Why Taiwan is building a satellite network without Elon Musk

In Taiwan, the government is rushing to do what no country or even company has been able to do: build an alternative to Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company.

Starlink has enabled militaries, power plants and medical personnel to maintain crucial online connections when primary infrastructure fails in emergency situations such as an earthquake in Tonga and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Officials in Taiwan are constantly reminded that communications infrastructure must be able to withstand a crisis. The island democracy is 80 miles (130 kilometers) from China, where leaders have vowed to use force if necessary to claim Taiwan is part of its territory.

Taiwan faces regular cyber attacks and almost daily incursions into its waters and airspace by the People’s Liberation Army, which has been built up in recent years.

And Taiwan’s infrastructure is vulnerable. Last year, the remote Matsu Islands, within sight of the Chinese coast, suffered patchy internet for months after two undersea internet cables broke. These fiber-optic cables that connect Taiwan to the internet have suffered about 30 such breaks since 2017, mostly due to anchors dragged by the many ships in the area.

The war in Ukraine heightened the sense of vulnerability weighing on Taiwan’s leaders. With much of its telecommunications system taken offline by Russian weaponry and cyberattacks, the Ukrainian military has become dependent on a system controlled by Mr Musk.

“The war between Ukraine and Russia gave us a profound reflection,” said Liao Jung-Huang, director of the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute. “Even if the cost to build it is high, in a special scenario the value of having your own constellation is unlimited.”

SpaceX dominates the satellite internet industry, and Mr Musk has long done business in China through his electric car company Tesla, which has a major production facility in Shanghai. Officials in Taiwan decided it would be best to build a satellite network that they could control.

But building a network of satellites manufactured, launched and controlled from Taiwan will require billions of dollars and years of research and testing.

SpaceX has spent five years launching thousands of satellites into so-called low Earth orbit, an area much closer than where traditional communications satellites fly, starting about 100 miles above Earth. The satellites send signals to terminals on the ground, and as they get closer, the signal gets faster.

Mr Musk has repeatedly proclaimed that within a few years his satellite network will provide the entire world with internet as fast as any land-based internet.

He’s not the only tech billionaire with this goal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has also announced plans for a low-Earth orbit network. But while SpaceX is responsible for more than half of the active satellites orbiting Earth, Amazon has only launched two.

The British company OneWeb also sent a few hundred satellites into space. But the effort was so costly that it had to be bailed out by the British government before merging with European conglomerate Eutelsat to form a company called Eutelsat OneWeb.

In Taiwan, the government has said it wants to have its first communications satellite in orbit by 2026 and a second within two years, while developing four more test satellites. President Tsai Ing-wen has promised this $1.3 billion that Taiwan’s space program would develop the best of these tests into a satellite internet network created and operated entirely from Taiwan.

While the network is being developed, the Taiwanese government has entered into agreements for access to existing satellite networks. It has said it plans to deploy 700 terminals receive satellite signals. In August it became a partner of Luxembourg company SES, and in November Chunghwa Telecom announced a partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb. The partnerships could provide layers of backup even after Taiwan gets its own network up and running.

“We need to invest in more than one system,” said Yisuo Tzeng, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank funded by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. “We can’t put all our eggs in one basket.”

More than 40 Taiwanese companies make parts in the satellite supply chain, said Mr. Liao of the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

A satellite network developed in Taiwan could do more than provide Taiwan with an alternative communications system. It could make Taiwan a key technology producer for years to come, just as the country is the source of most of the world’s advanced semiconductors.

“Right now we are strong in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, but space is a new industry where we can leverage that,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, founder of Tron Future, a startup that provides the payload for one of the satellites that the government is testing. .

One of the challenges Taiwan faces is the cost of the rockets that launch the satellites. Most rockets can only be used once and require enormous amounts of fuel, making the costs too high for all but the wealthiest governments to experiment with.

Every Taiwanese satellite that went into space between 2005 and 2016 was launched in the United States, said Yen-Sen Chen, founder of the rocket launch company TiSpace, who worked for more than a decade at the Taiwanese space agency’s predecessor.

Over the past year, Taiwanese research and weather satellites have been launched by French company Arianespace, as well as SpaceX.

Perhaps no entity has devoted more resources to rocket development than SpaceX.

It has become so unavoidable that it even sends competitor payloads into space. In December, Mr. Bezos’ project said it would launch some of its satellites three future Falcon 9 launches.

Taipei has been exploring ways to acquire satellite internet technology since 2018, including in talks with SpaceX. But Mr Musk resisted the requirement that any foreign entity involved in communications infrastructure be a joint venture with a local partner that would have a majority stake. Mr. Musk found this “totally unacceptable,” said Hsu Chih-hsiang, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The talks did not result in a partnership with SpaceX.

Last month, Rep. Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, alleged that by not making Starlink available in Taiwan, SpaceX could be in violation of its contract to make the service accessible to the U.S. government worldwide, according to a letter reviewed by The New York Times. .

SpaceX is complying with all of its US government contracts, the company responded in a message on X.

When asked about the prospects of any cooperation with SpaceX, Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs said in an emailed statement that it would “evaluate the possibility of cooperation” with any satellite operator, as long as the operator is “in accordance would be with Taiwan’s national security and information security regulations.”

Musk’s close business ties with China have also raised concerns in Taiwan. China is Tesla’s largest market outside the United States.

The Chinese government has eased long-standing restrictions on foreign ownership of companies and handed out lucrative incentives ahead of Tesla setting up its Shanghai Gigafactory. And he has made comments endorsing the Chinese Communist Party’s position on Taiwan.

“What if we were relying on Starlink and Musk decided to cut back under pressure from China because he has the Chinese market at stake?” asked Mr Tzeng of the defense think tank. “We have to take that into account.”