Britain’s Ministry of Defence is facing questions over whether its Armed Forces should keep buying satellite internet from SpaceX, after the Starlink service used by Ukraine’s military was throttled back earlier this month. Forces News put the question directly on 26 October, asking whether the MOD should drop Starlink and Starshield, its military-grade companion, and reconsider who supplies its connectivity.
Key facts
- According to Reuters, cited by Forces News, the MOD has spent £30m with SpaceX and now operates 1,000 Starshield terminals and around 500 Starlink ones.
- The UK military began using Starlink in 2022, received its first Starshield terminals in 2025 and has spent around £13m on Starshield so far, Forces News reports.
- Skynet, the MOD’s own encrypted satellite communications capability, remains the main system the British military uses operationally and is being modernised at a cost of around £8bn.
- Dr Mark Hilborne of King’s College London’s defence studies department told Forces News that only three nations have Starshield access: the US, the UK and Ukraine, whose access the US pays for.
Why it matters
The concrete problem is not who ordered the Ukraine cut, but that nothing the UK owns can do Starshield’s job. Skynet is geostationary, its next satellite is years away, and Hilborne told Forces News the UK has no low-orbit system with anything like Starshield’s data-handling capacity. For now, the capability British forces would miss most is the one they do not control. The dispute over who actually controls Starshield, and the measurable damage when ten days of capped Starlink service cost Ukraine’s front line, show what that gap is worth in practice.
What the UK actually uses SpaceX for
The two systems are not used the same way. Forces News reports that SpaceX stipulates Starlink cannot be used for any sort of offensive military action, so on UK bases it supports welfare, general internet and streaming services.
Starshield is the militarised version, designed to handle target tracking, reconnaissance and the early-warning systems Ukraine uses to monitor incoming Russian missiles, according to the same report, with encrypted networks and sensors supporting missile-tracking missions.
What the MOD pays is not a Starlink price
The £30m figure is procurement: terminals, service contracts and military-grade capability bought by a defence ministry. It says nothing about what the same constellation costs a household. SpaceX sells UK consumers satellite internet on a monthly subscription — the standard residential plan is advertised in the region of £75 a month at the time of writing, with the dish and router charged once at a few hundred pounds and frequently discounted. Starshield has no retail price at all, because it is not sold to the public.
Why Skynet cannot simply replace it
Hilborne told Forces News that Skynet sits in geostationary orbit, fixed over one point of the Earth, with the signal travelling 36,000km out and back, which introduces latency. Starlink’s main operational shell flies at roughly 550km, so the round trip is short enough for the link to feel immediate, and the sheer size of the constellation carries bandwidth Skynet was never built for. That bandwidth is what makes FPV drone operations possible, Hilborne said, adding that Skynet, although highly secure, handles nothing like it.
One figure in the interview does not hold up. Hilborne was quoted saying Starlink satellites circle the Earth every 60 minutes; at 550km the orbital period is about 95 minutes, and no Starlink shell completes a lap in an hour. The argument he was making — that the satellites pass low and often — stands regardless.
How solid is the assurance that the UK will not be throttled?
Hilborne said he does not expect the UK to have its speed throttled, and does not see the US–UK security relationship deteriorating to the point where limits are placed on British use of Starshield. He described the relationship as fairly stable despite political variations, noting the British military is quite embedded with the US.
That confidence rests on politics, not on contract. Musk has drawn the line himself in a post on X: “Starshield, a different system, is controlled by the US government.” The system’s anchor customer is the US Space Force, which awarded SpaceX a Starshield deal reported at the time as worth up to $70m in September 2023 — so British access runs through decisions taken in Washington, under terms the MOD has not published. The Forces News report carries no MOD comment on whether UK service levels are guaranteed, and Ukraine’s access, which the US pays for, was restricted without public warning.
The resilience gap, and what might fill it
Hilborne argued for more depth all the same. He pointed to the Istari programme, which the UK is launching with satellites doing reconnaissance work including imaging and satcom, and said OneWeb is available but has nowhere near Starshield’s capacity. “So I think the UK, if it wants to be truly resilient, ought to have something in between,” he told Forces News.
A persistent capability over a limited area does not require Starlink’s scale, he added: by his estimate, 10 to 24 satellites would be enough to keep a careful eye over the UK, the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap and the Arctic, and a small constellation offering both satcom and imagery would not be expensive. Elsewhere in Europe, operators are already pitching a sovereign European rival to Starlink by 2028.
Background: the Ukraine cut-off
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused SpaceX of restricting access to its military-grade service, in effect hobbling Ukrainian drone strike missions and crucial air defences, The Guardian reported in mid-October. The Ukrainian president framed the shift as a betrayal by Donald Trump and the US, the paper said, turning the spotlight onto how SpaceX and the Pentagon control the service. Musk, in the same X post, accused Ukrainian forces of using Starlink for the offensive purposes the terms forbid.
Russian forces, meanwhile, used thousands of smuggled Starlink terminals in occupied parts of Ukraine until Musk cut them off in February, which immediately disrupted battlefield communications and video links to attack drones, Forces News reports. Hilborne said Moscow’s own replacement, Razvet, has had repeated launch problems, with many satellites failing to reach the correct orbit — but that Russian forces still get valuable windows of time over Ukraine in which they can broadly replicate what Ukraine does with Starlink and Starshield.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is Starlink now?
Forces News reports that Starlink uses more than 10,400 low-Earth-orbit satellites to serve more than 12 million subscribers in excess of 160 countries. The constellation is owned and operated by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.
Is Starlink satellite internet available to UK households?
Yes. SpaceX sells the service direct to consumers across the UK, with a fixed residential plan and mobile ‘Roam’ plans listed on its own coverage map. SpaceX has at times waitlisted individual coverage cells where local capacity is tight, so availability is best checked by postcode on the Starlink site.
Can anyone buy Starshield?
No. Starshield is not a consumer product and is not sold on subscription. SpaceX supplies it to the US government and selected allies under defence contracts, and Musk has said control of the system sits with the US government rather than with SpaceX.
Who owns Skynet, and what comes next?
Skynet is owned by the UK Ministry of Defence, which treats it as sovereign capability rather than a commercial service. Airbus is building the next satellite, Skynet 6A, under a contract the MOD announced in 2020 at around £500m, with entry into service expected later this decade.
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