this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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It is quite literally how it works.
In addition, Starlink is not a good solution. It requires an infinite amount of rockets sent into low earth orbit forever, at a heavy subsidised cost paid for by American taxpayers.
You should be pushing for long-term solutions, not ones that literally fall out of the sky six months after the subsidies stop.
True.
How are American taxpayers subsidizing Starlink? The gov certainly isn't paying for Starlink launches or satellites . Starlink was also denied the $866 billion for government funded rural broadband/
Where is the tax money you're saying come from?
Well, they were going to get subsidies https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/spacex-starlink-wins-nearly-900-million-in-fcc-subsidies-auction.html
Now starlink mad they not https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/spacex-blasts-fcc-as-it-refuses-to-reinstate-starlinks-886-million-grant/
Right, I linked that in my post. So where is the taxpayer subsidy?
They got subsidies and were recently denied some. Don't pretend they never got any thank you.
The DID NOT get the subsidy.
What SpaceX won in 2020 was a bid to receive the $866 million. They did not receive the money at that time. The FCC process after winning a bid is to do extra work showing your product meets program requirements:
"SpaceX’s winning share was one of the largest among the auction’s 180 successful bidders [in 2020], and covered nearly 643,000 homes and businesses in 35 states."
"Auction winners were required to submit paperwork to the FCC to show how they planned to deploy services that meet RDOF conditions to receive the funds over 10 years.""
"The Federal Communications Commission said Aug. 10 [2022] that SpaceX had failed to show it could meet requirements for unlocking the funds, which aim to incentivize expanding broadband services to unserved areas across the United States."
source
...and in 2022 SpaceX's bid was denied for not meeting the product performance rules the FCC had placed on the program.
To make you feel comfortable, I'll adopt your level of snark for the conclusion.
So, no, SpaceX did NOT receive this money, and don't pretend they did, thank you.
As soon as SpaceX gets rid of the lunatic asshole billionaire pretending to run the company, I’ll stop cheering for bad headlines. Sorry about your internet service.
It's a good thing that these are put on the low earth orbit which decays faster. That means it cleans itself of space junk in a relatively short time. Putting them higher up would mean higher latency and more junk in space for longer amount of time.
The alternative is not "higher orbit satellites", it's "put wires on the earth".
Firing infinite rockets that fall out of the sky in a year is a bad, wasteful option that only exists because the American government is not under enough pressure to fix its infrastructure problems.
the rest of the world, even the big countries with lots of remote citizens, they used wires not infinite rockets.
It doesn't make any sense to dig cables into rural areas. It would cost a fortune to connect some remote house to the grid. Going wireless is the obvious solution to this and satellite internet gives you much better connection than cell towers. They didn't dig landlines into poor african countries either but skipped right into mobile phones.
You might have a point if launching rockets was cheaper, but launching infinite rockets forever is not cheaper. The rockets fall out of the sky. So we're talking about one upfront cost or a cost forever.
We'll likely have much better technology in the future and the problem will more or less solve itself. In this day and age satellite internet simply just is the most sensible option and probably cheaper aswell. The amount of diesel machinery you'd need to dig all that cable in the rural USA alone would be mind boggling not to mention the enviromental damage of all that digging. These cables don't last forever either. They too need maintenance and eventually to be dug up and replaced.
Rocket is just the delivery vehicle for the satellites. It's not supposed to stay in orbit itself. Building the rocket is what has made space flight so expensive in the past because they were single-use but now with reusable rockets the cost is much less of an issue. They run with renewable fuel aswell - oxygen and methane.
Space travel is going to be getting much more common in the future and the number of rocket launches is only going to increase either way.
Shockingly, you don't need to dig. And handwaving away the cost, including the environmental cost of infinite rocket launches forever because "oh magical technology will save us some day" does not help your case.
Why starlink exists is because the fcc is failing us.
The FCC and the government at large isn't to blame for this one. The ISPs collected the governments money to run high speed Internet to the rural parts of this country. Blame your ISP for not using the funds as intended. Maybe also blame the government for not holding them accountable for not delivering.
Definitely blame the government for not holding them accountable...