“We had to start from scratch, building basically a little radio telescope to eavesdrop on their signals.”
The Army wanted a backup for GPS. Musk told the researchers SpaceX couldn’t afford the distraction. Todd Humphreys’s team at UT Austin streamed Rafael Nadal tennis videos through a Starlink dish and spent two years reverse-engineering the beacons anyway. SpaceX keeps its signal structure secret. Physics doesn’t sign NDAs.