For terminally online people, prehaps. But in real life, no, people aren't generally obsessed by twitter drama. Real life usage is what matters, and if it's good enough for the ukrainian army in an active war zone...
He's referring to the fact that SpaceX are trying to abide by weapons export restrictions, so they are trying to prevent Ukraine from using Starlink from drones etc.
That is a spin which leaves out the moralising I think.
This is a newspaper quote:
"A senior Ukrainian presidential aide has reacted with anger after Elon Musk’s SpaceX said it had taken steps to prevent its Starlink satellite communications service from controlling drones, which are critical to Kyiv’s forces in fighting off the Russian invasion."
'Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief operating officer, said at a conference in the US that the surprise decision had been taken because it had never been the
company’s intention to allow Starlink to be used “for offensive purposes”. '
That's quite an interesting claim as I wonder what one would expect from people fighting desperately to save their country. It was at the least going to be used for command and control.
'Shotwell said Starlink was “never, never meant to be weaponised” by Ukraine, although it cannot come as a surprise to the company as Kyiv’s military has been using it to pilot drones for months. “Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement,” she added.'
'She said SpaceX was able to take measures to curb Ukraine’s use of the technology to pilot drones, although it was not immediately clear what those were and whether Kyiv’s military could work around them.'
'The row is not the first between Ukraine and Musk. Last October, Musk asked Twitter users to vote on a poll for Russia-Ukraine peace that included Ukraine handing over Crimea and allowing UN-supervised referendums on whether Moscow could keep other land it had occupied after its unprovoked invasion.'
I think it's reasonable to say that Starlink is far from the ideal solution now and you can also see why it's going to be essential for there to be competitors no matter what the economics are - perhaps national ones with only local coverage. Why would anyone build any reliance on a system which is controlled from afar and suddenly becomes unreliable when it's needed the most?
>Why would anyone build any reliance on a system which is controlled from afar and suddenly becomes unreliable when it's needed the most?
This would make sense if it was China or Russia proposing this, but for NATO countries I don't see the risk. The US would presumably be fine with Starlink being used to guide NATO weapons.
Possibly but maybe only if the conflicts were ones in which NATO was involved. Some French involvement in Mali or whatever might not count and might even conflict with the national interests of other Nato members.
They cut off access to military drones... drones which will still have access to military satellite data feeds from NATO countries. Yet every video posted on Reddit of commercial drones used by UA soldiers is still obviously using Starlink. Beyond drones it's still a critical asset, probably as much or more important than Javelins / HIMARs.
This is a PR move, since Starlink is trying to deploy globally it doesn't look good when they are supporting a military.
Making it seem like you're ostensibly a civilian org is a wise move, while in practice Starlink remains the #1 technical contribution by a foreign entity supporting the war effort.
Of course, what it actually means IRL won't stop the people looking for a villain and spreading FUD as if they cut off the entire military.
Because Russia might just blow up LEO satellites, civilian objects/devices can now be blown up for national security reasons, the US recently normalised it with their weather/spy balloon saga.
The whole controversy around Musk is mostly a North American topic. I'm pretty sure that most Europeans that were left out in the rain regarding useful Internet speeds would love to use Starlink (if they can afford it) no matter which crazy billionaire owns the satellites.
I am European and I hate Musk, but that's not the reason why I wouldn't use Starlink.
I just don't want commercial companies to send hundreds of thousands of satellites and pollute my sky, just to enable more consumption in a world that has passed its limits.
Exactly: any constellation built with pre-falcon9 rockets might be non-Musk, but it won't even be remotely starlink-like. They'd inevitably aim for orbits higher than "throwaway-LEO" and the much sparser constellations those orbits enable (lines of sight less constrained by horizon) will cause considerably more latency (far from geostationary-bad, but a meaningful quality difference) even if the inherent SNR drawbacks were somehow solved. It seems quite rational for governments to desire a fallback, but it won't ever be more than that and as long as starlink is on the market any hope for significant customer contribution seems unwarranted.
Without rocket parity to f9, it's just hopeless to get meaningful customer contribution as long as starlink exists. At least as long as they don't find some miracle tech to massively extend VLEO lifetimes (solar powered VLEO Bussard jet or something similarly far out), but even with that the numbers required would be virtually unachievable without an f9 equivalent (it's a somewhat crazy project even with the f9!).
They should absolutely go for it, if they consider having a starlink fallback worth the investment, but they should really not base that decision on illusionary hopes for customer contribution.
Gallileo can detect a distress beacon in the middle of the pacific ocean and send gelm. No other system can do that.
Civilian gallileo has better accuracy than GPS or any competitors.
Every mibile phone has multi-system reciever and accuracy of navigation has tripled in the past 10 years precisely because Gallileo and Glonass and the chinese system went online.
Do we need satcom if we have good enough terrestrial communications? EU is reasonably densely populated. So why just not go with simpler and maybe even cheaper terrestrial solutions?
There is plenty of demand for non-Musk satcom.