Musk has reconsidered and will continue paying for Starlink.
Imho Eventually Ukraine should pay the satellite fees. SpaceX has donated thousands of terminals.
I don’t know, it kind of feels like a lend lease to me.
Is Ukraine expected to pay for all the himars, for example?
SpaceX is a private company. I wouldn’t want them price gouging Ukraine. I’m not sure how buying access time on satellites works.
Weapons are funded by NATO countries.
One thing I heard is that the Ukrainians only need the $500 base device, but Elon “gave” them the $4,500 deluxe devices. Also that the US government paid for a third of them, and at exorbitant prices. Meaning that the actual check the US government wrote for its 1/3 of the devices ended up being more like 80% of the total cost of all devices sent. I don’t have any cites to back any of this up, so take it with the appropriate amount of salt. But if that’s true, I’m not shedding any tears about a billionaire losing money by upselling a captive audience.
On a different note, I could envision a time when US military services might want to use starlink for something. Right at this moment in time, if the US government decided to eminent domain starlink under the auspices of national security, I would just shrug and say “Yeah that sounds about right.”
Out of curiosity, how does the US military handle its communication infrastructure compared to what the Ukrainians are doing with starlink? What did we do in Afghanistan, for example?
That’s… not exactly it. The dishes are the pretty same, though the expensive ones have better weatherproofing.
The real difference is in the service level. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise, but a service plan usable by the military is going to cost more than one for civilians. This isn’t just price gouging; it’s just the fact that military use has much greater demands. The baseline Starlink service doesn’t even allow moving the dish from the original location. Keeping the service running in a warzone has meant fending off Russian hackers (who, unlike their generals, aren’t idiots). The Ukrainians actually do need the super-expensive military version if they’re going to be using it in the field.
No one has to feel back for Musk losing a few bucks, but Starlink has to be a sustainable service, and it’s unreasonable for them to continue funding this out of their own pocket. The network is <10% complete right now, and if the US military has any interest in it (they do), SpaceX needs enough funding to continue building it.
The fact that Starlink has gone from “but what about the astronomers?” to “it’s such a crucial piece of infrastructure that it should be nationalized” in such a short time is rather amazing. The lack of competition is entirely because no one else has been competent enough to build such a system. The geostationary satellites are slow and laggy; Iridium has very limited bandwidth; Globalstar and others aren’t any better; Amazon’s project is nowhere to be found.
I thought it was also “what about future space exploration in general?” And I don’t think that issue’s actually been dealt with. It’s just being ignored – whether due to current emergency usefulness, or due to a general societal attitude of ‘oh hell let’s go ahead and do it and we’ll clean up the mess afterward, nevermind whether we have any idea how to do that’, I don’t know.
If I’m wrong, and it’s been concluded either that there’s no problem or that there’s a definitely-usable solution, please let me know; though maybe in a different thread.
Thanks.
The U.S. might wind up forgiving the loans, but in that case it won’t be the weapons manufacturers who go unpaid - it will be the U.S. government, or rather taxpyers.
Demanding that SpaceX donate Starlink would make it the only defense company expected to donate their product. Some companies like DJI have also voluntarily donated hardware like SpaceX did. Lockheed certainly isn’t donating all those HIMARS systems. Why should SpaceX be different?
Also, people who say, "Elon Musk is a billionaire - he can afford it’ neglect to consider that SpaceX is a huge company with many investors who expect to be paid back, and who expect Musk to have a fiduciary responsibility to run the company in a profitable manner.
Yeah, and that funding pays the weapons manufacturers. Like SpaceX. They aren’t ‘price gouging’, they are charging for a very valuable service.
This. Think of the difference between consumer grade internet and a commercial T1/T3 connection. If you can get consumer grade gigabit internet for $100/mo, why does a 46Mbps T3 cost as much as $15,000 per month? The difference is really about connection reliabilty and guaranteed throughput. Consumer internet bandwidth is shared among many customers, and the ISP counts on the fact that you almost never use full bandwidth so they can resell bandwidth many times over. This means your connection speed is not guaranteed, and neither is your latency. The upload channel is also much slower than the download channel.
It actually is much more expensive to give full dedicated bandwidth with guaranteed performance.
In the case of Starlink, I can imagine the issues with moving terminals, attempts at signal jamming and hacking, performing in high-EMF environments and all the other milspec stuff requires a lot more attention and work from Stalink personnel than does a box that gets put on someone’s house and used to watch Netflix. And that guaranteed connectivity and bandwidth from a satellite does not come cheap - Starlink satellites expect to share bandwidth with many customers at the base service price. Satellites are expensive and have a finite lifespan, so the per-hour cost is very high. If you have to dedicate bandwidth, that gets very expensive.
As for the hardware cost, economies of scale come into play. SpaceX can manufacture consumer grade terminals by the hundreds of thousands, lowering the unit cost substantially. Specialty hardware for smaller markets is going to be much more expensive.
Starlink Maritime costs $10,000 for the hardware, and $5,000 per month for the service.
Kessler syndrome, if that’s what you are thinking of, is not a threat to space exploration in general. The frequency of collision would,not be high enough to pose a significant risk to rockets that are just flying through Low Earth Orbit. You’d need to loiter in LEO for weeks or months before the risk of getting smacked becomes significant.
In any event, SpaceX specifically chose very low altitudes to ensure that their satellites de-orbit very soon if they fail. And if they haven’t failed they can be commanded to de-orbit.
As for astronomers, the satellites only shine during a specific part of the night - when the sun is down on the ground but the satellites are still lit by the sun. This is also the worst time to do astronomy anyway. The high resolution, narrow field of view scopes aren’t going to be much affected. The biggest problems will be felt by the wide-field survey scopes like the Vera Rubin observatory.
That problem will probably be fixed through software at the observatory, coupled perhaps with image stacking. It’s not the disaster to astronomy some are predicting.
But they did donate their product. It’s stupid for them to donate it and then later expect the US government pay for it. If you want the US government to pay for it, you negotiate that up front. He seems to have realized this, and gone back to saying he’ll fund it.
Also, they apparently haven’t been giving them the $4500 retail service, most have been signed up for the $500 service, and the Ukrainians have paid for a lot of them themselves.
I may be expecting too much of the DoD, but I wonder how much pressure they were allowed to put on SpaceX. As much as the assorted communications agencies love the convenience and quality of SpaceX satcomm, they could easily whisper in Elon’s ear that hosing the Ukrainians may affect the DoD’s ability to acquire their future services.
Well, probably not. It’s mostly slow-moving bureaucracy over there in DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency).
To be honest, I don’t think there’s that much to the Starlink story. It seems like a piece of consumer tech which was easily adopted into wartime service and the parent company hasn’t yet done the work needed to become a certified (or whatever the term is) defense contractor. This will, I bet, be rectified in short order: if the US Government can do one thing well, it’s transfer vast amounts of taxpayer cash to large corporations.
It was always meant to be a robust, fast, general-purpose network. They started not just with consumers, but consumers that really had no other options, and were willing to put up with teething pains (like frequent outages). That’s just because the capability of the network depends on how many satellites they have up there, and they don’t get launched all at once. They moved on to a wider swath of consumers, and then high-grade commercial use (like cruise ships). The US is still evaluating its use on military craft, but clearly this stuff takes time.
The high-grade commercial plan is $4500/mo. That means no geofencing (within already approved areas), no data caps, and generally a high grade of service. That’s what the Ukrainian units are getting, even if they aren’t paying for it fully. In fact, they’re getting a tier of service even higher than that, but which (to anyone’s knowledge) doesn’t officially exist yet. The commercial grade service isn’t meant to operate in a warzone. Cruise lines aren’t fending off Russian hackers.
That said, I suspect you’re right. The adults in the room realize that Starlink is providing a unique service that ultimately needs to be paid for. SpaceX has proved very successful at winning and delivering on government contracts.
‘The hell with it’: Elon Musk tweets SpaceX will ‘keep funding Ukraine govt for free’ amid Starlink controversy
- It was not immediately clear whether Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, was being sarcastic. In response to a tweet about the move, Musk said, “we should still do good deeds.” Responding to another tweet saying that Musk had already paid taxes that are funding Ukraine’s defense, he said, “Fate loves irony.”
Another element here–though I don’t know how relevant given the distribution of service levels here–is that the consumer-grade dishes are subsidized. They’re sold for $500, while at last check they cost ~$1300 to manufacture. The expectation is that the difference will be quickly paid back through the service itself.
The trouble is that the dishes do not necessarily have a long lifetime in this environment. If they get blown up or otherwise damaged, SpaceX can’t recover that subsidy. The user may find a new $500 dish every month or two to be an acceptable tradeoff, but it’s not financially sustainable at the consumer service rates.
Under normal circumstances, a company would start charging the unsubsidized cost and geofence them. But that basically amounts to denying Ukraine service, and would get just as much backlash. So they’re in something of a no-win situation with respect to that, at least until they can bring their dish costs down to something close to parity.
One thing to keep in mind with regard to Musk’s statements is that his primary goal is to feed his narcissism. It really has nothing to do with the economics of any of it.
This is exactly why Musk will continue funding SpaceX. The majority of its revenue comes directly or indirectly from government entities, and mainly the US government.
I am sure the Biden administration has by now reminded Musk that that Northrop Grumman & Boeing have already built one lunar mission and would love to build another one. SpaceX investors no doubt understand that this is what they signed up for, not to prop up a petulant man-baby’s personal vanity project just so he can prevail in a Twitter beef.
Musk knows who butters his bread. That’s why he came to heel (for now). He doesn’t have a philanthropic bone in his body, he’s gunning for government contracts, and we can only hope that Russian aerospace defense contracts don’t become part of that portfolio.
Is that the dish alone, or the dish and receiver/transmitter and a router? How do they differ from the satellite web I used when I lived out in the woods?
You’re suggesting the President of the United States try and strong arm a private company into paying for another country’s war effort? The same company saving NASA millions of dollars?
Of course not!
His subordinates, on the other hand…
I’m suggesting that the United States has the right and responsibility to consider national interests when negotiating contracts with vendors, and vendors are free to exit contracts if that doesn’t suit them.
It’s not “strong-arming” to remind a vendor that their contract is not exclusive, it is competive, and other competitors exist. I thought you conservatives liked free-market competition.
Nobody’s holding a gun to Musk’s head and making him collect checks from the government. He’s free to exit that arrangement anytime it starts to offend his sensibilities. But that’s a non-starter since SpaceX can’t survive without government money.
In 1943, the US government effectively took over the 2nd largest company in the world, releasing the 26yo grandson of the founder from his Navy contract, ordering him to join the executive ranks, telling him that he had better get the company back on its feet or else have the entire firm nationalized… no matter what his famous, but crazy, grandfather (who was still in control) said or wanted.
At the time, Ford Motor Company was losing $200,000,000 (equivalent) a month. And within 2 years, Old Henry was gone, his executive team was fired, and Henry Ford II, not even 30, made himself CEO, having executed a quite remarkable turnaround, even ousting Henry Ford himself - all done with the knowing assistance of the Federal Government.
Elon hasn’t seen pressure yet.