In Taiwan, the government is struggling to do what no other country or even company has been able to: create an alternative to Starlink, the satellite Internet service operated by Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX.
Starlink has enabled militaries, power plants and medical workers to maintain vital internet connections when the main infrastructure has failed in emergencies such as earthquake in Tonga and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Officials in Taiwan face constant reminders that its communications infrastructure must be able to withstand a crisis. The island republic is 80 miles from China, where leaders have vowed to use force if necessary to claim Taiwan as part of their territory.
Taiwan faces regular cyber attacks and near-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 fragile. Last year, the remote islands of Matsu, overlooking the Chinese coast, endured patchy internet for months after two undersea internet cables collapsed. Those fiber optic cables that connect Taiwan to the Internet have suffered about 30 such breaks since 2017, mostly from anchors dragging the many ships in the area.
The war in Ukraine has heightened the sense of vulnerability weighing on Taiwan’s leaders. With much of its telecommunications system knocked offline by Russian weapons and cyber attacks, Ukraine’s military has come to depend on a system controlled by Mr Musk.
“The Ukraine-Russia war has given us a deep reflection,” said Liao Yong-Huang, director at the government-funded Industrial Technology Research Institute. “Even if the cost of building it is high, in a special scenario, the value of having our own constellation is limitless.”
SpaceX dominates the satellite Internet industry, and Mr. Musk has long been active in China through his electric car company, Tesla, which has a large manufacturing operation in Shanghai. Officials in Taiwan decided it would be best to build a satellite network they could control.
But building a network of satellites built, launched and navigated by Taiwan will require billions of dollars and years of research and testing.
SpaceX has spent five years launching thousands of satellites into what’s known as low Earth orbit, a zone much closer than where traditional communications satellites fly, starting about 100 miles above Earth. Satellites send signals to ground terminals and being closer makes the signal faster.
Mr. Musk has repeatedly proclaimed that in a few years, his satellite network will cover the entire globe with Internet services as fast as any land-based provision.
He’s not the only tech billionaire with that goal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also announced plans for a network in low Earth orbit. But while SpaceX is responsible for more than half of the active satellites in Earth orbit, Amazon has only launched two.
The British company OneWeb has 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 it was merged with European conglomerate Eutelsat into a company called Eutelsat OneWeb.
In Taiwan, the government said it wanted to send its first communications satellite into orbit by 2026, with a second to follow within two years, while developing four more test satellites. President Tsai Ing-wen pledged 1.3 billion dollars for Taiwan’s space program to develop the best of these tests into a satellite Internet network entirely built and controlled by Taiwan.
While the network is being developed, the Taiwanese government has brokered deals to access existing satellite networks. It said it plans to deploy 700 capable terminals receiving satellite signals. In August, it partnered with Luxembourg-based SES, and in November, Chunghwa Telecom announced a partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb. The partnerships could provide layers of backup even when Taiwan has 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 built in Taiwan could do more than give Taiwan an alternative communications system. It could establish Taiwan as a core technology producer for years to come, just as it 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 tap into that,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, founder of Tron Future, a startup that is making the payload for one of the government satellites. is trying.
Among the challenges facing Taiwan is the cost of the rockets that launch the satellites. Most missiles can only be used once and require huge amounts of fuel, making the cost too high for all but the wealthiest governments to experiment with.
Every Taiwanese satellite that went into space from 2005 to 2016 was launched in the United States, said Yen-Sen Chen, founder of rocket launch company TiSpace, who spent more than a decade at the predecessor of the Taiwan Space Agency.
In the past year, Taiwanese research and weather satellites have been launched by French company Arianespace, as well as by SpaceX.
Perhaps no entity has devoted more resources to rocket development than SpaceX.
It has become so inevitable that it even sends competitor payloads into space. In December, Mr. Bezos’ project said some of its satellites would go up three future Falcon 9 launches;.
Taipei has been exploring ways to acquire satellite internet technology since 2018, including in talks with SpaceX. However, Mr Musk rejected a requirement that any foreign entity involved in communications infrastructure be a joint venture with a local partner holding 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 any cooperation with SpaceX.
Last month, Representative Mike Gallagher, R-Wisconsin, argued that by not making Starlink available to Taiwan, SpaceX could be in breach of its contract to make the service accessible to the US government worldwide, according to a letter reviewed by The New York Times. .
SpaceX complies with all US government contracts, the company responded in a post 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 compliance with national security and Taiwan’s national security and information security regulations.”
Mr. Musk’s deep business ties in China have also raised concerns in Taiwan. China is Tesla’s biggest market outside the United States.
The Chinese government loosened longstanding restrictions on foreign ownership of companies and offered lucrative incentives before Tesla set up its Gigafactory in Shanghai. And he has made comments supporting the Chinese Communist Party’s stance on Taiwan.
“What if we relied on Starlink and Musk decided to scale back due to pressure from China because the Chinese market is at stake?” asked Mr Tzeng at the defense think tank. “We have to take that into account.”
The sound is produced by Adrienne Hurst.