Sounds fantastic, but if we look at the history of the EU's Galileo GNSS [0], massive delays can be expected.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
Citations welcome.
I'm not saying we wouldn't have had reusable rockets and ubiquitous internet access without him; just that it probably would not have happened in my lifetime.
There is plenty of demand for non-Musk satcom.
There is no demand for something more expensive than starlink, aside from government stuff and you need consumers to support it and not be money pit
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.
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.
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?
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.
But polluting space around Earth is brand new, so a few companies are rushing to leave their mark there.
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.
InReach does that, no?