Elon Musk: ‘Approaching 100 Starlinks Active In Iran’

Elon Musk announced on Monday that his SpaceX company has deployed almost one hundred Starlink Internet broadband connections to Iran.

Musk said in September he would provide Starlink access to the Iranian people so they could bypass their tyrannical government’s effort to control online communications and crush the popular uprising that began with the killing of a young woman named Mahsa Amini for allegedly violating Islamic headscarf laws.

“Approaching 100 Starlinks active in Iran,” Musk said on Twitter, which he also owns, in response to footage of street protests continuing in Iran four months after the death of Amini.

The Starlink system works by transmitting signals from orbiting satellites to ground stations, which normally retail for $599. The standard cost of the service, which was designed to bring high-speed Internet access to remote areas, is $110 per month. Musk’s SpaceX company has placed about 3,300 Starlink satellites in orbit to date.

Presumably Musk’s tweet means almost a hundred of the ground stations are now up and running in Iran, each of them providing a link to the Internet that the brutal theocratic regime cannot block or censor.

Starlink is illegal in Iran, because it supposedly promotes “deviant morality and culture.” Human rights activists have been smuggling tabletop-sized Starlink receivers into Iran ever since Musk announced his intention to make the service available.

Tehran is doing what it can to suppress the protest movement. On Monday Iranian officials rerouted a Dubai-bound flight, forcing it to land on Iran’s Kish Island, to prevent the wife and daughter of former Iranian soccer team captain Ali Daei from leaving the country.

Daei’s own passport was temporarily confiscated in October after he expressed support for the Amini protesters and called on the regime to “solve the problems of the Iranian people, rather than using repression, violence, and arrests.”

Iranian state media reported Daei’s wife Mona Farrokhazari was pulled off the plane on Monday because she was banned from travel due to her own support for the protesters. State media claimed that while her flight was bound for Dubai, her ultimate destination was the United States. Her daughter was not technically banned from travel, but was detained for long enough to miss the flight to Dubai.

On Tuesday, Iranian media buzzed with news that female chess champion Sara Khadem competed in an international tournament in Kazakhstan without wearing a hijab. Iranian women have been threatened and punished by the regime for appearing without headscarves in foreign countries, notably including rock climber Elnaz Rekabi, who was reportedly placed under house arrest and made to apologize after she competed in South Korea without a hijab in October.

The BBC noted on Monday that the Amini uprising is still going strong despite a vicious crackdown that has killed over 500 demonstrators, 69 of them children. Uncounted numbers of protesters have been arrested and two have been executed so far, with at least 26 more facing the death penalty. Prominent Iranians have been jailed merely for objecting to the executions.

“Both sides have been radicalized – the regime in its crackdown, and people in the film industry in their response. Iran cannot go back to pre-Mahsa Amini era,” said actress Pegah Ahangarani, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October for supporting the protests in social media posts and interviews with foreign journalists.