Shares of Starlink's European rival Eutelsat have tripled
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
Wow, that's faster than I would have expected. Good thing in this case!
First off the basic facts are wrong, SpaceX has just over 7000 satellites, not 40,000.
Secondly it is physically impossible to launch even 7000 satellites within a few months, even for SpaceX. The satellites do not exist and would need to be built which takes over a year at a minimum. Europe launches rockets into space a couple times a year and you can only launch around a dozen or two satellites per launch. That means just to reach 7000 satellites, assuming 20 per launch and a generous 10 launches per year is over 3.5 years to launch all those satellites.
Edit: The problem appears to be with the low quality terminology.
It is using the word "satellites" to refer to ground terminals. Ground terminals are not "satellites".
It is still incorrect however as Eutelsat doesn't have the bandwidth required to serve what SpaceX is providing to Ukraine. They can provide a backup, but it will be significantly degraded versus what Ukraine already uses.
What? The article never used satellite to refer to ground terminals. They used the word terminals.
Nobody wants to be addicted to this and vulnerable to being coerced and manipulated by threats of having service revoked at catastrophic times unless they do exactly whatever Musk and his puppetmasters say.
Sharing profits from your natural resources in exchange for military resources seems like a great deal to me. Nothing in life is ever free, someone is always paying for it, usually through taxes. If you think this logic is flawed, argument me why.
When your bank balance is zero or negative and rent and bills are due, do you care about your own today or do you care about the tomorrow of another country hundreds/thousands of KM away?
Because that's how most people think in private. Only the privileged with a warm home and a full stomach can afford to think about other countries. Everyone is rooting for Ukraine if you ask them, but not many are willing to sacrifice their own welfare for it.
Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
How naive can you be?
Russia is almost certainly not going to deploy nukes over Ukraine. The cost/benefit is just not there: they won't help take or hold territory, and they invite strategic retaliation from more actors than just Ukraine.
So. Putin's political position is not unassailable (remember how touch-and-go things were with Prigozhin? How hardly anyone stood up to him?). If holding Ukraine becomes genuinely untenable, he'll have to make some excuse to leave, or fall. It's even possible he'll die of old age or pneumonia and be replaced by a more reasonable psychopath.
Putin is not a God, he is a man. The circumstances of that are extremely unpredictable.
See what Ukraine is doing right now, and add more weapons and money.
They won't 'defeat' Russia in the sense of Ukrainian soldiers marching down Red Square in Moscow. But they will make Russia lose the war.
> Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
If the alternative is being deposed at home, yes.
They're fighting to uphold this order, to show that it's not simply yet-another-treaty that a warring nation can break and take territory from another country with few consequences, where allying to countries doing that will be met with absolute resistance to hold to this ideal.
That's what we are paying for in Europe, if that doesn't have any value to you and you prefer to see it as a purely transactional interaction then go ahead to hold this opinion, other people believe in something further than simply tit-for-tat transactions. Morally speaking is a better way of living.
Just because I don't want my tax money going to aid another country's war any further, doesn't mean I want Russia to win. I want Ukraine to win, just not with my tax money, especially knowing how corrupt Ukraine is and how luxury car sales have boomed in Ukraine in 2023-2025, maybe they should look internally for war revenue instead. I'm already doing my part housing Ukrainian refugees in my country on my tax Euros, even though a lot of them are military aged males and come with cars worth more than I make in a year.
I have two follow up questions.
How much do you want Ukraine to win?
Are you concerned more tax Euros may be spent if Russia wins?
I'm fairly sure, if Russia wins less tax Euros will be spent. That's because the European economies will be doing worse, and less GDP also means lower taxes.
I'd like some trustworthy sources on the luxury car sales since whatever search I do return results from absolutely sketchy websites with similar naming to real news outlets ("globaleuronews.com" instead of the real "euronews.com", "news-pravda.com" [which is very much a Russian propaganda site]), or stuff named using extremely generic terms (such as "automotivelogistics.media", "good-times-invest.com", etc.).
I believe you were victim of propaganda but would like to check what sources you have to challenge my assumption.
Which such blatant accusations it seems you've already made up your mind, and it would be a waste of time to entertain this further and go nowhere. I have already expressed all my arguments above. If you don't believe them, that's fine with me, I don't have to make you change your mind, I'm OK with you expressing a different opinion than mine, I'm not OK with you making accusations about me when you don't know me and expecting me to disprove your accusations as if I owe you that.
Please, share your sources and we can further the discussion, no need for the defensiveness.
Edit: also even if it's the case you have fallen victim to propaganda in no way I put any sense of judgment in that, anyone can be victim of disinformation, what is a failure of character is digging deeper into that belief after being shown one was bamboozled. Up to that point anyone is just another victim.
> I have already expressed all my arguments above.
I do not understand why questioning where your information might have come from triggered a whole meltdown, your argument might be based in disinformation (that Ukrainians have bought luxury cars and your taxes are being wasted on that) and if that's the case then your argument has no basis to it. I would like more information...
Where do you get that from? As far as I can tell, there's no voting at all involved. Formally, any member state can unilaterally invoke article 5.
There's been an ideological shift in America that a lot of people are desperately trying to deny because it is truly terrifying.
Boots on the ground. They're fighting an excellent proxy war against Russia on behalf of NATO, severely stretching NATO's largest geopolitical ally, at the extreme cost of young Ukrainian men ending up in the ground. Sweden and Finland have been brought into the alliance, very valuable lessons have been learned, exceptional military intelligence gained, for a bit of cash and essentially no NATO causalities. By the end of the war, an exhausted Russia will have almost zero capacity to mount a conventional attack against any NATO member for a decade.
In short, why should Ukraine be paying with treasure when they're already paying so much with blood?
Blackmailing them for profit is despicable.
Fixed that for you.
Thought of another way, if those minerals in the ground are useful resources for the US, it's more in the US benefit to pay now to stabilize the situation so they can later buy the minerals from a happy and productive population - as the amount of trade going the other way will probably be vastly greater.
Same is true of Russia, if it was possible to undo the fuckup there after the fall of the USSR. It could be a huge economy. It's not a zero sum game, if Ukraine and Russia have bigger free economies then everyone else gets bigger too.
That's the idea anyway, it's worked before. It maybe didn't work with China because we forgot the free part. But Ukraine was already heading in the right direction with democracy and fighting corruption - which is pretty much the reason for the war.
That sounds rather... Stupid?
It doesn't. That's what your made up analogy means in your head. Don't put words in my mouth to twist the narrative in your corner.
I was only pointing out that today, just like 70+ years ago in WW2, individuals want to stay out of other countrys' wars out of self preservation.
It's the second time I interact with you today, it's the second time you become extremely defensive and reactionary. Do you behave like that in real life? Rather exhausting.
On that note, I would invite you to read my reply to you earlier today [0], might help to put down the armor a little, and perhaps think about engaging with more curiosity and less aggressiveness out of the bat, not everyone is out to get you.
If your neighbour was being attacked would you help them even if you never signed a contract saying you will come to his defence?
Sorry, where did you get that this deal is for _FUTURE_ military resources??? Seriously - where did you hear that?
The only way the Trump administration characterized the mineral deal is as repayment for PAST military aid, even though it was perfectly understood that those were GRANTS (i.e. there were no terms attached to the military aid). The Trump administration also accused Ukraine of cheating/tricking the US/Biden administration to get this military aid ... and also of starting the war ... and also of being a dictatorship ... and also of being an obstacle to peace.
Trump administration also made it clear that the mineral deal is NOT a security guarantee, nor is the mineral deal payment for FUTURE military aid.
------------
It is a common pattern that whenever Trump says X, apologists, like you, come out of the woodwork and say something like "Well, what he really meant to say is Y".
Yes, it would be different if the mineral deal was payment for future military aid .. but it isn't - so why are you saying that?
My understanding is that for the USA, sending weapons isn't the same as giving away money. The military industrial complex gains from more weapons needing to be built, for one thing.
For the free world at large, it's beneficial to oppose Putin via a proxy war for obvious reasons.
We're all getting something out of this, and I'd say if it's in return for sending weapons, that's a good deal (for us!).
That's a weird question. Most of that equipment was more or less produced in the first place for fighting Russia.
Equivalently, you could ask how the US should be paying Ukraine for the manpower they are providing.
The US is getting a huge discount here, because they only have to supply some equipment for the fight. Ukraine is supplying the manpower for free.
Small things like Tesla sales crumbling, which means less tax revenue. The US had 320B USD in arms sales 2024. Usually about 60% of that stays in country as tax revenue. Europe is upping its spending massively but a big part is developing production capacity for the most complex and expensive stuff that will be in direct competition to the US. Never mind such BS like the US vetoing Grippen to sell their planes to Colombia because of the use of US engines.
All in all the US has proven itself to be an unreliable ally. This lack of trust will result in additional costs and lost opportunities in the next decades.
US brands are more visible since they have not been affected by WWII too much, and Europeans had to rebuild things, but there are brands and tools which I enjoy using, and some of these tools are pass-downs.
Though US uncertainty right now is a leading cause of share price suppression
As someone else mentioned, Vega C was operational during this period, but also, define 'quite a while'. Last Ariane 5 launch was in mid 2023, First Ariane 6 launch was in mid 2024.
Eutelsat is a commercial company, of course, and doesn't have to use Arianespace/ESA stuff; they have in the past used Ariane 4 and 5, Proton, Falcon 9, and various Atlases and Deltas, and are a fairly obvious candidate customer for Blue Origin.
Apart from that, we do see the world change in front of our eyes so when your ex-allies are becoming unstable it's natural you are evaluating your options, it's not specifically about Musk in this case.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
> Not a monster? Laisa was a polite Komarran; you had to give her credit for that. "Real monsters," observed Miles, answering her thought instead of her words, "often are just ordinary men. Only more confused in their thinking. [...]"
-- Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
> "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real."
-- Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
Of all the remarks made by Elron apologists, this one takes the cake!
becomes less relevant when national security is on the line.
@lm28469 I'll edit and answer for you here instead of an additional reply: Falling from the ECB's printers is not free money from "the sky", it's money created by additional inflation, which is a tax on all of us, especially on the poor, which in turn leads to a lower standard of living, desperation and votes towards political extremism. How can people be this economically illiterate is beyond me. You can't complain people are voting right when you're making them poorer through your economic policies. For every action there is a reaction.
Time will tell if moving Rocket Lab to the US was such a wise move. I hope they slowly start shifting their launches to Europe.
Do you think it's achievable for basic functionality in time to be meaningful, if it were for a few months that would otherwise have outage / shortage i a lot of places?
Might be worth modifying the Starlink terminals so they work with Eutelsat infrastructure instead of becoming scrap.
Starlink has over 7000 satellites. Eutelsat has several hundred they got from their purchase of OneWeb and isn't increasing them by much.
The reason why Eutelsat stock is increasing is because investors think that Europe is going to go nuts with "buy European" in the military space which would allow them to sell their services at inflated pricing as it's no longer a fair market between OneWeb and Starlink.
I cannot follow. Where did this happen? Isn't it the US that is not offering Starlink anymore? And did Eutelsat increase prices or did their competition change TOS? This is a form of victim blaming.
(And there is no historic precedent for Starlink to stop serving anyone either as they have never done so in the past.)
There hasn't been any threats to stop providing Ukraine with Starlink either. (There was a single news media source claiming this, but it was denied by SpaceX, Musk, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials.)
Hmm...
And is that not a valid fear? Why is Elon/Starlink's denial of threats to cut off Ukraine more trustworthy than Reuter's reporting?
Isn't the US government capitalising on fear as we speak in the recent Tariff wars and such?
Starlink needs competition and I hope that will come.
1. Elon Musk is in full control of Starlink
2. Elon is politically aligned with Trump
3. Trump is pressuring Ukraine by taking away any US support. He paused military equipment delivery that was already approved, and now cut intelligence sharing.
It doesn't seem that far fetched that they would use cutting Starlink in these negotiations.
A counter argument could be that Elon still wants to get revenue for this (I think Poland is paying for it).
In my opinion, Starlink is a threat to European security, in an ever growing hostile US. Remember that Trump explicitly didn't exclude taking EU territory by force.
Even if Starlink isn't cut, they would most likely use it in their negotiations for Ukraine to "peacefully" surrender (partly) to Russia.