the SpaceX Corporation because it offers countries and peoples that China could attack and conquer, the means to access the global Internet with its attendant abilities to communicate, access information and to control the “Internet of things.”
In particular, Starlink could give the democracy on Taiwan — while under attack by the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) — the means to achieve strategic communication and even to coordinate complex military activities, as it has done for the democracy in Ukraine under assault from the Russian dictatorship.
Today Starlink has about 10,000 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ranging from 340 kilometers to 550 kilometers altitude, though SpaceX has permission to raise this number to 12,000 and has stated that Starlink could grow to 42,000 satellites.
And for China, this challenge grows starker with the development of the SpaceX Starship, which can launch 100 Starlink satellites per mission.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has estimated that Starship could launch 10 to 24 missions a day, meaning an eventual possible capability of launching 1,000 to 2,400 such satellites a day, a capability that will likely only increase.
China has already complained when Starlink satellites have flown too close to its manned space station, but as China has for decades been planning a war to conquer democratic Taiwan, the CCP and PLA are now focused on the challenge of neutralizing Starlink to prevent it being used by Taiwan to sustain international contact and to conduct defensive military operations.
One major problem is that as the Starlink mega-constellation grows, it becomes less efficient and realistic for China to build and use thousands of ground-based anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, as there will always be more Starlink satellites than ASAT missiles.
Furthermore, kinetic ASAT interceptors threaten to create lethal clouds of debris that will threaten China’s manned space station and the now large number of satellites that it requires to prosecute military operations against Taiwan and against United States and Japanese forces that could come to Taiwan’s rescue.
To address this challenge, in June 2024 the Chinese Journal of Command Control & Simulation published an article by a team led by Professor Wang Dan of the PLA’s Naval Submarine Academy, proposing use of a nuclear submarine armed with a mega-watt class solid-state laser to attack Starlink.
Their article was reported by South China Morning Post reporter Stephen Chen, in a July 20, 2024 article titled, “China could attack Starlink-like satellites with submarine laser weapon: naval study.”
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