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Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

It's really about bandwidth and availability - US satcom systems were really struggling, and the only truly global (Iridium) was quite low bandwidth. Starlink is essentially "Iridium with newer tech and mass production" and IIRC DoD through various fronts put quite a lot of early financing to make it a thing, even if later the networks were supposedly disaggregated (would make sense to start building separate one once PoC was proven)

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DoD financing for Starlink was a long term game to create pLEO sensing capabilities: initially GMTI, then AMTI.

Both of which give the US military more persistent (revisit delay near zero because number of assets) and survivable (number of assets + LEO debris characteristics + cattle vs pets) ISTAR.

And an advantage in persistent ISTAR is a key enabler of the way the US military is aiming to fight a peer state adversary.

I'd be fascinated to dig into the contracts, but at 10,000' it's DoD offloading the bulk of the development cost onto NASA and the public (which in both cases, still gets good value for money).

That's a lot of acronyms. You might be saying something interesting, but no one outside of that particular area of expertise will understand it.

Department of defense. Persistent low earth orbit. Ground moving target indicator. Air moving target indicator. Low earth orbit. Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance. National aeronautics and space administration

Looked back on this and correction: proliferated Low Earth Orbit

Newer acronym, but apparently en vogue with the "How do we maintain a critical military space capability against someone who can shoot down exquisite satellites?" crowd.

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