Elon Musk Is Helping U.S. Intelligence Turn Thousands of Satellites into a Planet-Wide Brain to Spy on Everything All the Time
The National Reconnaissance Office, USA's most secretive spy agency, contracts with SpaceX to build & launch a "proliferated architecture" of AI-controlled spy satellites interfacing with Starlink
Introduction
Have you heard? It’s finally happening! The richest man in the world is dismantling the deep state for us!
Just playing. Don’t be stupid. Elon Musk is not dismantling the deep state. The idea is ludicrous on its face, but it becomes completely untenable with any serious examination of Musk’s business entanglements with US military and intelligence agencies. This post is devoted to an exemplary case that has not received enough attention.
In March 2024, Reuters1 ran a story with an eye-catching headline: “Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say.” Which sounds pretty bad, but I think it’s actually considerably worse than it sounds. The report stated that SpaceX would be manufacturing a surveillance satellite network of truly unprecedented scale and coverage for the US government:
SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's space company and national security agencies.
The network is being built by SpaceX's Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said.
The plans show the extent of SpaceX's involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces.
If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.
[…]
The satellites can track targets on the ground and share that data with U.S. intelligence and military officials, the sources said. In principle, that would enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe, aiding intelligence and military operations, they added.
[…]
The classified constellation of spy satellites represents one of the U.S. government’s most sought-after capabilities in space because it is designed to offer the most persistent, pervasive and rapid coverage of activities on Earth.
"No one can hide," one of the sources said of the system’s potential capability, when describing the network's reach.
Summarizing: Last year it was revealed that Elon Musk is working intimately with the NRO to create the most advanced and comprehensive global surveillance system in human history, consisting of hundreds of spy satellites able to “quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe.” As we will see later, the project appears to be on track, and the details point toward the emergence of something extremely sinister and all-encompassing. But first a bit of context about the NRO will be helpful.
The National Reconnaissance Office
The NRO is one of the more mysterious and understudied intelligence agencies in the United States, responsible for the purchase and maintenance of the US federal government’s spy satellite fleet. Established in 1961 to “coordinate the satellite reconnaissance activities of the CIA and Air Force,”2 the fact of the NRO’s existence remained an official secret for over three decades, until its declassification in 1992. In 1996, a Congressional committee reported3 that the NRO had the largest budget in the intelligence community by a significant margin, though by 2013 the NRO’s then-$10.3 billion budget had been overtaken by the NSA and CIA in the wake of the War on Terror.4
Although its activities and capabilities are shrouded in secrecy, it turns out we can get an idea of the NRO’s sophistication by examining NASA’s space telescopes. For example, you have probably heard of the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a space observatory NASA launched in 1990, and it has repeatedly revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. Hubble constrained the age of the universe to approximately 13.7 billion years and showed that most galaxies have gigantic black holes at their centers. It constitutes one of the greatest scientific achievements ever. Watch the video below to see the “Hubble Legacy Field,” an image of 265,000 galaxies captured by the device.
According to NASA official Michael Moore, the Hubble Space Telescope is so powerful that if you pointed it at the Earth, “you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument.”5 That may be a bit of an overstatement, as the European Space Agency’s Hubble FAQ claims the resolution would be about a foot (30 cm) if you were to point Hubble at Earth from its current orbit of 600 km6 (which would translate to half a foot for a more typical spy satellite orbit of ~300 km). Either way, this is a useful point of reference, because this behemoth of an instrument was apparently built in a factory that also manufactured NRO’s classified KH-11 “Keyhole” spy satellites,7 and Hubble’s mirror size of 2.4 meters was chosen to “lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites.”8 This, along with the fact that the Keyhole satellites were transported in the same modified shipping container and specialized aircraft as the Hubble,9 suggests that some of the NRO’s surveillance is collected by Hubble-class lenses pointing at the Earth. And they’ve been using them since 1976!10 Nearly fifty years of surveillance by machinery capable of peering to the edge of reality.11
In fact, the origin story of a near-future flagship Hubble-successor space telescope mission suggests that the Keyhole satellites are actually significantly more capable than the Hubble in certain ways, and yet nevertheless may be approaching obsolescence for the NRO’s purposes. The NASA mission in question is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (“the Roman”), scheduled to launch in May of 2027.12 The Roman, which has a mirror with the same diameter (2.4 meters) as the Hubble but a shorter focal length that produces a 100-times larger field of view, reportedly began life as a version of the Keyhole spy satellite13 that was to be launched into space as part of the optical imaging component of the NRO’s Future Imagery Architecture program.14 However, the optical part of the program fell through and the hardware that had been produced for it was shelved before launch in the 2000s, while a radar component went ahead. Below is the consciously sinister15 mission patch that the NRO produced for one of the launches that deployed the non-cancelled radar portion of the program, followed by a visual comparison of the fields of view enjoyed by the Hubble and the Roman.
In 2012, since they were sitting around gathering dust, the NRO decided to donate two satellites from the cancelled program to NASA, and one of those became the Roman.16 Since then, new iterations of the super-Hubble Keyhole spy satellites have continued to launch,17 with the latest going up in 2021.18 It’s mind-boggling to consider the power of the instruments the NRO has devoted to surveillance, but based on the direction of the NRO/SpaceX collaboration we’ll turn to next, we may soon look back on these days of relatively few cosmic eyes in the sky with nostalgia. In 2023, the NRO announced its plans for a ten-fold increase in signals and imagery throughput from its surveillance systems.19 To quote the patch from NROL-49, a 2011 launch that deployed yet another Keyhole, “Melior diabolus quem scies,” or, “Better the devil you know…”20
Deep collaboration between SpaceX and the NRO
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket ship corporation, is a natural candidate for NRO workhorse given the singular scale of the firm’s launch capabilities. The company utterly eclipses all competition and dominates the industry, launching four times more mass into space than the sum total launched by everyone else, government or private, on the planet in 2023.21 The rapid growth in SpaceX operations can be seen in this plot from Wikipedia showing the number of launches and distribution of rocket configurations they have used each year since 2010:
SpaceX’s first launch for the NRO22 seems to have taken place in 2018, when they carried the classified23 “Zuma” Northrop Grumman satellite,24 but, unfortunately for our surveillers, Zuma failed due to improper calibration by Northrop.25 That’s the official story, at least. The US government has hoaxed satellite failures to obscure classified missions in the past, going so far as to launch fake space debris to fool observers, so there has been reasonable speculation that something similar may have gone on with the $3 billion Zuma satellite.26 It’s hard to say what really happened, but discussion of Zuma is a great excuse to display this image captured by a Dutch pilot as the upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon-9 rocket returned to Earth after the launch, discharging extra fuel and producing an eerie, ethereal spiral in the sky:27
In the years after this possibly-inauspicious beginning, SpaceX and the NRO took their relationship to a new level. Details started to leak out early in 2024, with the Wall Street Journal reporting in February of that year that SpaceX had signed a major contract in 2021 with US intelligence that was expected to expand into a significant chunk of its revenue:28
SpaceX is deepening its ties with U.S. intelligence and military agencies, winning at least one major classified contract and expanding a secretive company satellite program called Starshield for national-security customers.
The Elon Musk-led company entered into a $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. government in 2021, according to company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. SpaceX said in the documents that funds from the contract were expected to become an important part of its revenue mix in the coming years.
The next month, the Reuters story that is quoted in this post’s introduction29 reported that the SpaceX contract for the Starshield program was with the NRO. At that point, in March of 2024, “[r]oughly a dozen prototypes”30 had been launched on SpaceX vehicles since 2020, when the first Starshield prototype was delivered to space as “part of a separate, roughly $200 million contract that helped position SpaceX for the subsequent $1.8 billion award[.]”31 Below is the mission patch for that first prototype launch, NROL-108, with the charming motto “Peace Through Strength.”32
After the Starshield project became public, SpaceX and the NRO rapidly moved on from the prototyping stage and began launching batches of functioning spy satellites (though SpaceX may have also been launching versions on rideshare flights for the Space Development Agency in 2022 and 2023 as well33). In April of 2024, Reuters reported that the program was “already capturing high-resolution imagery of the Earth,”34 and between May of 2024 and January of 2025, SpaceX delivered seven more Starshield payloads into space for the NRO.35 Below is the launch patch for the most recent of these spy satellite deliveries, NROL-153, which took place on January 9th of this year. The same art has been used for each of the seven NRO-sponsored Starshield launches since May 2024. The motto is “Strength in numbers.”
Get it! It’s an all seeing eye! Har har har. And indeed, again according to Reuters, Starshield’s “imaging capabilities are designed to have superior resolution over most existing U.S. government spying systems”36 with the goal of “quickly captur[ing] continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe.”37 In October of 2024, NRO director Chris Scolese announced that the project would be “going from the demo phase to the operational phase, where we’re really going to be able to start testing all of this stuff out in a more operational way.”38 The testing seems to have gone well, because in November Scolese followed up with an announcement: “You can’t hide, because we’re constantly looking."39 By December, they had reached a milestone: over 100 Starshield satellites were in service.40 With the launch in January, they’re probably at about 120 by now, but they are by no means finished expanding the network: plans reportedly call for hundreds41 of satellites to be launched through at least 2028.42 For comparison, in 2021, the year the Starshield contract was signed, there were only 49 active satellites known to be operated by the NRO.43 That number would of course be an under-count due to the classified nature of the NRO’s operations, but it’s obvious that the Starshield program constitutes a dramatic expansion in scale for the agency.
But don’t worry, it gets about an order of magnitude worse. It turns out that SpaceX had an extra ace up its sleeve that made the firm especially attractive to the NRO for this contract: Starlink. This month (February 2025), Reuters reported:44
While competitive bids were being prepared by several other contractors…Meink changed a portion of the contract that in effect made SpaceX the company best suited to fulfill it. The changes, they added, had to do with a type of inter-satellite communications that SpaceX could offer for the spy satellite network because of Starlink, its commercial broadband service, with some 7,000 satellites in orbit.
[…]
The spy constellation, deployed by SpaceX's Starshield unit, is distinct from Starlink, a commercial communications network with over four million customers. But the two satellite systems are designed to communicate with one another in space.
That is a very important revelation, especially since the original reports on the NRO/SpaceX collaboration included misleading statements like, “[t]he planned Starshield network is separate from Starlink.”45 Just like SpaceX dominates the world’s space launch industry, Starlink is by far the largest satellite network in space, with around 7000 operational devices in low Earth orbit.46 That’s more than half of all active satellites,47 and Starlink has plans to expand to 40,000.48 Below you can see a GIF of a Starlink train passing through the night sky, followed by another that shows a simulation of the orbits of thousands of the satellites. They are an increasingly common sight for stargazers. And now we know that they serve as communications nodes for what looks like the largest global surveillance effort in human history.
To recap: Elon Musk is using his unparalleled space launch infrastructure to construct Starshield, a “proliferated constellation” of hundreds of NRO spy satellites that are designed to communicate with Starlink, his existing network of thousands of communications satellites. This means that more than half of the active satellites in the sky are facilitating an NRO/SpaceX mass surveillance program that is intended to provide near-continuous imagery of the entire planet for US intelligence agencies, reportedly at even higher resolutions than previous projects. If the NRO was just spying through “Keyholes” before, they’ve now thrown the metaphorical door open.
This massive flood of data will require the NRO to deploy new techniques to keep up:49
“Once you go to a proliferated architecture and you’re going from a few satellites to tens of satellites to now hundreds of satellites, you have to change a lot of things, and we’re in the process of doing that,” Scolese said.
With so many satellites, it “means that it’s no longer possible for an individual sitting at a control center to say, 'I know what this satellite is doing,’” Scolese said. “So we have to have the machines to go off and help us there. We need artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated processes to help us do that.”
“We will deliver data in seconds, not minutes, and not hours,” Zarybnisky said.
This may be a sly reference to integration between the Starshield constellation and “Sentient,” the NRO’s ultrasecretive research and development program to synthesize vast and varied streams of data with artificial intelligence for automated satellite tracking and targeting and intelligence analysis.50 Intriguingly, documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by John Greenewald at The Black Vault indicate that Sentient was already operational and being used to detect and record anomalous objects in the sky by 2021.51
Then again, the degree of collaboration between private AI companies and US military and intelligence agencies has utterly exploded in the last year or two. During that span, major providers like Google,52 Meta,53 OpenAI,54 and Anthropic55 (among others) have all revoked self-imposed bans on using AI for evil (slight paraphrase) and ecstatically prostrated themselves before the US security state. Several major players—among them SpaceX, OpenAI, Palantir, and Anduril—were as of December reportedly in talks to form a consortium to collectively bid on US “defense” contracts.56
I note this just to speculate that the AI coordination required for Starshield will probably be achieved through a hybrid public/private effort rather than just relying on whatever the NRO has managed to secretly cook up within its Sentient program. Blacksky, a satellite imagery company that has been described as “Sentient’s unclassified doppelgänger,”57 is already known to be working with both Palantir58 and the NRO.59 Palantir, founded and chaired by Elon’s former business partner and fellow spook-billionaire-pretending-to-fight-the-deep-state60 Peter Thiel, offers access to software it calls “MetaConstellation,” which is intended to “[h]arness the power of satellite constellations to empower decision-makers on Earth.”61 I did not turn up any direct NRO-Palantir contracts, but that is not surprising given the extreme secrecy surrounding the NRO’s activities.
So, putting it all together, Elon Musk is working with arguably the most secretive spy agency in the United States to construct a global artificially intelligent surveillance brain made of hundreds of spy satellites designed to interface directly with Musk’s 7000-strong Starlink constellation. This means the majority of satellites in the sky are now facilitating the largest geospatial surveillance program in human history, and that program is poised to balloon further in the immediate future. Simultaneously, Musk and his business partners and allies have somehow managed to convince tens of millions of people that they constitute a revolutionary vanguard of government transparency, exposing wrongdoing and tearing down the “ancien regime” (to quote Mr. Thiel62).
Seriously, melior diabolus quem scies.
Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor, “Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say,” Reuters, 3/16/2024, https://archive.ph/02Jxm,
Jeffrey Richelson, “Out of the Black: The Declassification of the NRO,” 9/18/2008, https://archive.ph/jSexv.
Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community, “Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence,” Chapter 13: “The Cost of Intelligence,” 3/1/1996, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-INTELLIGENCE/pdf/GPO-INTELLIGENCE-17.pdf.
Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, “‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives,” Washington Post, 8/29/2013, https://archive.ph/0hG9K.
Joel Achenbach, “NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy,” Washington Post, 6/4/2012, https://archive.ph/QBxcZ.
European Space Agency, “FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions,” ESA/Hubble, https://archive.ph/Arws3.
Dan Vergano, “Why NASA’s James Webb telescope and its galactic discoveries may owe something to spy satellites,” The Messenger, 7/13/22, https://web.archive.org/web/20240106073657/https://themessenger.com/grid/why-nasas-james-webb-telescope-and-its-galactic-discoveries-may-owe-something-to-spy-satellites.
Andrew J. Dunar and Stephen P. Waring, Power to Explore, NASA History Series, pg. 483, 1999, https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/sp-4313.pdf.
“KH-11,” Encyclopedia Astronautica, https://web.archive.org/web/20120617154946/http://www.astronautix.com/craft/kh11.htm.
Ibid.
Since I’m adding this after initial publication (2/18/2025) and don’t want to figure out how to work this into the text smoothly, I’ll use this footnote to note that independent estimates of the Keyhole satellite resolution basically line up with the estimate of “half a foot” (15 cm) I give based on the Hubble. For example, “The current capability of US imaging satellites was revealed by President Trump on 30 August 2019, when he posted to Twitter an image of a damaged launch pad at Iran’s Semnan space facility that had been taken the previous day following the explosion of an Iranian satellite launch vehicle. Working from the angle of the image, experts were able to deduce that it had been taken from a distance of around 380 km by a KH-11 satellite whose unclassified designations are USA-224 and NROL-49. The ground resolution seems to 10 cm or even smaller, they deduced.” From: https://archive.ph/FYAj8
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “NASA Tool Gets Ready to Image Faraway Planets,” NASA.gov, 5/21/2024, https://archive.ph/rsj3O.
Craig Covault, “Top Secret KH-11 Spysat Design Revealed By NRO’s Twin Telescope Gift to NASA,” AmericaSpace, 6/6/2012, https://archive.ph/CKIa0.
Warren Ferster, “Donated Space Telescopes are Remnants of Failed NRO Program,” Space News, 6/8/2012, https://archive.ph/TMDoj.
Paul Szoldra, “Here's The Real Story Of The Creepy US Spy Agency Logo Boasting That 'Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach,’” Business Insider, 7/2/2014, https://archive.ph/HbDbU.
Achenbach, Washington Post, footnote 5.
Justin Ray, “Spy satellite infrastructure supported by successful Atlas 5 rocket launch,” Spaceflight Now, 7/28/2016, https://archive.ph/F13fi.
National Reconnaissance Office, “NRO celebrates 60th anniversary with successful launch of NROL-82,” 4/26/2021, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/assets/press-kits/2021-01-NROL82-PostLaunch-PressRelease04-21.pdf
Theresa Hitchens, “NRO plans 10-fold increase in imagery, signals intel output,” Breaking Defense, 10/10/2023, https://archive.ph/dZOTx
Covault, AmericaSpace, footnote 13.
John Holst, “It’s a SpaceX World (Everyone Else is Playing Catch-up)”, Astralytical, 1/8/2024, https://archive.ph/WVC2V.
Edwin C. Chapman III, “NRO Launch: A Pictorial History. 1996-2021,” Center for Study of National Reconnaissance, 12/?/2021, pg. 107, https://web.archive.org/web/20220407205142/https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/news/articles/2022/NRO_Launch_History_Picture-Book_1996-2021_web.pdf.
Emre Kelly, “Elon Musk's SpaceX launch is a secret government mission,” USA Today, 11/15/2017, https://archive.ph/sImae.
Tariq Malik, “Strange Sky Spiral May Come from Secretive SpaceX Zuma Launch,” Space.com, 1/9/2018, https://archive.ph/Aawmg.
Andy Pasztor, “Probes Point to Northrop Grumman Errors in January Spy-Satellite Failure,” Wall Street Journal, 4/8/2019, https://archive.ph/bVXtd.
Micheal Whelan, “Zuma,” Unresolved.me, 7/29/2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20241217152304/https://unresolved.me/zuma.
Malik, Space.com, footnote 24.
Micah Maidenburg and Drew Fitzgerald, “Musk’s SpaceX Forges Tighter Links With U.S. Spy and Military Agencies”, Wall Street Journal, 2/20/2024, https://archive.ph/GLnqZ
Roulette and Taylor, Reuters, footnote 1.
Ibid.
Ibid.
National Reconnaissance Office, “NROL-108,” NRO.gov, https://archive.ph/fReoK
“List of Starlink and Starshield launches,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches#Starshield.
Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor, “Exclusive: Northrop Grumman working with Musk's SpaceX on U.S. spy satellite system,” Reuters, 4/18/2024, https://archive.ph/rwvvp
National Reconnaissance Office, “Launches,” NRO.gov, https://archive.ph/dPd4X
Roulette and Taylor, Reuters, footnote 34.
Roulette and Taylor, Reuters, footnote 1.
Mikayla Easley, “NRO’s new proliferated spy satellite constellation moving into ‘operational phase,’” DefenseScoop, 10/3/2024, https://archive.ph/RqRmB.
Stephen Clark, “NRO chief: ‘You can’t hide’ from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites,” Ars Technica, 11/5/2024, https://archive.ph/Zvxze.
Sandra Erwin, “NRO hits milestone with more than 100 satellites in low Earth orbit,” 12/17/2024, SpaceNews, https://archive.ph/mzgUo.
Roulette and Taylor, Reuters, footnote 1.
Erwin, SpaceNews, footnote 40.
Hugo Britt, “Mesh Network Technology Will Spur Huge Increase in Orbital Spy Satellites,” SatNews, 3/25/2021, https://archive.ph/o9HYM.
Joey Roulette, Marisa Taylor and Aram Roston, “Exclusive: Trump Air Force nominee arranged satellite contract in manner that favored Musk's SpaceX,” Reuters, 2/7/2025, https://archive.ph/CB2qY.
Roulette and Taylor, Reuters, footnote 1.
Daisy Dobrijevic, “Starlink satellite train: how to see and track it in the night sky,” Space.com, 1/30/2025, https://archive.ph/mpsl8.
Eric Mack, “There Are 10,000 Active Satellites In Orbit. Most Belong To Elon Musk,” Forbes, 7/19/2024, https://archive.ph/878Dl.
Eric Mack, “The SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation is growing again: Here's how to spot it,” CNet, 4/28/2020, https://archive.ph/19kI7.
Clark, Ars Technica, footnote 39.
Sarah Scoles, “It’s Sentient,” The Verge, 7/31/2019, https://archive.ph/giagi.
John Greenewald, “Highly Classified NRO System Detects Possible ‘Tic-Tac’ Object in 2021,” The Black Vault, 2/27/2023, https://archive.ph/MJxdG.
Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck, “Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance,” Washington Post, 2/4/2025, https://archive.ph/jRouv.
Mike Isaac, “Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes,” New York Times, 11/4/2024, https://archive.ph/JMzDW.
Hayden Field, “OpenAI quietly removes ban on military use of its AI tools,” CNBC, 1/16/2024, https://archive.ph/cC9yp.
Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly, “Anthropic Joins A.I. Giants to Provide Models to US Defense Agencies,” Observer, 11/7/2024, https://archive.ph/1XlI7.
Tabby Kinder and George Hammond, “Palantir and Anduril join forces with tech groups to bid for Pentagon contracts,” Financial Times, 12/22/2024, https://archive.ph/1wLpm.
Scoles, The Verge, footnote 50.
SpaceRef, “BlackSky Secures Investment from Palantir and Enters into Multi-Year Strategic Partnership Following Successful Pilot Project,” SpaceNews, 9/1/2021, https://archive.ph/vh0ij.
Rachel Jewett, “BlackSky Wins 1-Year Extension for EOCL Contract with the NRO,” Via Satellite, 1/14/2025, https://archive.ph/yGWVE.
Peter Thiel, “A Time for Truth and Reconciliation,” Financial Times, 1/10/2025, https://archive.ph/PvS6B.
Palantir, “MetaConstellation,” Palantir, https://archive.ph/5PYBJ.
Thiel, Financial Times, footnote 60.
everywhere on the planet is under persistent 24/7 surveillance by the SIBRS system right now. every spot on the planet can be viewed at any time by SIBRS, a network of Lockheed satellites. It’s truly sickening. Uncle Ted.
After reading this, I was reminded of the new feature on ios18 iPhone that allows iMessage via satellite whenever I’m outside cellular range.
Another way of saying, the satellite knows my location, once my phone pings it