Elon Musk is once again involved in a submarine-related, time-sensitive international news event. This time, one of the details involved in the increasingly absurd and endlessly fascinating search for OceanGate’s Titan submersible that is lost on a billionaire’s expedition to the Titanic is the fact that OceanGate’s boat has SpaceX’s Starlink internet.
The Starlink internet subplot had less frenzy around it Tuesday than the “submarine-is-controlled-by-a-Logitech-controller” subplot and the “billionaire’s stepson went to the Blink-182 show” subplot. But a Snopes article Wednesday focused on the fact that OceanGate uses Starlink for internet access at sea, and people have made the nonsensical jump that, because Titan lost communication with its above-sea support vessel, Starlink (and thus, Elon Musk), might somehow be to blame for the fact that the submarine is missing.
Videos by VICE
“Was the Missing Titanic Submersible Using Satellites from Elon Musk’s Company?” asked the Snopes article. It rated the claim as true with a big green check mark. “Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX, which Elon Musk runs. However, we do not know how much Starlink is responsible for the loss of contact with the submersible, nor the reasons behind that loss of contact.”
Snopes tweeted out the article and readers used the community notes feature to immediately add context. “You can’t even run a good psy op,” Musk said, replying on Twitter. Since Musk responded to them, a parade of blue check Twitter accounts have responded to Snope’s tweets with scorn.
Snopes clarified after getting hammered on Twitter. “ We amended this post to address claims that the submersible itself used Elon Musk’s SpaceX-run Starlink satellites, not whether the vessel’s company (OceanGate) did,” it said in a follow up tweet. “While it was true that OceanGate used Starlink, it was unknown if, or to what extent, the submersible itself relied on Starlink.”
There’s plenty of schadenfreude and general intrigue to go around in this saga, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that OceanGate’s “innovation” on things like safety and submarine design were perhaps ill-advised. But the fact that OceanGate uses Starlink for internet access is almost definitely irrelevant to its current crisis and it is not clear why Starlink would have anything to do with a boat losing contact with a submarine.
Simply put: Satellites cannot communicate directly with vessels that are underwater. Traditional wifi does not go underwater. The “internet” cannot be transmitted underwater wirelessly, and must be transmitted using physical cables. In very limited tests, scientists have recently proved that you can make something that approximates wifi underwater using lasers and LEDs; this is not being deployed at any sort of scale on real vessels in the open ocean.
Anyone who has a smartwatch or has tried to figure out how to listen to music while swimming will know that, broadly speaking, the wireless signals that power things like bluetooth, wifi, and GPS denature extremely quickly underwater and are basically not functional at a depth of a foot or two, let alone thousands of feet underwater.
This is not a trivial problem; the lack of reliable communication and tracking methods are two of the many things that makes traveling in submarines so dangerous. It’s also one of the reasons why it’s (relatively) simple to make “stealth” submarines. Basically, tracking submarines and communicating with submarines is one of the great military problems of our time, and the problem gets harder the deeper a vessel is.
This is all to say that allowing scientists and crew members on the surface of the sea to access the internet using a technology like Starlink is a perfectly normal thing for a boat to have (in fact, Starlink has marketed itself to yacht owners and seafaring vessels specifically because getting the internet at sea has traditionally been expensive and difficult). It also, again, has nothing to do with whether a boat is able to communicate with a submarine underwater.
So, how do submarines communicate with support vessels above the water? This, again, is the subject of much research and is one of the biggest problems with submarines broadly speaking. Right now, submarines use “very low frequency” (VLF) and “extremely low frequency” (ELF) radiowaves that can travel through the water without significantly distorting the signal. This technology allows for very little data transmission. Radio waves are also how underwater headphones work. To do something as trivial as transmitting music from your phone to your ears in a lap pool, a special transponder that uses radiowaves instead of bluetooth is required.
The military and scientists have been experimenting with new technologies that use lasers, advanced acoustics, and other experimental tech to make underwater-to-underwater communication and underwater-to-surface communication better. NATO has also proposed sticking giant buoys on the ocean’s surface and using them to grab signals from the land, sea, and space. That buoy is connected to a giant underwater antenna that would then be able to send messages to submarines. This tech will be used in the near term by militaries, not overly optimistic tech startups selling trips to the Titanic.
The Titan submarine has an “acoustic link” with its surface vessel, which has seemingly broken during this expedition. That’s a major problem, and it’s why we don’t know where Titan is. But it has nothing to do with SpaceX, Starlink, or Elon Musk.
