https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_Affiliate_Radi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_Affiliate_Radi...
The problem I have with the Canadian business culture was there is zero protection on a global scale for your company, privacy, and or personal safety. =3
I'm less familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe. Many countries joined NATO as quickly as possible, because they understood the Russian doctrine and saw a real threat there. Russia tries to surround itself with puppets / friends / allies, by force if necessary, to avoid having to fight in its own territory. Many East European countries didn't want to be part of that so soon after the fall of communism. But it looks like the idea of being in friendly terms with Russia instead of fully committing to the West never went away.
They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".
The idea of all these is slightly different, but boils down to that because first the cold war ended and then communism "died" with the Soviet union, democracy would just win everywhere without any effort from anyone (or at least, no effort from anyone but the US). Because of this wars and militaries and ... would just end. Because why would you have these between trade-based democracy? Let's just leave some military rescue units in place and get rid of the rest!
In reality it was progress that ended. Or, at least, a lot of technological progress ended with the end of defense spending. For example, the EU (technically France), was the first nation with a starlink-like satellite network. Of course it was version 0.01beta of starlink, not remotely close to the capabilities of the current version, but it did do packet transmission over very long distances). I have helped write software to make it's use more tolerable. They let it wither and die, just like everyone since.
> They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".
* "The end of history" - coined by Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist.
* "The unipolar moment" - coined by Charles Krauthammer, an American political columnist.
* "The peace dividend" - older term, popularized by George HW Bush, an American president.
* "Military-to-civilian conversion" - older term, popularized by Seymour Melman, an American professor of industrial engineering.And, to be clear, the US not having health care is a policy decision on the part of the US, not some lack of funding, as becomes clear when one looks at the expenditure per capita on healthcare in the US compared to other developed countries.
e.g. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100002023/downloads/20...
which has a chart of apogee/perigee of debris. There seem to be examples of debris with _perigee_ above the collision altitude but the vast majority stayed beyond.
There would be disentigration when satellite pieces rip through other satellites.
How many satellites carry compressed gas for orbit adjustments?
Maybe there is some compressed gas pushing against liquid fuel and oxidizers, but I don't think the fuel and oxidizers would explode. Shooting tanks of gasoline with regular bullets do not cause explosions like movies would have you believe. Well, maybe pure oxidizers might, would there be enough heat generated by the tank being punctured?
I think the custom satellites came first and they rebranded the communications after it.
- The US military (including the Army) showed early interest in Starlink's potential, but this was exploratory rather than as the inaugural customer.
- As early as 2018–2019, SpaceX received funding and contracts (e.g., a $28.7 million award) to study and test military applications of Starlink technology, focusing on things like aircraft connectivity.
- In October 2019, SpaceX's President Gwynne Shotwell publicly mentioned the US Army as a potential future customer for Starlink.
- In May 2020, the US Army signed an R&D/testing agreement with SpaceX to evaluate Starlink's performance for military field use over three years. This was a trial to assess feasibility (e.g., low latency, bandwidth in remote areas), not a full commercial subscription or "first customer" status. Actual field testing and pilot programs by the Army ramped up later (e.g., 2022 in Europe).
- Starshield is SpaceX's dedicated business unit and satellite network designed specifically for government and national security applications, building directly on the technology and infrastructure of the commercial Starlink constellation.
- While Starlink focuses on providing broadband internet to consumers, businesses, and general users worldwide, Starshield adapts and enhances that foundation for more secure, classified, and military-oriented needs. It was publicly unveiled in December 2022, though related work (including contracts) began earlier.
I was probably conflating the exploratory articles with their intent to go that direction.
Do governments and militaries even believe in the laws of physics? I mean that exactly this was going to happen (undisruptable radio comms + robots, on the battlefield) was perfectly predictable near ~about 1960, and it's an absolute miracle that it took so long to come to pass.
And even that is assuming you're only willing to believe in demonstrations. For physicists it must have been a theoretical certainty that this was coming before WW1 was done.
Essentially, anyone with a smart-phone will now be able to text home from anywhere without specialized equipment. Elon can take a victory lap on that product.
Competitors naive enough to underestimate what it took to build Starlink are going to find spectrum auctions already well out of their league. =3
An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on platforms run by EU companies subject to EU jurisdiction. Think EU AWS. This is easier said than done.
But this is really a consequence of the current administration having absolutely no idea what they're doing and they're intentionally and unintentionally destroying American soft power.
Another way this can come to pass is that the EU decides that the US is an unreliable partner for their security needs so you will find that various weapons, vehicles, platforms, etc for EU militaries will be supplied by local companies, particularly if the US effectively abandons Ukraine.
Starlink is just another piece of that.
The current administration paints NATO as Europe taking advantage of the US. It could not be more wrong. NATO is a protection racket for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy.
We kind of saw a precursor to all this with GPS. For anyone who has been around long enough, GPS used to be less accurate, deliberately. Why? Because defence (apparently). There was a special signal, Selective Ability ("SA") [1], that military gear could decode to be more accurate.
Fun fact: one of the clues to the first Gulf War was that the military turned off SA on the commercial GPS system because they couldn't procure enough military equipment so had to use civilian gear [2].
I think Europe was slow to learn the lesson of being completely reliant on the US but we did end up with Glonass and Galileo as a result.
To exert the kind of control the US does through tech platfoorms, the US needs to be predictable and reliable can't be too overt with exerting political influence such that American imperial subjects can pretend they're still independent. This administration has shattered that illusion.
[1]: https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability
[2]: https://www.spirent.com/blogs/selective-availability-a-bad-m...
The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades, outspending the rest of NATO combined, while the majority of NATO members continuously fail to meet their monetary contributions. Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs if the majority of their military capabilities weren't directly tied to the implied threat of the US military interceding.
America's allies haven't necessarily been that reliable for us either.
During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes, and the US could barely get token naval contributions from allies. The US deployed an entire carrier strike group while Norway sent ten staff officers, the Netherlands sent two, and Finland sent two soldiers. France, Italy, and Spain refused to participate; Denmark contributed a single staff officer while being one of the primary beneficiaries of the US naval protection.
With Operation Epic Fury, the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging, and Spain banned the US and then demanded that the American tanker aircraft leave. The UK refused to provide any support until drones hit a UK base in Cyprus, and even then, their mobilization was extremely slow. They weren't even able to deploy their carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, without getting an escort from France. Canada praised the removal of Iran's nuclear capabilities, while providing no support and heavily criticizing the operation itself.
Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them. The unreliability comes from trade policy (which I think is mostly dumb, but is also very much not a one-way action), hesitancy to fund Ukraine at levels that aren't being matched by NATO allies, and Trump's blustering about "adding a 51st state" (no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada).
America will continue to act as a deterrent against military action for her allies, and said allies will still not have to commit to the spending that would be required to field a military that is actually a near-peer to China or Russia.
Having said all of that, I 100% support America's allies building out their own cloud infrastructure and bringing defense R&D and manufacturing back locally. Israel has been moving to cut direct dependency on the US and instead acts as a partner in new joint defense capabilities. I think a similar strategy for Canada and Europe would be best for all.
I'm honestly not sure how practical an EU counterpart to Starshield is, but maybe a partnership with SpaceX would allow them to more realistically diversify while the EU builds up its space capabilities.
Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.
I believe those people are being a bit silly, and their position probably comes from a strong dislike of Trump as a person, and not a genuine belief.
Russia annexed a warm-water port and then shortly after attempted to incorporate Ukraine as part of a plan to remake the USSR. The only thing keeping China from taking Taiwan is the United States.
The US has no desire to annex Canada, and it also has no need to. If Canada proposed statehood or even a territory agreement with the US, I genuinely don't think it would even pass a vote.
China might have the capability, but they don't have the desire.
Only US has both the capability and the desire.
If Canada was not allied with the US, Russia would still not have the capability. And the reason for that is Ukraine.
Sure I can. I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
> The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades ...
Ah, now I get it. This is Trump administration talking points eg [1]. Those talking points are just a shakedown for American defense contractors. Again, just like a protection racket. Because it is a protection racket.
> Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs
This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs. Even something like the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was only tolerated because of Norway's strategic position in the North Atlantic as a foil against the USSR.
> During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes,
America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
But again we come back to the protection racket. You can't both have a protection racket (and, by extension, defang the militaries of the protectorates) AND expect military help, particularly when the entire thing only happened because of the US material support to Israel's genocide.
> With Operation Epic Fury ...
Operation Epstein Fury FTFY
> ... the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging,
Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran other than the US and Israel. Everybody else, including Europe and other Middle East neighbours, all of whom are American client states, basically, begged the US not to do it. And they did anyway.
So yeah, you're on your own.
> Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them.
Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect any more than Fiji invading the Central African Republic. What are you talking about?
[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/us-slams-czech-republic-over...
> I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
The US didn't deny Europe the means to defend itself. Europe chose not to build those means because it was cheaper to rely on the US. These were domestic political choices made by governments whose voters preferred social programs over defense budgets. A protection racket requires coercion; what the EU received is much closer to a subsidy.
> This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs.
Can you cite a specific example? The US has broadly pushed for capitalist markets or free trade via policy, but "done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs" is a very strong claim without evidence. Norway's sovereign wealth fund being "tolerated" because of strategic positioning is, at best, a conspiracy theory. There has been some tension over Norway divesting in American companies for political reasons, but that's hardly the claim you've made.
> America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
Rerouting around the Cape added weeks of delay and a high monetary cost to European shipping. Just because European ships could reroute doesn't mean the European economy wasn't significantly impacted. Why did the European trade association publicly beg for more governments to join the operation if the Red Sea shipping was only about Israel?
> You can't both have a protection racket and expect military help
You expect America to adopt a one-way obligation where it provides for the defense of its allies, and receives no help in return? Why wouldn't that deal fall apart?
> Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran
You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran. But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
> Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect
No country would seriously consider it a prospect because the entire might of the US Armed Forces would immediately engage anyone who tried. This despite the fact that Canada has anemic defense spending, a large arctic border with Russia, and strategic assets I'm sure Russia would love to have.
If I drop you into a war zone and don't give you a gun, don't you have to kinda do what I say?
> You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran.
There's only one country on Earth that supports attacking Iran and that's Israel [1]. Americans don't support this war [2].
> But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
What targets did Iran strike in those 11 countries? Was it US military bases? Radar installations? There were also hotels housing US military personnel who had abandoned US bases because the US either chose not to defend them or was unable to.
Everybody, except you it seems, understands America is doing this for Israel and the Gulf states are caught up in this because they house American military bases and provide indirect or direct support an unprovoked war. These arne't innocent bystanders.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/13/success-uncertain-b...
[2]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54284-americans-think-war-...
That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.
Source?
12 000 years of this shit
I'll settle for anything to be honest. A sign, a derelict, an artifact, a fossil, an echo.. anything to distract humans from shitting on each other for a little while at least.
What? I thought it needs to generalize to/fit into quantum mechanics.
(And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are.
The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.
But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX.
I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).
0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, but you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
Like you said either any fighter jet + missile or an high altitude jet + auto cannon will shoot it down reliably.
This is probably a good solution for redundancy if you already have air superiority.
You can fire a THAAD at one Starlink satellite, but probably not at 8000 of them.
For comparison we’re currently producing THAAD interceptors at a rate of 96 a year (though Lockheed is aiming to increase it to 400).
And potentially exceed Starlink cumulative payload a few years after that.
US via SpaceX generates most launches/payload due to reusability PRC built 2x more disposable launch vehicles. PRC figures out disposables and they can operate reusable fleet 2-3x the size of US and simply throw more payload per year and catchup/exceed cumulative SpaceX volume in a few years. A few years after, permanent kgs in space advantage due higher replacement as old hardware deorbits.
Having said that, I double checked the numbers - it would take ~60 launches at the minimum to replicate Starlink 1.0. This is how many launches China does per year right now. So it is doable indeed for them, just absurdly expensive - $10-$30B, but they can afford that.
EU on the other hand - no way. We're doing 5 launches a year with Arianne, due to incompetent management over the last decade. Unless China or US allow us to use their infrastructure, we have no way of doing all this.
suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.
So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.
And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.
If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".
There's a lot of open source intelligence about SpaceX rocket designs available.
They're even espionaging from themselves in the future!
Dude, have you ever _been_ in China? They don't need espionage, they're now way ahead of the world in technology, except in a few areas like biotech research and semiconductor manufacturing.
For the last decade, China has been having more engineers in _training_ than the total number of engineers in the US. Sure, the quality of Chinese universities is not that great, but the sheer number of them has its own power.
One feels like the future. The other feels like you will get shot.
SpaceX is a rare bird - a space startup that actually achieved not just spaceflight, but (so far only partial) reusability of launchers. Most space startups died long before that, including Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. Given that they are gone, we don't think of them often, but the total graveyard of defunct space startups is quite sizeable.
Russia seems to be slowly losing their space capabilities. The EU still does not have a human-rated launcher. These aren't small entities either.
Getting to space is a dangerous business with extremely thin security margins, where previous experience matters a lot.
I think China will eventually have reusable rockets, but it will take some time.
It's the second-mover advantage. Once you know that something is possible, you can often avoid exploring all the dead ends.
Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.
In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."
Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.
Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.
As opposed to...?
How many starlink clones are there really customers for?
Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet.
Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do.
Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.
But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html
We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive.
Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.
Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.
China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.
The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.
The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.
More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].
China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.
And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.
I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".
[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi...
[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...
Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
China can (and does) do the same for current tech today, through whatever means.
(Also, GP's comment directly said what you said; not sure what your comment adds to the discussion.)
At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.
Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.
In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.
The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.
In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.
American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.
Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...
British scientists helped some.
But the spies at Los Alamos were giving updates on US progress, not delivering secret technology.
But a military is going to be fine with an antenna that costs $3000.
0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
Starlink's revenue is comparable to the ESA's entire 5 billion euro budget, and it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service. (And kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits)
The chief problem "stopping" other countries from developing a starlink competitor is that starlink simply doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction. Fiber runs are expensive but not that expensive.
Starlink was profitable in 2024 [1] and should be materially profitable once V3 goes up.
> kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits
This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue. Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence. And the propellant depots SpaceX is building for NASA tie in neatly if the chips stablise enough to permit longer-lasting birds.
> doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction
Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-much-does-starlink-make-this-...
Those are revenue figures.
> This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue.
That it affects everyone just makes the problem worse. If China or the EU does commit to a starlink competitor, there's even more crowding in orbit. Even more collision avoidance required.
> Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence
That's the point. These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter.
The constellation is both expensive to build and to maintain. That makes it a lot of trouble compared to running a bunch of fiber once and having only occasional maintenance trouble when some idiot drags a backhoe through it.
> Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
The military interest is real, but it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it. Higher latency more conventional satellite internet will have significant cost savings in comparison.
And also net income.
> just makes the problem worse
Did you skip the part where it’s not a serious cost issue? None of these birds are even close to being propellant restricted.
> These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter
Because they’re being intentionally deorbited to make room for better birds. They don’t have to be deorbited as quickly as they are. But overwhelming demand makes it a profitable bet.
> it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it
$70mm per year for 22 birds [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-space-force-contract
The cost isn't in paying someone to not use the orbit, it's that the busier a part of space gets, the more expensive it becomes to do collision avoidance and station keeping.
What makes this impossible to calculate is that there's an unknown exponential involved. The more satellites, the more collisions that need avoiding. And the higher the chance that one avoidance will create new future collisions.
At some point the space is simply so busy that collisions can no longer be avoided.
It’s really not impossible to calculate, particularly if you’re trying to cause damage.
The answer is it’s cheaper to shoot down individual satellites than try to create a localized cascade. Kessler cascades propagate too slowly, and degrade too quickly in low orbits, to be useful as a military tactic. In high orbit one could feasibly e.g. deny use of a geostationary band. But again, it’s cheaper to just shoot down each satellite.
> For example, although the Starlink subsidiary reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2024, the same financial statement doesn’t account for the costs of launching and maintaining a fleet of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites.
???
Those figures, to my understanding, include cost of services and launch in COGS.
But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?
No. The German army wants a constellation of initially 40, and later just over 100 satellites. They do not want or need to replicate the massive Starlink numbers.
It's a PR project to calm people down, not a real solution.
Right now we, in EU, plan to have first reusable vehicles (Ariane Next) in around 10 years - around 2035. And that is for the first vehicles, not for scaling up the production.