Pentagon Uneasy About Elon Musk’s New Spy Satellites
futurism.com
Elon Musk's SpaceX just launched a bunch of spy satellites for the Pentagon — and some in the DOD are getting worried.

After giving in to Putin/Xi’s demands to not provide starlink internet service over Taiwan, DOD officials are growing nervous about trusting Elon’s Space company with our national secrets

  • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
    3·
    16 days ago

    The vast majority of starlink are launched on their own flights.

    They get a few freebies here and there but it’s not the defining factor of their success.

    The success is their reusable rockets and turning satellites into a smaller mass manufactured item amd getting economies of scale, not a giant super expensive item.

    Edit: also they made reusable rockets then had to figure out a use for them as there wasn’t enough global launch demand. They made their own demand. Then they used their own flights to test riskier things like the rockets with the most launches to fine tune the system without risking customer payloads.

    Edit: Also for reference launch masses and dish costs

    • Hughesnet JUPITER 3 (EchoStar XXIV) has a launch mass of 9200kg. ($445 million)
    • Starlink V1 is 260kg (200k USD)
    • Starlink V2 Mini (current) 740kg (800k USD)
    • Starlink V2 (future satellites for starship) 1250kg (??? USD)

    And obviously the Jupiter 3 will stay up there forever so they can recoup costs if starlink doesn’t kill them, but thats a lot higher up front cost and they aren’t making a lot of them so they don’t get efficiencies of scale. Instead they’re made with very custom stuff meant to last forever which costs big $$$.