The Chinese have published two remarkably contrasting pieces of writing about Starlink. One is about how to destroy it. The other turns it into a radar. The first paper was prompted by a worrying incident in 2021, when China told the UN that Starlink satellites had approached its space station so closely on two occasions that it had to move out of their way. In April 2022, Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher at a military institute in Beijing, said that the satellites should be tracked and, if necessary, destroyed by a combination of jamming and direct physical attacks. Two years later, a team at Wuhan University came to the opposite conclusion: that Starlink was more valuable alive than dead. Radar works by sending out a signal and detecting its reflection, which has the drawback of betraying the radar's presence to the enemy. But Starlink already blankets the earth with signals from around 11,000 satellites, and does so whether anyone requests them or not. Off the coast of Guangdong province, the Wuhan team pointed an antenna at one of the satellites and waited for a drone to pass in front of it, briefly interrupting the signal, like an object passing in front of a light and momentarily blocking it. The team used a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone because they calculated that its radar cross section was similar to an F-22 stealth fighter. Stealth aircraft are designed to reflect radar waves away from the transmitter, but a shadow doesn't care about the shape of the object casting it, just its profile, so the clever shaping of stealth aircraft is useless against it. The team's paper referred to it as "anti-stealth". In 2025, a Chinese radar journal was considering how it might be used over the open ocean, where land-based radars cannot reach. For now, the implications are relatively limited. In the simulation, the drone had to pass within 77m of the direct path between the satellite and the antenna for the technique to detect it. Yi Jianxin, the lead researcher, admitted that the "feasibility and effectiveness" of the system for military use were yet to be proved. Even a Chinese military blog that was excited by the research said that "it cannot serve as fire-control radar to guide interceptors", ie, it does not offer a way to shoot things down. The Register was more graphic, saying that it was like "knowing there's a mosquito in the bedroom at night", but still "not being able to swat it". One obvious weakness of the Wuhan radar is that, because it uses Starlink's own signals, it would be disabled if the satellites were destroyed, as the 2022 paper recommended.