Pentagon contracting Starlink to provide satellite communications for Ukraine
defensescoop.com
defensescoop.com
All other defense contractors haven't been expected to indefinitely provide services for free, so it was always absurd to see people arguing that SpaceX should do it for free.
Musk was threatening to pull out of Ukraine because he complained it was costing him money and after he got to ride the initial wave of press releases about saving Ukraine he let his politics got in the way of his judgement.
SpaceX was mostly just saving face publicly about not directly working with the military and only doing it for civilian purposes. Which makes a lot of sense from a business perspective as they are a global business operating in plenty of countries. Once the DOD rolls up and offers a bunch of money those dynamics can change.
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-spacex-ukraine-starli...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/8/23016670/starlink-spacex-u...
Any "free" service was always to demo the usefulness of the product to the DoD for them eventually to pay through the nose. Musk got flak for his comments because a) it was a half-truth b) he made it very publicly, c) he started promoting Russian government accounts on For You pages, and d) he started echoing Russian sentiments and/or falsehoods about the war.
If he had not done any of that he would have still gotten the money and not looked like a fool. No one expected Starlink to lose money on the deal, and they haven't.
SpaceX is a regular for-profit defense contractor. They aren't scamming the government. For anybody aligned with America's foreign policy interests, both of these are a good thing. (And for those who aren't, it's an unmitigated disaster.)
Go ahead and list all the other companies or countries that have done what SpaceX has with Starlink (the answer is: something like it has never existed before in human history).
There you go, with your 'creative' use of language again. You seem strangely upset about Ukraine having internet access, because you're throwing up all sorts of FUD about it throughout this discussion (16 comments from you so far; 21% of posts in this discussion), all with a negative tone and hyperbolic abuse of language. Why are you so keen on getting people to be upset about Starlink's use in Ukraine?
I think stealing is a fair word for secretly taking tax payer money and greatly overpaying for something. If you don't think people would object the solution is simple: make the price paid public and people can decide for themselves.
Wasn't the actual issue was that they can't allow their tech to be used with weapons. Ukraine was using it to use drones with explosives attached. Allowing that would have made Starlink something controlled under the weapons export laws. Therefore, they can't allow it. Or was that another of the many things with Starlink and Ukraine?
The tech would have been considered “dual-use” eventually. Dual-use tech has complex export laws. Having the DoD as an invested partner will help fund future projects/provide financial stability to spacex generally.
and why would Starlink be okay with it just because they got paid? It sounds like you're saying they never had any actual morals or principles except getting more money
As for Starlink being okay with it just because they get paid, I don't see how that means they lack morals. They're obviously invested in Ukraine winning, but as a defense contractor they're also interested in being in alignment with the positions of the US government. Put differently, I don't really see it as SpaceX's decision to make regarding using Starlink as a long range weapons guidance system, that's the government's job to approve.
- first they oppose something allegedly based on morals
- then they get paid more money
- then they subsequently no longer oppose it allegedly based on morals
frankly, I don't see how someone can NOT see how that means they lack their aforementioned morals
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23733/spacex-exec-says...
If I sell the government a widget at 10x retail price and then throw in two extra for "free" I can go to the press and say that I'm a humanitarian donor. If you are Elon Musk people will actually believe it.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-sta...
USAD in their initial announcement of Starlink donation said SpaceX donated “roughly 10 millions” worth of 3,667 terminals, and they themselves bought additional 1,333 terminals (They later deleted those details):
[0] - https://twitter.com/joroulette/status/1511781864356212737
In addition, SpaceX donated at least 50 Powerwall according to the Ukraine’s government:
[1] - https://mil.in.ua/en/news/ukraine-received-20-000-starlink-t...
SpaceX asked Pentagon "to take over" funding via Twitter because Musk either didn't know that the Pentagon was already doing that, or because he knew and wanted to lie about it to make himself look better. As Musk was espousing numerous Russian talking points at the time, it's also possible he was asked to do so by his Russian contacts.
In addition, SpaceX donated at least 50 Powerwall according to the Ukraine’s government:
Wow. For an order of 20,000 Starlink terminals, SpaceX is willing to throw in a few Powerwalls? It's like Apple throwing in a free lithium battery when you buy 20 iphones. We should all grovel before Musk's generosity in getting rid of obsolete previous-generation Powerwall units that Tesla was unable to sell to paying customers.
It was mostly donations. There were some third party sourced terminals which were being paid for, like the ~1300 provided by the UK of ~20k total that were in operation, (over which CNN started the blackmailing lie) but the service has thus far been mostly paid for by SpaceX itself.
Third parties were definitely paying for terminals and services.
Elon got cold feet when the Russians started threading Starlink with targeting with ASAT weapons, and when the Ukrainians (despite agreements) used starlink to remotely guide UAVs in Russia. Now that the UAVs are hitting Russia without starlink, and the Russians have backed off of threading to wipe out all American Satellites (which almost certainly lead to a nuclear confrontation since it would also blind detection systems), its less of a issue.
If you look at actual reporting the revenue Musk is receiving from Ukraine service is enormous, hundreds of millions a year.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-sta...
SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it can no longer continue to fund the Starlink service as it has. The letter also requested that the Pentagon take over funding for Ukraine’s government and military use of Starlink, which SpaceX claims would cost more than $120 million for the rest of the year and could cost close to $400 million for the next 12 months
That was an official, non public letter to the DOD. It said SpaceX had been funding Ukraine’s use of Starlink. Do you think they could lie to the Pentagon about who paid for the service? The Russia’s invasion is the best advertising for Starlink for military use. Nobody in their right mind want to piss off their primary and potentially most lucrative customer.
You keep saying SpaceX charged 10x of the normal price. That’s BS. You definitely don’t know how much it costs to serve those terminals.
> If you look at actual reporting the revenue Musk is receiving from Ukraine service is enormous, hundreds of millions a year.
The actual reporting that you cited did not say that. The war has only been over a year, and if the letter above was sent in September 2022 SpaceX couldn’t possibly get paid until at least November, likely much later if the news about the contract only comes out now. It has the potential of bringing hundreds of millions annual revenue, which the contract in question makes it more of a reality.
For example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl... highlights that the US has paid millions for Starlink terminals 'contrary to SpaceX's claims', while burying that SpaceX had donated 3670 terminals with free service for 3 months, compared to 1500 terminals purchased by USAID.
Then we have the first half of CNN's manipulative reporting (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-sta...), where, after setting the tone to bias readers against SpaceX by citing outages and 'having to request Starlink services to be turned on in liberated areas' (conveniently skipping over the explanation that that's necessary to avoid Russia using the terminals), they sneak in a few lines about how 70% of the service costs were being borne by SpaceX.
Both also reference an "85% of terminals partially paid for by entities like the US and Poland", but that doesn't fit with the numbers, since the 3670 donated is greater than 15% of the 20k total terminals which had been sent by then, implying that 'partially paid' includes things like transportation costs, masking the true numbers regarding the costs of the terminals themselves (which obviously wouldn't be necessary if the number wasn't unfavorable to the narrative they were attempting to push).
> ... 70% of the service costs were being borne by SpaceX.
That's Musk's completely made up number for the price of the service ($4500/month). By that logic he could have said it was $10000/month and therefore been "donating" even more. That price 1. isn't the cost of providing the service; 2. isn't the retail price of the service, 3. isn't a reasonable mark up on the retail price.
Especially since if they're reporting to the Pentagon and intend to get them to pay by reason of unreasonable financial burden for SpaceX, they would want to make it look like it's costing them more, which would not be the case if we go with your unsupported suggestion that they're charging extremely high rates to government compared to how they're pricing their donations.
I did support it by linking to a CNN article which cites what government officials say they were paying (hundreds of millions of dollars per year) as well as Musk's own claims about the service price.
Look this is very simple: Musk receives a certain amount of money from providing service and terminals in Ukraine (hundreds of millions of dollars a year). You claim that this is substantially less than what it costs to provide those terminals and services (even in a war-zone) which is absurd.
So the CEO of the company?
1 example will do.
Claiming he held his baby in arms as it died. His ex-wife said it was her.
You also have the technically-true but so misleading as to be a lie:
He said workers could have Juneteenth off at the time before it was an official holiday. What he left out was that you had to take one of your personal days and get permission from your supervisor. Just like any other time off.
He said that workers didn't have to come in to work if they were afraid of Covid on Joe Rogan. What he failed to say was that they would fired.
And can you never call a product a lie for any amount of lateness? If it takes 100 years that wasn't a lie? The fancy solar shingles demoed before the Solar City acquisition don't exist and won't in any time frame anybody cares about, if ever.
I think even children know that Ukraine is going to pay for all this. Likely through the nose. There's a good chance it will be worth it though, considering the alternative.
I am only saying this because the whole series of news about this starlink not getting paid thing is such an obvious charade. A PR operation. It makes me sad adults are falling for it.
After all, the west isn't expecting its military industrial complex to provide support/make ammunition by telling them to wait for Ukraine to pay when it wins the war.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-e...
I add that only for context though, not to address your main point which other commenters have done.
Ukrainian military user =/= typical western starlink user.
Starlinks in Ukraine were/are seeing an order of magnitude more usage in an adversarial environment, the cost to provide this level of service is clearly not the same vs supplying some Canadian shack in the woods. Even for civilians the star links are overwhelmingly shared, used as public access for a whole town as the only way to talk etc. This again is not typical and far exceeds the designed-for workload
So I see a few possibilities here
1) You were aware of this basic reality but chose to mislead others
Or the more charitable/HN friendly take:
2) Your routine sources of information are so biased and agenda-driven that this obvious, basic set of facts didn’t get to you because it would be inconvenient for their narrative.
Since it’s probably #2 I encourage you to seek out more diverse sources of information, as you’re probably being misled about a lot more than just Starlink in Ukraine
You should do that even if you haven’t launched any other satellites, because serving that customer means you can’t serve 10 others.
But if this is so easy to justify why aren't they making the per-unit/per-unit-service cost public? Or the total cost. I don't think most other cost of arms to Ukraine are hidden.
This sort of logic, followed to its conclusion, implies that nobody should charge for variable costs before they have actually been incurred, even if said costs are 'chunky'.
For example, it implies that TSMC shouldn't charge a customer (Apple, let's say) more for its large order, unless TSMC has already broken ground on a new fab.
But I don't see much sign of increased capacity (they may have built an extra ground station somewhere) certainly not anywhere near hundreds of millions of dollars worth. And I'm not even sure it is possible to increase capacity: The constraint is probably the satellite to ground bandwidth which you can increase by adding satellites but not in a specific area because they are LEO.
In another context, it's fair that I should pay 10x more for 10 diapers than one diaper. This is true even if the diaper company has no immediate plans to make another diaper factory.
Price here is a signal to allocate scarce resources — in this case, the resources and labor that went into the diapers, as well as the amortized cost of the factory needed to make them.
Is Starlink special and thus subject to pricing rules that other businesses are not? If not, is it a special case simply because it's Ukraine?
If the latter, it'd be more honest to simply say: Ukraine is under attack and needs a helping hand. Starlink is uniquely positioned to help and ought to pitch in out of the goodness of their own hearts.
Digging into their cost structure is really a diversion from the actual argument, which is that we feel they have a moral duty to help.
Bandwidth is different, it doesn't cost any more to supply 1 bit or 10 bits. Nearly all the cost is building the pipe. Put another way, in the Starlink case there isn't 10x more cost to them to provide increased usage if they aren't building more capacity.
> Price here is a signal to allocate scarce resources — in this case, the resources and labor that went into the diapers, as well as the amortized cost of the factory needed to make them.
Not in the Starlink case. What is the allocation being made? Price-priority rationing has no purpose here because the government already knows who it wants to have priority. And you said that inducing investment is irrelevant so there is no use of a price signal for that (and the investment isn't happening anyway).
> Is Starlink special and thus subject to pricing rules that other businesses are not? If not, is it a special case simply because it's Ukraine?
Yes, because it's not a free market and worse the price is specifically being hidden from the ultimate payer (citizens).
> Digging into their cost structure is really a diversion from the actual argument, which is that we feel they have a moral duty to help.
That's silly and no one accepts that argument. By the same logic you could charge $10,000 (or any other price) for a coffee cup.
Personally I have no problem with it if it helps Ukraine show the world that war is ridiculous in these modern times and that one sovereign state invading another is an archaic concept that should be buried; let the Ukrainians bury war and the warmongers!
I dislike Musk for many of his business practices, which I view as unethical and often outright illegal, but the hate train has really made some people lose their minds and suggest all sorts of outlandish nonsense. I wonder how much of it is provoked by foreign nations upset about Starlink astroturfing any discussion about it.
All that really matters is what is actually happening on the ground, and Starlink has and continues to be the most important foreign technology Ukraine has been given. Even more so than HIMARS and Patriot.
Germany warned USA about this in 1915.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4535149/newspaper-warning-not...
neither are a validation of the correctness of such a consideration or the righteousness of such a casus belli
The US Government is de facto in control of SpaceX, so long as SpaceX is so critically important to US national security going forward. It can do what they allow. If it steps out of line, that can be corrected as needed. They're 'free' to operate within those parameters. There could never be a scenario where the company - as is - would be allowed to relocate out of the US; the US Government would promptly curtail that stupidity if anyone at SpaceX were delusional enough to think it possible.
The price to government is 10x+ the retail price civilians were paying to donate the same equipment and services. Musk was unhappy that people were paying retail price when he could be charging a government-special super-premium. My impression is that the government was resisting paying it but have now caved and are keeping the details secret to prevent a potential backlash.
People were furious at Halliburton and other government contractors for price gouging during the Iraq war and you certainly got the impression that it was a "never again" situation but here we are.
How do you know this?
If you want to argue about whether I should have qualified the statement with "it's very likely", or "it stands to reason", okay.
But no I wasn't trying to make a point with the question, I was legitimately wondering if you had a source. I'd like to read more
Using government and commercial customers to subsidize the less profitable consumer market is a fairly well established precedent in several industries at this point.
so like airline tickets then?
IMO, it's probably reasonable for Ukraine to pay civilian prices for the terminals[1]. But service should absolutely be at a premium.
The reason Starlink is being used by Ukraine in the first place is because Russia completely compromised Viasat and bricked every user terminal in Ukraine (and a bunch near by). It's expensive AF to defend against constant cyber attack from a capable state-level opponent.
---
1. When the terminals first came out, SpaceX substantially subsidized the cost of the terminals - to the tune of a year's worth of payments. I could see how this could make sense for them if the terminals are supposed to last for a very long time (10+ years).
But their use in a war zone is probably much harder on the terminals. They're getting moved around way more often than a residential install. They're probably being targeted by the Russians. And accidents just happen in wars.
I have no idea how much SpaceX currently subsidizes the consumer price of terminals, or how long the average terminal lasts in Ukraine. But I think it's pretty reasonable to adjust or even eliminate SpaceX subsidies on hardware depending on the exact value of those numbers.
However, SpaceX has apparently been doing a lot of firmware support to help Ukraine to deal with EW signals, so some level of premium is likely justified.
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/04/spacex-beating-russian-j...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-sta...
"Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs $4,500 each month"
---- (Regular price is about $100 so the claimed price is more than 40x. 13x if look at the price actually being paid by others.)
" On September 8, the senior director of government sales for SpaceX wrote the Pentagon saying the costs have gotten too high, approaching $100 million. The official asked the Department of Defense to pick up Ukraine’s new request as well as ongoing service costs, totaling $124 million for the remainder of 2022.
Those costs, according to the senior defense official, would reach almost $380 million for a full year."
And it's a weird argument to say that the price the government should pay is whatever the most any group is willing to pay for Starlink; The price segmentation, especially at the high-end, is mostly not based on cost to provide service but customer propensity to pay (boat and private jet owners). It doesn't make any sense to say "this is the special price we charge to Jeff Bezos and he doesn't care it's so high because he's rich therefore the government should also pay that price".
As I said elsewhere price rationing for priority doesn't make sense in this case (because the government already knows who should get priority) and neither does higher prices as a signal to increase investment in capacity (because that investment doesn't look like it's being made despite the high prices and because creating capacity is just difficult because of the fact that the limitation is number of satellites in overhead and that can't be increased only in a specific area using LEO sats.)
No I'm not saying that the govt should pay the same as the maximum any group pays. Rather it's that the military requirements/desires are going to be similar to what private commercial or industrial entities desire and therefore are willing to pay.
This isn't about Bezos in his jet, but what say American Airlines or Maersk pays for commercial services. Generally commercial / industrial uses include things like SLAs, guaranteed bandwidth, R&D for service during movement, etc.
> As I said elsewhere price rationing for priority doesn't make sense in this case (because the government already knows who should get priority) and neither does higher prices as a signal to increase investment in capacity
If a military user wants data priority then it makes sense it'll cost them for that privilege. The density of the LEO constellation can and is being increased, along with other R&D investments. These investments undoubtedly include forecasting the higher pricing for industrial and military usage.
It's a stretch to call any of these things value-add features since in this case they are basically provided to everyone equally (except prioritization which I addressed elsewhere). Presumably the "mobile" R&D is also paid for by the mobile plan which is $200/month not $4k/month (and which has already been researched and deployed without expectation of a major war to finance it).
But it's really easy to answer this question in practice: If there is so much value-add let them choose between the retail price and the government-special price with the SLA guarantees, etc on a per terminal basis. I really don't see anybody being willing to pay 10x more except for a few select applications.
> If a military user wants data priority then it makes sense it'll cost them for that privilege.
It doesn't though. It's an arbitrary charge whose only functions are 1. price-rationing 2. investment inducement and 3. profit for SpaceX. I've explained why 1 and 2 don't apply here so it's just an arbitrary fee by SpaceX.
> The density of the LEO constellation can and is being increased, along with other R&D investments.
It isn't being increased for Ukraine, I don't see any evidence of investment to support Ukraine capacity and certainly not hundreds of millions of dollars worth.
> These investments undoubtedly include forecasting the higher pricing for industrial and military usage.
Yes it's the government subsidizing SpaceX (who will claim that they receive no government subsidies).
In a war zone where Starlinks are destroyed this model would lead to massive losses.
Then again discussions may have taken place, and the geopolitical consideration were (and are) massively complex. The level of aid that other countries, especially the US, were providing was a delicate balance especially in the beginning. Providing a resource of highly strategic usefulness under the fig leaf of it coming from a private US corp may have been deemed necessary. But at some point it’s unreasonable of the DoD not to foot the bill. After many many $Billions of lethal support the fig leaf has been torn off.
There's also the scale... There's a lot of GPS satellite redudancy, plus the US has about 8 active Keyhole, a bunch of radar ones, etc. NATO as a whole adds way more on top of that.
Otherwise Russia only has 2 Persona optical reconnaissance satellites and both are at the end of their life and only have 50cm resolution which is awful compared to commercial stuff you can buy online, let alone the US ones. GLONASS has 23 satellites.
China is probably a better example here but again I don't think ASAT is a huge priority, rather than just something you want to be capable of doing.
I still don't know how that was possible when Starlink wasn't even really available at that moment.
Source: I saw them myself while eating during breaks.
"While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on three areas: Earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads (the ability to put a wide variety of instruments on the Starshield satellite bus)"
https://www.spacex.com/starshield/
https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-satellite-internet-m...
Get rich by being a western oligarch - then gerrymander the system so that you have no competition.