I remember that they didn’t want it to be used for drones and that there were issues about cost. But that doesn’t mean that they turned of access to thwart this specific naval drone attack. It could just be that the naval drones were the ones in action at the moment that they turned off the satellites. It sounds more like a typical situation of a company turning off service because of a usage dispute. It seems similar to the cable company turning off someone’s internet because they are using too much bandwidth.
OK, I see what you’re saying. To me, the evil villain action is deciding unilaterally what’s best for Ukraine and the world, and turning off access. Whether or not it was done as a reaction to a specific attack or just as a general practice isn’t really important.
But you’re right, the specific story here is unconfirmed.
During the California wildfires in 2018, it emerged that Verizon was throttling the emergency communication system used by firefighters, because they had exceeded their usage budget for the month. Verizon obviously wasn’t trying to “help” the wildfires, it was just incompetence and gross neglect for human life as compared to corporate profits.
Probably the same thing with Elon and Starlink.
With the difference being that afterwards Verizon didn’t claim that their preventing the firefighters from communicating saved the world from nuclear destruction.
Yeah, fair. Verizon’s just evil, not evil and crazy.
Exactly this, but again I’m calling the story complete bullshit, not just unconfirmed. In order for the tale that Elmo has retold via his biographer to be true, Elmo had to know somehow about a Ukrainian surprise attack and shut it down in real time. Ukraine sure as shit wasn’t sharing their military plans with Elmo, so the only plausible explanation is that Elmo has a super-secret network of spies ala James Bond infiltrated into the Ukrainian high command informing him of actions that he knows would lead us all to a nuclear holocaust that only he, boy wonder, the high tech Ultraman-child billionaire could save all of humanity by cutting their live feed in real time. Sorry, disregard everything from the word plausible onward in that sentence, I was having a stroke, it’s obvious nonsense.
Oh, and it seems everyone has forgotten what Elmo’s real problem with Ukraine using Starlink was after he got the accolades about him being such a philanthropist for donating Starlink to Ukraine. Having gotten his PR hit for his free donation, he wanted hard cash from the government teat.
AKA based on his complicity with Putin and his invasion. Aid and comfort to the enemy indeed.
I think you’re reading into that more than was said.
More details on the Musk biography. He reportedly turned off Starlink communications as Ukraine was launching a drone sneak attack in Crimea, so the drones “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.” Based on his conversations with senior Russian officials, he was worried the Russians would retaliate with nuclear weapons.
That doesn’t say he shut it off because of the sneak attack. Just that it happened as the same time. And the link I provided shows that Musk has been saying he’s afraid that Russia sees him using Starlink to help Ukraine as an act of aggression.
It’s worded to make it sound like he somehow knew about the surprise attack, which I agree they wouldn’t tell him. But my article does show that Musk has repeatedly tried to shut down Starlink.
The article also said that Musk intended Ukraine to use Starlink for peaceful, non-military purposes like Netflix and chill, and doing homework assignments, not blowing people up.
I can actually sympathize with it a little bit. Even though I’m on the side of Ukraine in the war.
Musk’s version of the Ukraine Starlink episode differs from the reported version:
I don’t think you’ve read the CNN article, there is nothing to read into, bolding mine. It’s the literal first sentence in the article:
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson, whose new book is set to be released by Simon & Schuster on September 12.
Can’t the Starlink system see where active terminals are? Elon doesn’t need a spy network to see a bunch of Starlink terminals sailing through the Black Sea towards Sevastopol.
Russia has the technology to shoot Starlink out of the sky. They might not be able to afford the potential losses.
On the other hand, Musk also decided to censor Twitter in Turkiye despite legal Turkish Supreme Court precedent in Twitter’s favor, despite being a free speech purist, and despite it being a neck-and-neck election that barely needed any outside interference to decide the outcome. The decision didn’t make any sense from publicly available information at the time nor from anything that Musk has said since (that I’ve seen).
It seems likely that he’s communicating with a variety of actors and weighing a variety of things that we aren’t aware of. As such, we can’t really say whether any one decision is madness, drugs, preserving his business, the bottom line, selling out to the highest bidder, bowing to blackmail, or what.
Given his increasing level of irrational behavior, I’m willing to believe that he’s in a variety of tense and stressful predicaments that aren’t terribly enviable. But, likewise, I expect that they’re mostly self-created, so I don’t sympathize.
This Wikipedia article has the Ukrainians complaining about Starlink outages. More details are needed about the wheres and whens to corroborate or contradict Musk’s version of events.
Which is why he told the Pentagon that they would have to pick up the tab if they wanted the Ukrainian military to continue using the Starlink terminals he’d provided them, am I right?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine/index.html
So far roughly 20,000 Starlink satellite units have been donated to Ukraine, with Musk tweeting on Friday the “operation has cost SpaceX $80 million and will exceed $100 million by the end of the year.”
But those charitable contributions could be coming to an end, as SpaceX has warned the Pentagon that it may stop funding the service in Ukraine unless the US military kicks in tens of millions of dollars per month.
Documents obtained by CNN show that last month Musk’s SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it can no longer continue to fund the Starlink service as it has. The letter also requested that the Pentagon take over funding for Ukraine’s government and military use of Starlink, which SpaceX claims would cost more than $120 million for the rest of the year and could cost close to $400 million for the next 12 months.
“We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales wrote to the Pentagon in the September letter.
Netflix and chill indeed. Elmo had no idea his precious Starlink wasn’t being used by Ukrainians in the middle of a war to make having casual sex easier. Honest to god, he thought he was just asking the Pentagon to give him $120 million for the rest of 2022 and $400 million a year after that so that Ukrainians could fuck each other. After all, he’s also combatting underpopulation which is the greatest threat to humanity.
Oh, got’cha. Musk was being less than honest about that. Imagine my surprise. That fucking asshole.
This is not really accurate. Russia has some anti-satellite missiles, yes. But there are thousands of Starlink satellites, and there’s no way Russia has that many missiles. The only way to bring down enough of them to matter would be to hope that blowing up some would Kessler-syndrome the rest. That (if it were possible, and I’m not entirely sure it is) wouldn’t result just in the loss of Starlink, but the destruction of almost everything in LEO, including Russia’s own satellites, including everyone else’s satellites, and preventing the use of anything in LEO for decades at least. The international blowback would be beyond enormous.
Including NATO members states’ military satellites, which could trigger an Article 5 reaction.
Not worth the risk even if they could do it.
I kind of doubt the Russians even have enough anti-sat missiles to trigger Kessler syndrome in the first place. I think most likely they’d blow up a dozen or two Starlink satellites, piss everyone off when a couple other random satellites are disabled or perhaps just have to burn through a bunch of station-keeping fuel resulting in early retirement, and only decrease the Starlink network capacity by a couple percent. The cost/benefit is just horrible.
Here is a gift link to an extensive excerpt from the relevant portion of Isaacson’s book that was published in the Washington post.
In this he describes a real time conversation with Musk as the decision.
One Friday evening that month, just after spending a week with Musk, I was back home in New Orleans watching a football game at my old high school. (The occasion was that it was one of the final games for the school’s superstar quarterback, Arch Manning.) My phone started vibrating with messages from Musk.
“This could be a giant disaster,” he texted. I went behind the bleachers to ask him what the problem was. He was in full Muskian crisis-hero-drama mode, this time understandably. A dangerous issue had arisen, and he believed there was “a non-trivial possibility,” as he put it, that it could lead to a nuclear war — with Starlink partly responsible. The Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet based at Sevastopol in Crimea by sending six small drone submarines packed with explosives, and it was using Starlink to guide them to the target.
It sounds to me like Musk figured out the attack with something similar to what @Gorsnak suggested suggested. The thing I think it is reasonable to Musk to not want Starlink to be used in an offensive military capacity, but the way that should have been handled was to tell Ukraine that if they didn’t call off the attack and recall the drones he would shut down the link. Unilaterally shutting down the link without warning if far from being neutral and is instead actively taking the Russian side.
Overall it sounds like Musk has a huge messaiah complex, and feeling like he is the one to solve the whole Ukraine war thing, arranged a meeting to talk with the Russian ambassador. At that meeting told him that Russia would win Ukraine was doomed and that any attack on Crimea would lead to immediate nuclear escalation. Standard Russian propaganda and saber rattling which Musk bought hook line and sinker. So now even though he might be sympathetic to Ukraine, it is in Ukraine’s and humanities best interest to allow Russia to keep the territory it annexed and not risk antagonizing Russia any further. I wonder if he in any way revised his opinion after the multiple attacks on the Kerch bridge did not result in the end of the world.