@spaceflight Well, maybe companies and governments should have competed with @STARLINK and Falcon-9 instead of laughing at their ideas. Instead of copying Starlink and Falcon-9 now, they should look beyond and beat spacex at own game with better rockets and comsats. Easier said than done, but probably only way forward.
@DonaldFR@spaceflight@STARLINK Starlink isn't the first, just the second to get build despite the unfavorable economic situations. Iridium is active for much longer, but its under US government control now. Also OneWeb exists as well, which is now a Eutelsat subsidy, and thus under European government control (via Eutelsat IGO)
@spaceflight public supervision is not always public money. And Starlink also searches subsidies and public customers. Also we can't even tell if SpaceX or Starlink are profitable or like the early Amazon, is burning money for rapid expansion and market share.
The first major economic crash is yet to come for the Musk projects, like in 2008, which killed most of the commercial spaceflight then.
@spaceflight again EutelSat S.A. the public owned IGA does not pump money into the Eutelsat S.A. operations.
(And of course Volkswagen did not get public money for a long time while they were still a 100% state company until the 1980s.)
2008 killed for example Kistler Aerospace, another big company working on reuseability. I have a mobile communications text book from the early 2000s, that lists a number of mega constellation companys no longer in business today.
@spaceflight Musk is an ass, but no one is making Ukraine (or anyone else) use Starlink, and no one is preventing companies or countries from deploying their own constellation.
@spaceflight Sure, it’s an extremely useful service in a time of war. So perhaps NATO or the US should have their own system to provide. Again, Musk is a jerk, but the US has itself denied Ukraine the use of various of its sophisticated weapons systems, so I’m not sure they have the moral high ground here.
@spaceflight Indeed, I think it’s an interesting question if the US had a system like Starlink, would they provide access to Ukraine, or would they be concerned about Russian anti-satellite reprisals?
@spaceflight Not exactly, as that’s not intended for general internet use. I very much doubt that the Pentagon would give low-level squads of a foreign force access (to do things like control drones). Starlink has been so transformative because it’s just the internet, and so can accommodate all sorts of innovative uses of off-the-shelf gear.
@michaelgemar same same, but different 😜 "The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of #Defense.
Bob Taylor initiated the #ARPANET project in 📆 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote #computers 💻" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
@Luna I think it shouldn't all be linked to Elon, while it's nearby inevitable on this "spaceflight" platform (the problem is nobody achieved anything similar up to now). Means I can't refer to "the rest" of people which have "way too much power" as it doesn't fit the topic (example above, didn't achieve any orbital stuff)
@spaceflight I did. I'm also aware that he's pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine.
Plus I don't care for oligarchs, especially those who meddle where they have no clue.
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