How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
  • RickRussell_CA@beehaw.orgEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something

    That sort of points to the nature of the problem, doesn’t it? The world relied on Musk’s sense of charity for MONTHS and did nothing to either pay for or substitute Starlink.

    I mean, just saying it out loud, “Musk’s sense of charity”, should cause the kind of vomit into one’s own mouth that immediately merits attention and forces one ask, “What the hell did I swallow?”

    Who is working to give Ukraine an alternative to Starlink? Anyone? If not, then yeah, they handed the reins over to Musk and didn’t do jack squat to fix it. That’s not Musk’s failure.

    • zhunk@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      There isn’t a direct competitor to Starlink. OneWeb is the next biggest LEO constellation, but it doesn’t cater directly to individual users like Starlink. It’s also 18% owned by the UK government, so that might have made it a no-go.

      Amazon’s Kuiper constellation should be a Starlink competitor, but they haven’t even launched their demo sats yet. Others, like Iridium and Globalstar, are too slow.

      Starlink will be incredibly difficult to replicate, which is why really only Amazon and the Chinese government are trying (what an insane sentence). SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets are the cheapest commercially and Starlink gets internal pricing. Even if someone else had identical sats, they couldn’t get that launch discount.