EU to help Ukraine replace Musk’s Starlink
EU to help Ukraine replace Musk’s Starlink
The European Commission is figuring out how it could help Ukraine secure satellite communication capacity in the wake of Elon Musk reportedly threatening to pull Kyiv's access to his Starlink network. Space-based communication systems are a critical tool for Ukraine, but it remains unclear whether Musk will continue to offer Starlink as the war grinds on. Ukraine said last year it has about 42,000 Starlink terminals in operation in the country; about half are financed by Poland.
Unfortunately Europe has no competitior at present but more importantly they’re a long way from having a suitable (reusable, rapid cadence) launch vehicle. Ariane 6 is still not ready for prime time, the launch cadence can’t touch SpaceX, and the costs are higher. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/europes-first-ariane-6-flight-achieved-most-of-its-goals-but-ended-prematurely/
I’d leave Starlink in an instant if there was a reasonable alternative.
Pretty sure the engineers at SpaceX who do all the work would happily take a better deal elsewhere if say Europe gave them the opportunity. I'm sure Elon and his 20yo hacker friends will do fine by themselves, they're like an MCU Iron Man dream-team according to his fans.
Asking hundreds or thousands of people to uproot their entire lives and move across an ocean is a rather tall order. Some would take the deal, certainly, but not enough. And it takes more than engineers and money to do things the way SpaceX has been doing them. It requires a leadership that isn't averse to failures along the way. The ESA, much like NASA, is publicly funded. Meaning programs need to progress with a minimum of (outright or as perceived by the uninformed public) failures, otherwise the bureaucrats who don't know shit about dick come and pull the funding. You can't make rapid progress like that and rapid progress is exactly what's needed for anyone to even dream of catching up to SpaceX.
EDIT: Another point: SpaceX are mass-producing Raptors and full stack Starships, while both of them are still deep in development. The EU won't be willing to pay for a mass production line for anything without a finalized design. That slows you down even more, because you'll be stuck waiting on manufacturing. And said manufacturing is likely to be spread across multiple EU nations, so that more would benefit from the funding. This, once again, slows you down. And makes the entire operation more expensive, in turn making it more likely that your funding gets pulled when enough people get pissy that your test article failed while being tested to failure.
They could use spacex to launch their own. Last I checked spacex liked money.
This is true; Bezos’s scheme is doing that. Better than doing nothing while they come up with a high frequency rocket of their own.
Let me guess by paying spaceX to launch their satellites?