1,300 SpaceX satellite units went offline over funding issues
cnn.com
cnn.com
> Reading the article: what seems to have happened is that Ukrainian government bought a batch of 1300 Starlink units from some private company in UK, had them shipped to Ukraine and distributed among the military, then had a disagreement over actually paying for the service. As a result, those units were cut off the network.
> Literally no side of the dispute is commenting on the whole ordeal, so this is about the extent of information we have.
> Starlink clearly sold those units expecting to get paid. Then the terminnals got resold and shipped to Ukraine and it seems like no one is paying for them now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ym4w1q/ukraine_s...
>Negotiations between SpaceX and the Defense Department continue despite Musk’s claim that SpaceX withdrepw its request, according to a senior defense official.
>“Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay them,” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry he’ll change his mind.”
Interesting tactic.
If you have a bank account with $100 in it, a $10 daily expense will deplete your account in 10 days. A $10 daily opportunity cost would never deplete your account.
Well that's assuming you have no expenses. In your example the difference between realizing the opportunity cost or not is the difference between 10 days of runway and paying the bills in perpetuity.
Bills pile up no matter what, so there's only a limited amount of opportunity cost you can afford to eat.
I would love to have some explain to me why I am wrong, but this seems like war profiteering to me.
If I understood correctly some are used as a backbone for their internet infrastructure and some on the field on moving vehicles. The $110 plan wouldn’t cover those use cases.
And who in Ukraine are they competing with for bandwidth? Did they start selling terminals to civilians too?
The only way I can see justifying the price, is because ground stations are required nearby, as there is no sat to sat communication yet. Getting internet to a ground station in a war zone might be expensive and dangerous.
It's really difficult to figure out what's going though his head.
> “Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay [SpaceX],” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry [Musk]’ll change his mind.”
Whether this was a deliberate negotiation strategy or a simple case of Musk being Musk in public, I can’t tell.
“Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay them,” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry he’ll change his mind.”
> As a result, Musk’s control of the signal gives him significant sway over the battlefield at a time when he has come under heavy criticism for arguing that Ukraine should sue for peace and give up some of its territory.
I wonder if really the play is less ambitious: press covering disruptions in the service, and quotes from military personnel about how critical or valuable the service is are bolstering the starlink brand more than providing uninterrupted service would.
When starlink charges you $100 it's because where it does so it has competitors that charge at that level. (Pendants will challenge this). In Australia where starlink is the superior satellite service there is an inferior NBN service and various mobile services if you can get signal. In Ukraine what do the alternatives charge that have consistent service?
If I own the only gas station with gas after a hurricane or earthquake, I should be able to raise my rates to whatever I want?
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible business, but there are real operating costs to keeping the network alive.
(fwiw it would be chill of the US government to pitch them some money for the actual cost imo, but i think the actual cost to spacex (real and opportunity) is likely much smaller than the numbers being bandied about here)
Heh.
The thought that there is no overhead to such a complex system that is designed to continually fall out of they sky and self destruct every couple years.
1. Usage patterns being way different from normal customers, i.e. at max capacity nearly 24/7, whereas regular customers can be oversubscribed by as much as 50 to 1.
2. Cyberattacks requiring enormous effort to mitigate or block
3. More stringent and demanding requirements for customer support, etc., because of the military application.
Though on the other hand there should be economies of scale somewhere here, so 50x greater usage likely isn't a linear 50x increase in cost.
At some point during this whole thing, Musk tweeted a bandwidth usage graph that showed that all of the Starlink units combined (many thousands of them) were using a total of 7TB a day. Which is a minuscule amount of data and wouldn't be much of an issue even if it was for a single unit.
I got the impression that they were turning on the super expensive max unrestricted service (which has no incremental cost over the regular service) then pretending that the price of the service times the number of units was money that they were losing every month.
Looking at the graph, it looks like it's from May, so I don't know what it looks like today. But I think most of the terminals were in place by then.
As others have said, the demands of military use probably require 24/7 dedicated support and monitoring with real-time threat detection and evasion from skilled engineers at SpaceX/Starlink and actively monitoring the satellites passing over Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
Also, this has proven to likely be the most important piece of tech on the battle field. The US government could march into SpaceX HQ in a moment and turn it back on if needed.
The way the headline is worded makes it sound like there was some sort of hardware malfunction and that SpaceX is having financial difficulties.