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Comment by sekai | Hacker News Reader

> Like sending Ukraine "free" base stations and charging them $4,500 a month for service.

Are there any alternatives? Nope. Also, let's not talk about how SpaceX "should" sponge up the costs, because you would not ask Lockheed Martin or Raytheon Technologies to do that. Compared to regular prices of military hardware, Starlink costs nothing.

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To get any credit for 'charity' we should at least look at the nominal cost to service a particular base station instead of the cost to make Starlink profitable. For the former I only really see the bandwidth costs because the base stations are part of Starlink's normal operation and all of the satellites are up there anyways.

Yeah. I mean, from SpaceX's perspective they're perfectly entitled to try to get the US government to underwrite general operational costs as well; any other supplier is going to do the same thing (albeit not on Twitter...), and Starlink could certainly use the additional funds because the whole network is pre-profit. But that doesn't mean that if the US government doesn't fund everything they ask for the Ukraine service is a philanthropic endeavour. Lots of marginal costs are being unwritten and (again, ignoring Twitter) SpaceX is getting a lot of PR benefit and stress testing from doing it.

I don’t agree because bandwidth isn’t the only part of nominal operations in a war zone. You’re also painting a bright red target on your back for the highly sophisticated state actors (On the level that they might bribe or threaten employees, try to infiltrate the company, etc.) If I were SpaceX I wouldn’t want any part of it.

Those are all things they should already be guarding against though for the most part and definitely not a cost incurred per unit. If they're not already doing tons of work to secure against malicious employees they're a joke of an ISP to begin with.

Security isn't binary. There's a difference between normal commercial-grade security, and being actively engaged in warfare against an adversary with serious cyber and space warfare capabilities.

Space doesn't matter here, if Russia decides to mess with StarLink by shooting down satellites there's nothing SpaceX can do beyond launching replacements. So we're back to the more normal security they should already be doing because ISPs are already huge targets for state level actors even if you're not involved in a war.

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