The Download: Ukraine’s Starlink repair shop, and predicting solar storms

Starlink is absolutely critical to Ukraine’s ability to continue in the fight against Russia. It’s how troops in battle zones stay connected with faraway HQs; it’s how many of the drones essential to Ukraine’s survival hit their targets; it’s even how soldiers stay in touch with spouses and children back home.

However, Donald Trump’s fickle foreign policy and reports suggesting Elon Musk might remove Ukraine’s access to the services have cast the technology’s future in the country into doubt.

For now Starlink access largely comes down to the unofficial community of users and engineers, including the expert “Dr. Starlink”—famous for his creative ways of customizing the systems—who have kept Ukraine in the fight, both on and off the front line. Together, they have repaired and customized more than 15,000 terminals since the war began.

Despite the pressure, the chance that they may lose access to Starlink was not worrying volunteers at the time of my visit; in our conversations, it was clear they had more pressing concerns than the whims of a foreign tech mogul. Russia continues to launch frequent aerial bombardments of Ukrainian cities, sometimes sending more than 500 drones in a single night. 

The threat of involuntary mobilization to the front line looms on every street corner. How can one plan for a hypothetical future crisis when crisis defines every minute of one’s day? Read the full story.

—Charlie Metcalfe

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NASA’s new AI model can predict when a solar storm may strike

NASA and IBM have released a new open-source machine learning model to help scientists better understand and predict the physics and weather patterns of the sun. Surya, trained on over a decade’s worth of NASA solar data, should help give scientists an early warning when a dangerous solar flare is likely to hit Earth.