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Comment by algorithm314 | Hacker News Reader

What most people don't understand, is that Starlink is a military first service. Their primary customer is the US military. The most obvious application is UAVs where latency is critical. The consumer part is probably just marketing. It doesn't make much economic sense. Imagine they wanted to launch 1000s of classified military satellites. Everyone would be opposed.

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Please provide actual sources to these claims. SpaceX has made roll out of consumer terminals a priority and started basically as early as it was possible.

If the military was really the primary target, why would they do it like that?

Not launching it until you have laser link would also made more sense if you wanted to sell to the military primarily.

The military and other commercial have run some trial test but they are not close to ready to adopt them. The military also doesn't need nearly as many sat to get the coverage.

Launching 12k+ sats just for the military makes no sense what so ever.

So please, substantiate your claims with something other then speculation.

For source just ask what Russians say. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/russia-may-fine-citi...

Keep in mind, that searching for sources for military stuff, doesn't make a lot of sense. They are mostly classified.

But yes while the project was initiated for military purposes, they also want consumers to reduce the amount they have to pay.

The article doesn't prove anything other then that the Russian are scared about free access to information and hate SpaceX in particular because SpaceX is basically destroying Russian space flight.

And we do actually have sources that military have test Starlink, these contracts are not super secret. We also no that military has contracts with other sat providers already.

Yet there is no such contract with Starlink.

You just have opinion based on nothing that the consumer market is not worth it and nothing to back it up with, and it contradicts everything said by SpaceX and what many analysts believe.

How does that article support your claim?

I'm convinced that the primary purpose of Starlink is funding SpaceX's R&D for eventually going to Mars. Providing internet service to the public helps, providing internet service to the military helps too. I don't think the really prioritize one above the other.

While this may be amongst the long term goals, I don't think it's useful for military applications yet until laser com is fully online. Currently there is no sat to sat com, so there's is always ground station within sight of a sat. Unless SpaceX places a ground station near a conflict zone, military can't utilize it much yet.

This is something that is fascinating to me about really all of Musk's businesses - they all seem to be in some way misrepresenting themselves to the general public. And they all actually rely on insights into how governments have to spend at an enormous scale. And all of them make things that are of extreme strategic importance on a global scale. Like I'm not one for conspiracy bullshit, but there must be a deeper story going on behind the scenes. Right?

I mean, customers from all over the world using an USA ISP for their internet access, which can be tapped easily to gather mass surveillance data is a very valid reason to be paranoid :)

This is a scenario for which the tin-foil hat was born.

I have no idea if this number is realistic but lets say the US military pays 10 billion dollar a year for this. The consumer price is about a thousand dollar a year so they would need about 10 million customers to get the same revenue. If the whole system has enough bandwidth to support that many consumers I don't think it's just for marketing.

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