DOD "Anxious" Over Trusting Musk with Spy Satellites
DOD "Anxious" Over Trusting Musk with Spy Satellites
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
Aw man, if only there was some sort of space administration that you could invest some of your trillions of dollars into so that your satellites could be launched by a group that you can monitor and trust.
Nope, everything in the US must be privatized. EVERYTHING. Capitalism DEMANDS it
To be fair here... The old guard still aren't working on reuse even after SpaceX not only championed it but actually succeeded and proved reliability.
The old launch providers are still just throwing their shit away and still cost billions of dollars for launches.
The Commercial Resupply Service and Commercial Crew Programs have also achieved better standards than NASA had when they started them, and at much cheaper cost than the previous solutions.
Privatisation isn't inherently bad, and importantly, the money is still being handled through NASA for oversight.
Revoke his security clearance. They did it to Oppenheimer for a lot less.
Ah, but he wasn't a capitalistic wage exploitation illegal immigrant billionaire. That was his first mistake.
No, Oppenheimer was a..."communist"!! 😱😱😱😱
If you're going to rely on private firms for your aerospace espionage endeavors, maybe factor in their leader's sanity before you sign the contract with them.
Nah. Loads of things just shouldn't be privatised.
What do you value higher - that one company's profits or the public? Why are you so selfish? Why can't you just be happy that that one company gets to hold the entire population hostage over the necessary good or service that they can then monopolise? It's so much easier to squeeze the poor for all they own when their very survival depends on the things you can hand out or hold back at a whim. Something something the free market will probably prevent abuse or something, so it's perfectly okay.
I 100% agree with you but is there someone else in thr US who can reliably launch satellites? I know several othe companies are developing these systems but I don't think any are anywhere close to Space X's reliability or capability.
Space X is doing some awesome stuff and I hate that the awesome has to be tempered by the owner is a piece of shit.
They're only able to do it because they've received trillions of dollars from the federal government.
They should nationalize SpaceX before they ever let someone like Musk get the security clearance needed to be in that position.
In what would be an unprecedented move, the US needs to nationalize SpaceX in the name of national security.
They don’t need to go that far. Just force Musk to divest. (And prosecute him for any crimes he’s committed, but that might be asking too much of the government.)
They should go that far though.
This entire position that things are in are a direct result of a certain party trying to privatize space travel, and "run it like a business", which is how the Challenger disaster happened.
So wouldn't be the worst idea to pull waayyyyyy back.
It's not unprecedented, though.
No, not everything needs to be nationalized. That's a lazy excuse to solving problems and often just leads to different issues. Look at the fights we have for NASA's current miniscule budget slice for a perfect example. Our government is dog shit at allocating and running departments like this, primarily because of politics.
Remember that neither NASA or the military actually build anything themselves, everything is outsourced to companies like SpaceX, Lockheed, Boeing, etc. So you're advocating all of that to be brought into the government bureaucracy machine with no existing infrastructure to manage it, for it to be smothered to death by politicians trying to "prove" that government doesn't work.
Instead, they just need to demand that Elon not have any decision making position at the company to continue getting contracts, blacklist him. As it is, daily SpaceX operations run without Elon. Gwynne Shotwell actually runs the company, regardless of specific titles. Elon doesn't actually do the engineering work either, so while he may be involved in major decisions, it's more the overall vision, the company would operate just fine whether he's there or not. HE is the problem, not SpaceX as a company, and not the entire C-Suite team, just him. Get rid of him and the place runs just like it does now, works towards the same goals, and daily operations and contracts continue as normal,
they wouldn't need to take SpaceX. just replace Musk's ownership/control with Some Advisory Board™️staffed by project managers that know the fuck they're doing. SpaceX wouldn't necessarily need to be closed- just a change in ownership.
Granted, that's pratically a pipe dream since congress has been intent on privatization instead of having NASA be in that role.
after about a decade, the government then sells its stake off slowly; probably reaping a rather huge profit while it's at it.
lazy excuse
Lol what? You think that would be easy? Like when Michael tries to "declare bankruptcy" in The Office?
Apply the same standards the rest of us have to meet, revoke his fucking security clearance already! Same for the racist criminal spray painted orange Cheeto, too. This is completely obvious.
IIRC, you're supposed to report when you've had significant contact with Canadians and this motherfucker is talking with Vladimir Putin himself. I can't imagine he reported that to whoever his clearance is with.
When I had my clearance, we were told if we had a conversation with a foreign national at a bar, we had to disclose it, even after we had already received our clearance.
I was put through a multi-hour polygraph interview from hell, where I was told I didn't know how to breathe and was threatened with being failed and losing my clearance, because I was having issues remembering online foreign penpals from high school.
But motherfucker is talking to Putin on the regularly, and he's a billionaire with billions worth of government contracts? Tell me again, US Government, why any of your citizens should give a fuck about anything, again?
he worships a russian asset. dont give him any access to defense
But he has money. If you're rich, they let you do it.
You want to trust him after what happened in Ukraine? Are you out of your mind? And he's admitted that he chats with Putin on a regular basis.
Yet another reason billionaires shouldn’t exist. Dude is making international policy based on requests from foreign leaders, along with having conversations with them while launching the US government’s satellites of national security importance.
They should be, it's a spectacularly bad idea.
In his defense, the GOP also answers to Putin, so it makes sense he would too.
Just outsource DOD too, they basically work for their main sponsors anyway.
/s
why the hell would you be?
What even is the DOD/DOJ doing here?
Surely you meant "wouldn't"
Satellite internet already existed way, way before Starlink. You know, good satellite internet where you have a single geostationary satellite giving you high speed instead of these small Leo ones that will fall out of orbit within a decade...
Why would Taiwan even need Starlink?
Having said that: fuck Musk, and yeah, they should never have allowed this dumb ass anywhere near rockets
The traditional satellite internet is slow and high latency. With the Starlink approach, it is indeed an issue that the satellites need to be continuously replaced, but it does provide a superior service to the user, and combined with SpaceX often launching them "almost free" by piggybacking on free space around their customer's payloads and not having to pay anyone for launches otherwise, it does come out cheaper than the old satellite internet.
But that's just the technology. The fact Musk is anywhere near that project makes Starlink a liability.
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 $$$.
Geostationary satellite internet is not "good." There's about 200ms of latency built into the system because of the distance to the satellite, which means you can't use it for anything real-time. If it's all you have it's better than nothing, but LEO satellite Internet is a lot more useful.
Old sat internet is not high speed unless you have your own private sat and are willing to spend crazy amounts of money and they suffer from very high latency. I’m a musk hater but starlink preforms pretty well. My dream is that the US will nationalize spacex and remove musks influence. Nothing but a cancer
Wtf is this article? If there’s a doubt about someone’s national security clearance, revoke it immediately until further review. Being anxious means nothing. Do or don’t.
"As much as I hate elon..."
"I hate elon as much as the next guy, but...."
"Look, I'm no elon fan, but..."
I'm sure you all know, but to be clear, when you see the above in elon posts... these are the beginnings of sentences from people who don't hate elon. They are sentences from people who like elon, but think you will hate them, or not consider their opinions, if they say out loud that they do, in fact, like elon.
On a separate but related note, this is elon speaking at a hate-filled rally featuring a series of bigoted speakers, including himself. The rally very intentionally cosplayed an American Nazi rally that famously occurred at Madison Square garden in the 1930s. To emphasize how on the nose this all was, elon wore a specially made hat - a hat that very deliberately used an especially prominent font from the Nazi era. They are literally SCREAMING it in your face and tattooing it on their foreheads
elon has done nothing good or admirable with his life and elon will will not do anything good or admirable with his life. You can't compartmentalize your opinion on this, he sucks, on the whole.
Jesus Christ.
Fraktur was a remnant from Kaiser times. Nazis were quite against it, maybe because of different reasons you might assume. Hitler said this: "In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The countries of the East, North and West will learn our language in order to be able to communicate with us. The prerequisite for this is that the script known as Gothic will be replaced by what we previously called the Latin script and now call normal script."