On June 20, 2025, near Enderlin, North Dakota, veteran storm chaser Reed Timmer was tracking a severe supercell, streaming real-time video via Starlink from Dominator 3, a Ford F-350 that he and his team have converted into a six-ton, tornado-proof battle wagon. Unbeknownst to him, just half a mile away, a local family was watching the stream from their farmhouse, assuming the storm was drifting safely southeast.
However, the vortex churned into a massive barrel tornado and executed a sharp left hook due north. In other words, it was headed straight for the farmhouse. Official radar data was lagging, but Timmer’s livestream gave the family just enough of a heads-up to barricade themselves in the basement before disaster struck.
"Their house was hit directly by the tornado," Timmer recalls. "It was shredded over top of them." Timmer and his team immediately broke off the chase to shift into search-and-rescue mode. They found the family, safe and sound, in the basement. There's little doubt that Timmer's livestream, powered by SpaceX's Starlink, saved the civilians' lives.
You can watch Timmer and Team Dominator intercepting some of the worst storms on Earth in the new documentary Never Stop Chasing, which premieres in IMAX theaters on Friday. In the film, Reed and his crew head directly into a 190-mph tornado in Greenfield, Iowa, in 2024. “It feels like you're in the back of The Dominator in this movie,” Timmer says.
"Starlink is probably our most crucial piece of equipment," he says, adding, "It's really been a game-changer." Indeed, with its low-Earth-orbit satellites and easy-to-utilize dishes, Starlink has brought reliable high-speed internet to remote users in dead zones and far-flung locations lacking traditional wired networks. (Check out our Starlink review to learn more about the specifics of the service and the tech that powers it.)
Timmer is far from the only individual using Starlink for extraordinary purposes. Below, we profile him and six other people—from a seafaring filmmaker to a livestock manager—who, thanks to the SpaceX tech, can accomplish feats that would have been unthinkable just six years ago.
The Storm Chaser in a Tornado-Proof Battle Wagon
Timmer, a 46-year-old from Grand Rapids, Mich., began his storm-chasing career in 1996, using print maps and a VHS camcorder. His fascination with storms and extreme weather led him to the University of Oklahoma, where he earned his Ph.D. in meteorology and used his graduate stipends to continue his early storm-chasing career. Today, Timmer's team is funded through private sponsorships and multi-platform social media livestreams.
Team Dominator's core mission is to advance atmospheric science and emergency warning systems (of course, there's a thrill-seeking element as well). Timmer also operates the Team Dominator Storm Recovery Group alongside rapid disaster response organizations such as the United Cajun Navy, using mobile connectivity to support relief operations immediately after a storm passes.
In the early years, the most reliable internet connection on the road was found at local libraries. "We'd go in there and look at the internet to see where we had to go,” Timmer says. “Then we'd have to rely entirely on our eyes to chase the storms."
Today, when chasing an active supercell, Team Dominator operates with a core crew of three inside Dominator 3: Timmer at the wheel, plus engineer Will Clay and field navigator Matt Spatol. (The trio is backed by a remote network of five to 10 contractors.) The Starlink Dish V4 mounted on the roof of Dominator 3 allows them to stream live 360-degree, POV, and drone feeds.
The Dominator crew uses air cannons, rockets, and specialized FPV drones to launch miniaturized micro-sensors directly into active vortices. These sensors stream live GPS, pressure, humidity, and temperature metrics back to the truck, allowing Timmer’s team to construct a live 3-D "X-ray" of the storm’s core dynamics to decode tornado mechanics.
Taking Starlink into a tornado requires custom protection, especially when what Timmer calls "gorilla hail," which "sounds like a big gorilla fist when it comes down," enters the picture. "We did lose a Starlink [dish] to that very large hail," Timmer recalls. So the team built a protective polycarbonate enclosure. "Now it can handle softball-sized hail—even larger than that—and debris."
Dominator 3 is indeed tough. Even when a multi-vortex twister in Alabama spun the massive vehicle in a complete circle and wedged it into a ditch, the live data stream never dropped. Timmer says he and his team want to build a next-gen Dominator that can withstand an EF5 tornado, which has winds over 200 mph. "That would take a lot of the anxiety out of the tornado-intercept process," he says.
The Solo Sailor Navigating Treacherous Oceans
American filmmaker Olivia Wyatt, 43, has spent the last seven years living solo aboard Juniper, a 34-foot cutter-rigged sailboat. Her global voyage has taken her across the South Pacific, through Asia, and across the treacherous Indian Ocean. She has encountered severe squalls, been chased by illegal fishing boats, and been robbed three times.
Her last feature film, Sailing a Sinking Sea (2015), documented a seafaring community in Thailand that successfully predicted and survived the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami by drawing on ancestral wisdom and natural observations. When we catch up with Wyatt, she is anchored off Namibia's Skeleton Coast, where she is traveling inland to explore the world’s oldest desert.
For the first few years of sailing, staying connected was a real ordeal. “I was relying on the Iridium Go,” she says, referring to a pre-Starlink satellite-connected hotspot. “I would equate it to dial-up internet in the '80s. I often had to move all around and contort my body like a tree limb to try to get it to connect to a satellite. The calls would constantly drop.”
In 2025, she swapped out her legacy equipment for an ultra-portable Starlink Mini dish. Positioned on the aft port side of Juniper’s cockpit, the setup gives her high-speed internet access even in the dead zones of the open sea.
But to make the hardware work in a harsh ocean environment, Wyatt had to get creative. She bypassed expensive custom marine mounts by jimmying together a DIY bracket using a piece of starboard—a high-density, marine-grade polyethylene—repurposed from an old fish-cutting board. She attached one end to the dish and the other to an old solar panel rail mount. Because her cockpit is covered by a canvas shade called a bimini, this improvised extension was vital to push the dish far enough outboard to maintain an unobstructed view of the sky.
"How I’ve mounted it is not beautiful by any means, but it works well," Wyatt admits.
Starlink Saves the Day
The difference between Wyatt's old communication array and her current satellite setup is night and day. Previously, obtaining crucial weather data was slow and prohibitively expensive. During one terrifying three-day storm, Wyatt was left hand-steering to exhaustion, unable to determine which way to turn to escape the system because her shore-based weather router hadn't noticed her coordinates in time.
Now, running a Starlink Roam Unlimited plan near the coast and toggling on Ocean Mode offshore, she has total data autonomy. A true test of the tech came during a recent passage from South Africa to Namibia, when Juniper's headsail roller-furling jammed, leaving Wyatt trapped with too much sail unfurled in volatile conditions. Attempting to drop the sail alone was a terrifying prospect, given the chance of falling into icy waters: "If I fell overboard, survival lasts between 11 minutes and a few hours.”
When her emergency VHF radio calls to the shore went unanswered, Wyatt used her Starlink connection to message contacts on land. A support team met her right at the harbor entrance, helping her to untangle the line and save the vessel.
Beyond emergency situations, the integration of high-speed satellite internet has permanently altered how Wyatt navigates the sea. Previously, arriving at an unfamiliar port at night meant slowing down or waiting until daybreak out of fear of striking uncharted reefs or shipwrecks. Today, she can pull down live satellite imagery in real time, making night entries significantly safer. "I am a lot braver when it comes to entering foreign lands thanks to Starlink," she says.
The high-speed link has also alleviated the extreme isolation of solo sailing. Wyatt frequently "buddy boats" with other vessels crossing the same corridors. While traditional VHF radios lose contact over long distances, she now uses Starlink to schedule daily check-in calls to share coordinates. If a boat misses a check-in, the other immediately knows its last known location and alerts nearby commercial ships.
Through it all, she's also blogging, sharing her adventures on Instagram and her website, wildernessofwaves.com, and continuing her freelance video work. "I could not do what I do creatively or professionally at sea or near shore without Starlink," Wyatt says. But she's still trying to strike a balance. "I go to sea to escape technology," she points out, "but actually still need it to keep the voyage going."
The Idaho Potato Farmer Keeping His Team Connected
Shane VanOrden, 41, is co-owner and manager of VanOrden Farms, a midsize operation cultivating thousands of acres of potatoes, wheat, and sugar beets just outside of Blackfoot, Idaho. Until recently, he faced a problem: While his farm’s nine John Deere tractors are highly sophisticated, the local cell service is completely hit-or-miss.
John Deere’s Remote Display Access (RDA) is supposed to allow managers to log into a tractor’s monitor from anywhere to troubleshoot settings. However, rural cellular dead zones frequently turned the feature into a logistical headache. “We were always having connection issues before,” VanOrden says. “It would freeze or lock up, we'd have to quit, and half the time it wouldn't even work just because we couldn't get connected.”
Two years ago, John Deere supplied the farm with an experimental solution: the JDLink Boost, an integrated system that mounts a Starlink satellite dish directly onto the roof of the tractor cab. "We went from barely being able to connect—I mean, there are areas on our farm where we can barely get a phone call—to a 200-megabit download speed," VanOrden says. "It made it so we never lost access to the tractor."
The shift to satellite connectivity has completely revolutionized the farm’s daily workflow, particularly for the John Deere guidance system AutoPath. As a tractor drives through a field to plant, it records the exact physical line of the crop. That heavy data file must then be shared with the next tractor in the sequence so subsequent passes don't accidentally disturb the buried seed.
Previously, wirelessly downloading a single AutoPath mapping file took 20 to 30 minutes of agonizing wait time, during which the tractor engine had to remain running. "Every minute we're sitting there just idling the tractor is costing us money, whether in fuel or wasted, useless hours we put on the machine," VanOrden says. With Starlink, files download almost instantly.
The high-speed link also allows managers to utilize Remote Display Access seamlessly. If an inexperienced operator encounters a technical error or setup issue, VanOrden no longer has to halt his work to drive out to the field. He can pull up the tractor’s live screen directly from his phone from anywhere and walk them through the solution in real time.
The true test of the system's reliability came during a recent harvest, when the region's primary cell tower network crashed for around six or seven hours. In a pre-Starlink era, communication across thousands of acres would have been completely severed. Instead, operators inside the retrofitted cabs simply switched to their localized tractor Wi-Fi networks, using iMessage and text alerts over satellite to keep the harvest moving.
Another perk: The cabin Wi-Fi router allows operators to stream music, watch videos, and check sports scores during long hours in the field—a massive boost to crew morale. "That was the first thing I asked!" VanOrden jokes. "Like, 'All right, am I going to be able to watch college football?'"
The Organizers Bringing Broadband to Underserved Areas
Starlink dishes don’t always show up via delivery truck or on store shelves. In the African nation of Malawi, a rural community received satellite internet access with the help of a pack animal.
“The Starlink got shipped there on the back of an ox," says Mea Thompson, a co-founder of the six-year-old nonprofit unconnected.org, which is helping to expand broadband service to underserved areas in 24 countries. "They had to take it through a river to get it there"
Thompson's organization has brought Starlink and other connectivity services to over 5,000 sites across the globe, including to indigenous communities in the Amazon and a refugee camp in northwest Kenya.
“You’re in the middle of nowhere, and you’re getting 100Mbps. That’s amazing,” says Mary Munyoki, the organization’s director of programs. She notes that many of the communities that unconnected.org has focused on in Africa have never had internet access before. In other places, the users were experiencing speeds of 1 or 2Mbps.
Thompson and Munyoki say that one of the beauties of Starlink, beyond its high speeds, is the ease of setup. “We’ve shipped Starlink kits along the Amazon River for five days to reach a school,” Thompson recalls. “They were like, ‘What do we do? What is this?’" Their answer: "Just plug it in.”
“Starlink is a game-changer for these communities because they might not be as tech-savvy, but [the device] is something that you plug in, and it works,” she adds. “It is very, very rare that we come across any issues.”
Getting this kind of access can be eye-opening for those on the receiving end. “One lady in Malawi was talking about how the internet enabled them to see other people who have made it, other women in other parts of the world,” Munyoki says. “And they were so inspired by that.” Some students in Africa have also received remote education through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Emerging Talent" program, designed for "refugees, displaced, and conflict-impacted communities."
Sometimes, Thompson says, critics object to exposing remote areas to the internet's ills. “People ask me, ‘But why would you bring social media into these communities? They’re protected, leave them be. They don’t need all this crap,’” she says. "But if they’re adults, they’ve got the same right as me to choose what they want to access."
However, unconnected.org doesn't offer Starlink and other broadband services for free. “One thing we’ve learned is that free is not scalable, it’s not sustainable,” Thompson says. “There’s no skin in the game, there’s no ownership, there’s no monetization method, and then a year later, when they’re going to start charging, people are like, ‘We don’t want to pay for this. We’ve had it for free.’”
Today, unconnected.org uses a special Starlink offering called the Impact Plan, which provides Priority-level service at lower rates. To prevent abuse, the Impact Plan caps data at 5 TB per month and requires a community representative to submit a quarterly report verifying the impact that Starlink access has had on the community.
Unconnected.org is "technology agnostic" and has been collaborating with all kinds of tech companies, including cellular providers and device makers. About three to four years ago, the group began working with SpaceX to test different subscription models.
“Starlink was one of the first partners that we spoke to that really got it,” Thompson says. “I think that’s why Starlink really appreciates working with us. We can, for every single kit we have, showcase the actual impact coming out of it.”
The Engineer Monitoring Volcanic and Seismic Activity
Brendan Hodge, 46, has been fascinated by volcanoes since he was around eight years old, when a friend of his mother's gave him a small vial of ash from the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington State as a gift. He studied geology and geophysics in school and, in 2010, joined the Washington, DC-based EarthScope Consortium, a research group dedicated to studying the planet's internal processes, including earthquakes and tectonic plate motion.
As a senior engineer, Hodge now helps the group monitor volcanic and seismic activity using hundreds of sensor stations across the country. Some of those sensors are so remote that they must be reached by helicopter. "My next project is to repair a station on an active volcano in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, which will require several weeks of preparation and travel,” he says.
EarthScope operates the National Science Foundation's National Geophysical Facility, which includes the federally funded Network of the Americas (NOTA). That network spans about 1,200 stations across North and Central America, using underground instruments and global positioning to detect geological activity. The sites serve as a crucial early-warning system for earthquakes.
"This data provides the information needed to locate where the earthquake occurred below the surface and how much of the fault has slipped," Hodge explains. "With immediate information from real-time data, we can predict the severity of surface shaking and alert critical infrastructure and local residents to take appropriate actions, preventing loss of life and infrastructure damage."
Meanwhile, the positioning data can give "scientists the critical information needed to characterize how much the ground has moved below the ocean during large earthquakes, allowing us to know if a tsunami will impact coastal areas," he adds. "We can save lives with a functional real-time earthquake monitoring network like the one we operate."
There was a problem, though: Much of the sensor network has relied on cell towers for connectivity to send information back to NOTA's data centers. But for remote stations outside cell range, particularly those in Alaska, the consortium was relying on older satellite dish systems called VSATs, along with low-speed 900MHz radios. “They were very painfully slow,” Hodge says of the original VSAT dishes. "We couldn’t use our modern instruments at the sites.”
But now Hodge has been upgrading the affected sites with SpaceX's much faster satellite internet service. "The Starlinks allow us to collect data in real time," he says. "The VSAT could not do this because it required too much power, and thus could only be active for an hour per day. The Starlink Minis can run all day using the same power system."
Protecting Starlink Mini Dishes With Fiberglass Domes
In 2023, the EarthScope Consortium began testing Starlink for the more remote sensor stations, including those in areas around Yellowstone National Park, where volcanic activity occurs. But the consortium discovered that the older “actuated” Starlink dishes were “pretty power-hungry,” preventing them from running continuously, Hodge says.
The next year, SpaceX released the smaller, portable Starlink Mini, which requires even less power, enabling the consortium to stream data through the sensors even longer. The organization has since swapped out the VSATs for about 70 solar- and battery-powered Starlink dishes, which enable the stations to reach download speeds of around 100Mbps. In other cases, the Starlink dishes have been placed on the cheaper $10-per-month Standby Mode plan, which limits the download rate to 0.5Mbps.
The consortium has been fitting the Starlink Mini dishes under fiberglass domes that don’t interfere with the satellite communication. The hope is that the domes will prevent any snowfall from accumulating on the dishes. Although Starlink has a snowmelt mode, Hodge wants to save on power.
For most of the other sensor sites, cell tower connectivity remains the better solution, Hodge says. But with SpaceX teasing more power-efficient next-gen dish models, it’s possible Starlink could prove a better alternative over time.
The Cattle Rancher Keeping Track of the Herd
Lloyd Calvert worked as an IT consultant for a decade, but all that time, the great outdoors was calling his name. "I would spend all my time out on the mountains, going camping and fishing, skiing and mountain biking," he says. "It was really just driven by a love of the land." In 2015, he left the IT field to pursue outdoor ranching work. Nine years later, he was hired as the livestock agriculture manager at the High Lonesome Ranch in De Beque, Colo., a rural area.
Calvert, 38, once dealt with helpdesk issues, file recovery, and network system design. Now he found himself facing a new kind of problem: Where did his cows go?
High Lonesome Ranch sells premium beef from cattle that feed strictly on grass across 60 to 80 miles of remote land each year. The ranch used traditional electric fencing in some parts, but for larger or more mountainous areas, that was impossible. It was routine for some of his 300 cows to wander off and go rogue. “Last year, we spent months just getting them out of areas and corralling them out of a canyon,” he says. “This is the kind of country where you could lose cattle.”
Earlier this year, Calvert hit upon a high-tech solution to keeping track of the herd, fitting each cow with a solar-powered smart collar from the New Zealand-based company Halter. The company incorporates Starlink Mobile technology into its virtual fencing system, enabling unlimited connectivity even in tree cover. Now Calvert can track the cows in real-time using only his phone. “If they are piled up somewhere, if something is wrong, I can see it,” he says.
The smart collar's app allows Calvert to nudge a cow in the right direction using noise signals, and, failing that, a low-level electric pulse. “It beeps at them when they approach the invisible fence before giving them a small electric charge," he says. "It’s not a mean thing. It’s a training tool, and the goal is to not inflict any kind of stress on them, but to just get them to turn around.”
“Even if they tear down a neighboring fence and ignore the collar, I can see where they are," he adds. "That’s really hard to replace when you have hundreds or thousands of acres."
“It really impressed us how quickly the cows adapted to the collars,” Calvert says, predicting that the tech will be "a game-changer" for the cattle industry. “Halter has allowed us to do things we simply couldn’t do before,” he adds. “Sometimes my cows are more connected than me.”
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