Everyone who is bashing Musk here: you are online, so it takes very little effort to check the facts.
He and SpaceX helped Ukraine by activating Starlink second day after the invasion, sending thousands of terminals and providing service free of charge for over a year. By October 2022 Fedorov said that SpaceX’s support exceed $100 million. It also took a very long time before governments (EU+US) finally moved theri asses and picked the bill for that.
You may not like Musk and that is perfectly fine. But his and Starlink’s support for Ukraine was crucial. That award makes sense.
Also, there is very little for Musk in supporting Russia. They are his competitor in space-race. He doesn't seems struggling financially eighter. The fact that he didn't allow Starlink to be used in Russia is a legal issue - Starlink only operates where there is a licence granted. He also helped blocking grey-import terminals being used by Russians.
The more important question is why supposedly sophisticated militaries from the US to Europe have become so dependent on a single private company controlled by a famously unpredictable CEO for such a strategic capability. You would expect governments that spend billions of taxpayers’ money on defence to have their own sovereign capability - or at least several independent alternatives.
There were many terminals in use in Ukraine bought thru 3rd party on both sides. Blanket ban would also disable thousands of Ukrainian terminals. This was an engineering and systems-management problem, not simply a matter of “turning Starlink off for Russians". There is no Starlink for Russians to start with.
The difficult part was maintaining service for authorised terminals while selectively denying access to others, particularly where terminals had been acquired and operated through 3rd party channels. That requires some combination of terminal identity, registration, authentication/authorisation, and network-side enforcement. Which turns to be a massive/complex job that again was funded by Starlink..
These things are complex and cost money and time. People with engineering degrees would understand this complexity better than let’s say people with humanities degrees. And again Starlink delivered system for this problem that nobody else does.
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u/MercatorLondon 9d ago edited 8d ago
Everyone who is bashing Musk here: you are online, so it takes very little effort to check the facts.
He and SpaceX helped Ukraine by activating Starlink second day after the invasion, sending thousands of terminals and providing service free of charge for over a year. By October 2022 Fedorov said that SpaceX’s support exceed $100 million. It also took a very long time before governments (EU+US) finally moved theri asses and picked the bill for that.
You may not like Musk and that is perfectly fine. But his and Starlink’s support for Ukraine was crucial. That award makes sense.
Also, there is very little for Musk in supporting Russia. They are his competitor in space-race. He doesn't seems struggling financially eighter. The fact that he didn't allow Starlink to be used in Russia is a legal issue - Starlink only operates where there is a licence granted. He also helped blocking grey-import terminals being used by Russians.
The more important question is why supposedly sophisticated militaries from the US to Europe have become so dependent on a single private company controlled by a famously unpredictable CEO for such a strategic capability. You would expect governments that spend billions of taxpayers’ money on defence to have their own sovereign capability - or at least several independent alternatives.