SpaceX says it can’t keep funding Starlink in Ukraine, asks Pentagon for money
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To keep money out of the pockets of a person who explicitly wants your ally to lose the war, is very chummy with your enemies, and could easily undermine your ally's war efforts? Um... yeah.
Money isn't as important as knowing who to trust. And when it comes to global politics, freezing out people who are untrustworthy is beneficial, even if it costs more.
Elon Musk can't even be trusted to do what a contract that he negotiated and signed says. How could you possibly expect him to be trustworthy with vital infrastructure for a war he has made clear he wants to be over, no matter what? Elon has made it clear that Ukraine winning the war is not something he cares about. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
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At $400M/year it's gonna be hard to find a higher cost provider.
What you and your fellow denizens of the Musk Clown Car don't understand is that it's not about SpaceX getting paid for Starlink, it's about Musk handing the Pentagon a $400M bill and demanding it be paid without any evidence that $400M is a reasonable cost. And the math that is able to be done from Starlink's published information is that not only is $400M completely unreasonable, it's probably borderline fraudulent.
And clearly Musk has zero idea how Washington in general, and the Pentagon in particular, actually work when it comes to procurement. They're not impressed when some over-indulged man baby throws a temper tantrum because they've already seen much worse. If Musk wants to get paid for Starlink, he needs to grow the fuck up, give the Pentagon a detailed cost proposal and then sit down and shut the ever living fuck up. The fact that he's doing none of those things should tell us all we really need to know.
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I'm not talking about the original idea. It's like Linear algebra, everyone discovering already discovered solutions. OneWeb's founder has been selling the LEO idea for ages, wanted to partner with SpaceX and was the last related person to talk to Elon about it.
I'm sure with his Gates beef, he'd have passed on the idea if he saw the connection as his entry into the overall idea
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Musk understands exactly one negotiation style: do what I say, right now, or I walk. He's been living in a world where that's been his only interaction with the people he wants stuff from that he has no idea how else to behave.
He doesn't understand 2 things:
1) If you really want a thing, and the other side knows you really want it, they can fuck you over in the contract. See Twitter's lawyers, who negotiated an iron-clad meager document with him, with provisions that make it very easy to force him to comply if he gets skittish. They were able to do that because they knew that he really wanted the deal (for some reason).
2) Goodwill pays dividends. For someone who claims to think long-term, Musk is incredibly short-sighted. Like, why would you tweet out support for Russia and a request to end the war in a way that fucks over Ukraine at the same time you're trying to shake down the very pro-Ukraine US government for more money? Like, you couldn't wait a couple months for that? That's almost certainly how this stuff got leaked: somebody in government looked at those tweets and decided to show people who Musk really was.
Musk's belligerent, bellicose style may work in the short-term, but long-term it makes people look for alternatives. You know right now that the government is looking into propping up Starlink alternatives. They may even start to look at Artemis alternatives (not that this mission is ever going anywhere).
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If you're talking about the first sentence of my last paragraph, I was referring to his purchase of Twitter. Promising to do a thing, and then reneging, and then not-reneging, only still reneging, is not the act of a person who can be trusted.
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Not that I know much about it, but it appears from a cursory Wikipedia glance, Starlink was not Musk's idea.
From what that says, SpaceX had a 'shared strategic vision' with Surrey in 2004 when they were already 'working to extend the Internet into space.'
That means it was Surrey's idea almost a decade before WorldVu became a thing in 2012.
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Ars Legatus Legionis
I wouldn't presume to think that at all. Russia has never cared about space debris. Much like the rest of Russia their space program is struggling to just maintain the status quo.
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If there's a case to be made for $100M, why didn't it get made? Are you telling us that Musk hired someone incompetent? Or that he hired someone competent and then refused to listen to competency?
And leaking is another tried and true Washington pastime. It's frequently done when something so mindbogglingly stupid is about to happen that the leaker feels there's no other recourse. It's very possible that someone in the Pentagon was about to cave and the leaker felt that the only way to avoid a staggeringly colossal waste of taxpayer dollars was to leak the info. Again, someone with any understanding of how Washington works would have seen this coming for miles.
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I'll start by tossing out that Elon is an unhinged @##$.
But past that, you make a couple of statements here that I have to challenge:
I'm Canadian, and using weed hasn't brought down our country AFAICT. The disastrous War on Drugs have led to some pretty crazy responses, which I include yours in. Related to that is the 'highly probable' statement. Either you mean the gateway drug theory, which is frankly horseshit, or a belief that his behaviour is caused by drugs. Personally I think he's off his meds (and possibly self medicating), but that's just me.
Not that where I'm from is better, but the behaviour of many of your senior business, government and political figures is absolutely reprehensible. Musky is the richest and therefore most visible, but I have yet to see a billionaire or president/senator that I would ever want to associate with. There might be a few somewhere, but I doubt it. On average, they're assholes.
Now maybe if he took a device-free sabbatical to a South Seas island for a year or two he might get rehabilitated, I don't know. But trying to leverage bullshit to smack him down, whether justified or not, is a poor look.
NB: I wonder what the response would have been if Ol'Musky hadn't tweeted about this. The original statement came from Starlink themselves, the director of government sales no less. There may be some underlying truth to the original claim, now lost in bullshit and obfuscation.
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But you were OK when Trump invoked the exact same provision to produce vaccines and ventilators, I'd bet.
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Ars Legatus Legionis
Not everyone has an issue with SpaceX getting paid for providing a service. Some of us just have an issue with the gross asinine way the Elon Musk the billionaire man-baby went about it. He is honestly his own worst enemy. 99% of his "problems" and unforced foot gun incidents. Hard to have sympathy for someone with more money than God and also utterly unwilling to learn form an endless parade of idiotic decisions.
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The process of attaining a security clearance is exactly designed to screen out people who say things like "I think that rule is stupid, and based on my judgement, I will not follow that rule." Because there are a lot of security-related rules and processes that you may not understand or see every corner of, kind of by design. You need to be the sort of person who is able and willing to shrug and accept and follow the rule.
The problem is not getting high per se. It's displaying a casual contempt for the rule.
If you don't want to follow rules that you think are dumb, I get it! I understand! But a position within the cloak of US classified information isn't a good fit for you.
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There's two separate discussions -- can they technically do something (they can, no one's disputing that) and is it remotely plausible they do the same thing.
Russia's "minions" as such are largely not capable of independent space flight. None of the countries ostensibly in Russia's sphere of influence have such a capability except Russia itself. The others who might be somewhat geopolitically aligned -- well, China, not "others" -- aren't about to do something that's so blatantly against their own interests. There's not a chance in *hell* China will use that play until they become dissatisfied with being West Taiwan, but the status quo suggests that's a ways off.
In any case, no, Russia shooting down Starlink (or otherwise disabling it via any mechanism at the space hardware level) isn't remotely plausible.
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And electric cars haven't actually become mainstream until... ten years away.
Also, the Nissan Leaf was out before the Tesla Model S.
The end of combustion engines was inevitable. Tesla *might* have sped up that transition a bit.
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I think even done quietly the $400M number was bullshit and the DoD would have pushed back on it but very likely some accomodation in the $50M to $100M/yr range would have happened and it would have been a non-event.
The DoD however takes a dim view of sympathizers of our enemies. Elon Muks was regurgitating Kremlin talking points as if they were his own at the same time he was asking the DoD for nearly half a billion friggin dollars. I mean for fuck sake that is a pretty low bar for dumb things not to do and he still failed. I would hazard to guess 99% of the country could follow the rule of "don't regurgitate enemy propaganda at the same time asking the DoD of all people for hundreds of millions of dollars". Could you? Would you find it hard to follow that rule because Elon Musk sure did.
It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that the DoD an organization of very serious very conservative people might have a small problem with that.
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Thanks for the insight. Note that Airbus/EADS is a OneWeb partner
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Been wondering if these people think pharmaceutical companies raising the price of insulin and other cheap, life saving drugs is an equally good move.
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Varying competence and a reticence to listening to ostensibly good advice seem to be Musk core values
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Aside from what others have said, about how Musk didn't come up with the idea, my point was more that Musk really had nothing at all to do with Starlink except maybe provide some funding. All evidence suggests he's not a talented engineer or businessman. He's a nightmare of an executive/manager, both in having unrealistic demands of people--his 40 hours of butt-in-chair time per week demand, which he himself doesn't follow, or how one time he yelled at some interns, threatening to fire them, because they were waiting in line to get some water--and being a PHB who doesn't really understand what's going on--see SpaceX vs every other company he's involved in. Tesla was already a company when Musk came along and bought his way in--he's now literally suing to be called a "founder" and he tried selling Tesla to just about every other car maker out there at one point, including Apple--he founded SpaceX but bought the designs for a lot of the early rockets off someone else. His hyperloop idea is also one of those things that a real engineer would need about 2 seconds to find at least a dozen fatal flaws with. There's a reason the people attempting to make a go of it have been having about zero luck. And, let's not forget the entire idea is basically the same as the pneumatic tubes banks sometimes use. The idea was around a lot longer than that though, and everyone else stopped using them, even on a small scale, for a reason.
Musk personally has been responsible for jack shit. He got lucky on a couple speculative investments, that's the grand total of his business and engineering prowess. And of course he was essentially a trust fund kid so he could afford to take risks the rest of us couldn't. If the entire thing went titsup, he could just get a loan from the Bank of Mommy & Daddy, he wouldn't potentially end up homeless like the rest of us.
THAT is why your comment was the whoosh to end all whooshes.
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Snarky Robot
Ars Legatus Legionis
I mean his sycophants are annoying, but I think most of them are real people, like yourself.
Do me a favor though: expand on your idea of “bots”. Which posters here do you believe are bots? Who were they written by? Why? Who the fuck do you believe is spending money to have bots rebuke Elon Musk on Ars Technica Dot Com?
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JonnyOneNote
Ars Centurion
''The Boy Who Couldn't Make Up His Mind'' (Episode XXVII)
Sometimes I wonder about the mentality of some of the people who made too-much-money from their involvement with PayPal, particularly Mr Musk and Mr Trump's second-best friend/defender, Peter Thiel (who can always runaway to his "In Case of Nuclear War" heavily guarded compound in New Zealand, and bought his way into becoming a citizen there).
The things these 2 ''grown-ups'' say (and then do or don't do or do again or retract what they said) is just on this side of Borderline Insanity.
No doubt, at the last moment in 2024, one or both will toss in their hat (or Hair Club for Men membership) at the last moment to save the Republicans and the US and the world from another four years of The Great Pumpkin.
And as we saw (those of us alive then) that just like Ross Perot in 1992, they'll discover they don't like the scrutiny from the press (especially Thiel -- he already proved that with bringing down the original Gawker) -- and decide "Oh, I changed my mind" then a few weeks later, "Oh, I changed my mind again...."
Ah, to press the Red Button or not ... before Putin does .... now that is the question! /s
(Sunday morning sarcasm. Sorry if you are a defender of any of these above-mentioned individuals. But it does give one a pause for thought...)
Sometimes I wonder about the mentality of some of the people who made too-much-money from their involvement with PayPal, particularly Mr Musk and Mr Trump's second-best friend/defender, Peter Thiel (who can always runaway to his "In Case of Nuclear War" heavily guarded compound in New Zealand, and bought his way into becoming a citizen there).
The things these 2 ''grown-ups'' say (and then do or don't do or do again or retract what they said) is just on this side of Borderline Insanity.
No doubt, at the last moment in 2024, one or both will toss in their hat (or Hair Club for Men membership) at the last moment to save the Republicans and the US and the world from another four years of The Great Pumpkin.
And as we saw (those of us alive then) that just like Ross Perot in 1992, they'll discover they don't like the scrutiny from the press (especially Thiel -- he already proved that with bringing down the original Gawker) -- and decide "Oh, I changed my mind" then a few weeks later, "Oh, I changed my mind again...."
Ah, to press the Red Button or not ... before Putin does .... now that is the question! /s
(Sunday morning sarcasm. Sorry if you are a defender of any of these above-mentioned individuals. But it does give one a pause for thought...)
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That's called counterfactual thinking. It can be a fun little mental exercise now and then, but the way you're using it is just embarrassing. For all we know, the timeline where Musk never existed is a Star Trek-like utopia. No climate change, free everything, and we've already colonized the Moon and Mars. That is just as plausible as your insinuation that we would somehow be worse off if he hadn't been born.
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It's not about weed. It's about following the rules. There's a lot of seemingly arbitrary rules, and "I don't care about your rules, that's just, like, arbitrary, man," isn't a good thing. Those rules around classified information were written in blood. I'm sure some of them are a giant, impractical pain in the ass.
Just because something is a pain in the ass doesn't mean you don't do it. Rules are rules for a reason, and the rules about classified information are ultimately safety rules. They're in the same category as "wear safety goggles," or "wear your seatbelt." Most of the time, not wearing a seatbelt works out okay, because most of the time, you don't get in car accidents. Same with safety goggles. Most of the time, a fragment of what you're working on doesn't fly off and hit you in the face.
Yet, I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that someone who doesn't wear their safety goggles or their seatbelt is an absolute moron who I *wouldn't* trust to do things the right way.
Because, though safety goggles and seatbelts are a pain the ass, the rules surrounding them aren't written about the times when things are going right, they're because the fail cases can be spectacularly bad. I've had to prohibit a few people from working in my garage because they can't be arsed to put on goggles. You get one warning. Same rule, DOD and secrets, except Musk already *got* his one warning.
As far as highly probable that he's got a drug problem? Yeah, I'll stand by that. He's far too mercurial to not have a drug problem. Whether that problem is "doesn't take his psychiatric meds" or "does too many silicon valley psychotropics," I have no idea, but his behaviour is consistent with either bipolar disorder or drug misuse.
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Ars Legatus Legionis
In the real world Russian weapon development is non-existent. The vast majority of their Army is Soviet Era stock and a few dubious wonderweapons never developed into anything useful. Russia was a major regional power because they inherited the vastness of the USSR weapon stock piles.
Looking into and having the competence to do it are two different things. Russia is a failed petrol state circling the drain with nuclear weapons. I mean they are buying weapons from Iran and North Korea and putting AA guns from WWII back into service.
They sure as fuck aren't wasting resources trying to develop nets in space. They don't even have enough boots, beans, and bullets.
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What are we, <insert country right-wingers hate because it shows their policies don't work>?
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Longmile149
Ars Tribunus Militum
It really seems like Musk’s spiral is speeding up. Used to be months between splashy look-what-this-jackass-is-doing-to-his-own-business news, now it’s down to days.
I suspect the 28th is going to be a major turning point for the dude, and I don’t expect it to be pretty. He’s dug some *deep* trenches to throw himself into lately.
I suspect the 28th is going to be a major turning point for the dude, and I don’t expect it to be pretty. He’s dug some *deep* trenches to throw himself into lately.
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Short of literally triggering Armageddon, they can't take out Starlink. People think they can just throw up a few missiles and take out every Starlink bird. They can't. There are too many. So short of nuking the upper atmosphere while the rest of the world somehow sits and watches without retaliating, they can't. After lighting off the first nuke, Russia would disappear from the map. The loss of some satellites would be the least of our worries.
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Hey... feel free not to comment next time and we'll be that much closer to your goal.
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