The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's.
(And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are.
The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.
icegreentea217 hours ago
I'd broadly agree that EU is pretty behind the curve. But I think China is probably only ~5 years max behind the curve in terms of Starlink.
I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).
bryanlarsen16 hours ago
China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.
That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight.
There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying
criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer
space. This debate is unsettled. [0]
There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider.
Found those balloons very strange, hope they were up to something nice
ExpertAdvisor0114 hours ago
Because they will be destroyed immediately
nine_k13 hours ago
To shoot something down at 70,000 ft (21 km) all you need is a conventional military jet fighter, and a long-range rocket, or even a MiG-31 with a conventional cannon. At best you can make these birds cheaper than the rocket + flight time.
Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, but you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
ExpertAdvisor011 hour ago
The f-22 balloon kill was at the same height as the altitude quoted on their website .
Like you said either any fighter jet + missile or an high altitude jet + auto cannon will shoot it down reliably.
This is probably a good solution for redundancy if you already have air superiority.
pacificmint12 hours ago
> you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
You can fire a THAAD at one Starlink satellite, but probably not at 8000 of them.
For comparison we’re currently producing THAAD interceptors at a rate of 96 a year (though Lockheed is aiming to increase it to 400).
nine_k11 hours ago
Exactly; it's a limited and very expensive capability. Nobody would want to spend it on a $100k stratospheric flying vehicle, if the latter existed. It does not exist though, if you do not count weather balloons.
jacobgkau14 hours ago
There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.
maxglute9 hours ago
>put up those numbers within a few years,
And potentially exceed Starlink cumulative payload a few years after that.
US via SpaceX generates most launches/payload due to reusability PRC built 2x more disposable launch vehicles. PRC figures out disposables and they can operate reusable fleet 2-3x the size of US and simply throw more payload per year and catchup/exceed cumulative SpaceX volume in a few years. A few years after, permanent kgs in space advantage due higher replacement as old hardware deorbits.
kolinko12 hours ago
Spy satellites you can have way fewer, but for an internet connection you really need Starlink's scale. Otherwise you need full 360 deg view of a horizon (good luck with that on the battlefield), and a much higher power use.
Having said that, I double checked the numbers - it would take ~60 launches at the minimum to replicate Starlink 1.0. This is how many launches China does per year right now. So it is doable indeed for them, just absurdly expensive - $10-$30B, but they can afford that.
EU on the other hand - no way. We're doing 5 launches a year with Arianne, due to incompetent management over the last decade. Unless China or US allow us to use their infrastructure, we have no way of doing all this.
bryanlarsen18 hours ago
Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go".
suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.
So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.
And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.
sigmoid1017 hours ago
China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things. They are not even hiding it anymore. It's almost comical how much they copied SpaceX. And I'd be surprised if they hadn't supply-chained themselves into some level of access in all the big aerospace corpos by now. But Europe? Developing this kind of stuff from scratch in a few years without an unregulated messy startup ecosystem and no army of state sponsored hackers? No chance.
emkoemko11 hours ago
whats the issue with that? US just cloned the Iranian drone.... all countries do this
Liftyee16 hours ago
Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.
If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".
Be serious, you don't really need a citation to know the CCP is using industrial espionage to advance their defense industry.
bryanlarsen16 hours ago
Sure, they're trying. But there's no evidence they've succeeded in stealing anything other than open source intelligence from SpaceX.
There's a lot of open source intelligence about SpaceX rocket designs available.
throw31082215 hours ago
Be serious, do you think defense industry normally respects other nations' industrial secrets?
cyberax14 hours ago
> China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.
They're even espionaging from themselves in the future!
Dude, have you ever _been_ in China? They don't need espionage, they're now way ahead of the world in technology, except in a few areas like biotech research and semiconductor manufacturing.
For the last decade, China has been having more engineers in _training_ than the total number of engineers in the US. Sure, the quality of Chinese universities is not that great, but the sheer number of them has its own power.
noosphr14 hours ago
I strongly suggest to anyone who thinks this isn't true to go to Shenzhen and then SF.
One feels like the future. The other feels like you will get shot.
mikkupikku13 hours ago
Nonexistent relevance to rockets.
inglor_cz13 hours ago
Rockets are notoriously complicated, though. Only a few nations even managed to get to the orbit, and not for a lack of trying.
SpaceX is a rare bird - a space startup that actually achieved not just spaceflight, but (so far only partial) reusability of launchers. Most space startups died long before that, including Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. Given that they are gone, we don't think of them often, but the total graveyard of defunct space startups is quite sizeable.
Russia seems to be slowly losing their space capabilities. The EU still does not have a human-rated launcher. These aren't small entities either.
Getting to space is a dangerous business with extremely thin security margins, where previous experience matters a lot.
I think China will eventually have reusable rockets, but it will take some time.
cyberax12 hours ago
China has at least two startups that launched rockets into space. Zhuque-3 launch even almost landed a booster.
It's the second-mover advantage. Once you know that something is possible, you can often avoid exploring all the dead ends.
joe_mamba16 hours ago
>China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.
Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.
In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."
Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.
Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.
bdauvergne15 hours ago
Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased. The fact they had to be stolen does not give them more weight. There is a lot of bias in US governmental opinion on french technology that such a small country cannot be so advanced without stealing; opinion which started with the french nuclear and space program. My opinion on those discourses about France, China or the USSR in the past are just mostly propaganda from the US MIC to ensure continued funding.
joe_mamba15 hours ago
>Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased.
As opposed to...?
pie_flavor17 hours ago
The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
jopsen15 hours ago
> but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
How many starlink clones are there really customers for?
Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet.
Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do.
Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.
kolinko12 hours ago
All the airlines, all the trains, and other government-supported entities may have a strategic interest to use a local version of Starlink. But everyone else? I don't think anyone will buy a service that will be 10x more expensive, 10x slower and 10x more energy hungry than Starlink -- this first mover advantage may be hard to beat.
db48x15 hours ago
Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)
But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
IshKebab17 hours ago
Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.
standardUser17 hours ago
China is a full blown superpower and it should surprise no one when they catch up to or surpass the West in technical feats.
ergocoder2 hours ago
How did Starlink get so far ahead of everyone that everyone else is 20 years behind?
We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive.
Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.
db48x18 hours ago
SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.
bryanlarsen18 hours ago
Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
zitterbewegung18 hours ago
To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
fragmede17 hours ago
What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
zitterbewegung17 hours ago
If you are good at making businesses then why not make more?
db48x16 hours ago
I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?
thisislife214 hours ago
India's ISRO already competes with SpaceX for these launches ( ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... ), despite not having any reusable launch vehicles (reason - it's in the top 5 in space technology and just cheaper - Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo ). Once it masters reusable launch vehicle technologies, it'll be hard to compete with ISRO on commercial launches.
kolinko12 hours ago
36 compared to 10000. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude. It's like a corner store trying to compete with Walmart.
ripe10 hours ago
They have a list of 434 foreign satellites launched so far as of January 2026 on their website:
The point was that you don't need a reusable launch vehicle if a single use launcher is just as cheap.
RobotToaster14 hours ago
I'm wondering if we will see a resurgence in direct to geostationary, It seems like it should be a lot easier to cover the planet when you only need a few satellites.
kolinko12 hours ago
Bandwidth, input latency (250ms absolute minimum), energy use and antenna size (mattering for mobility and military). I don't think there is a way for geo to compete.
jmyeet18 hours ago
The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea.
Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.
China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.
The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.
The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.
More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].
China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.
And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.
I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".
The Soviet Atomic Project was helped by starting early and capturing massive amounts of fissile material at the end of WWII.
British scientists helped some.
But the spies at Los Alamos were giving updates on US progress, not delivering secret technology.
ciupicri17 hours ago
> many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years.
Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
kelnos17 hours ago
Yes, but how they got it is irrelevant. They got it, and that's what matters.
China can (and does) do the same for current tech today, through whatever means.
(Also, GP's comment directly said what you said; not sure what your comment adds to the discussion.)
adrian_b15 hours ago
Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.
At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.
Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.
In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.
The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.
In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.
kazen4414 hours ago
also, the knowledge about how a nuclear bomb works wasn't a secret. The way to produce one was the hard part to figure out.
Without the espionage, a industrialised country like the USSR would have figured out how to produce an atomic bomb eventually.
bluGill17 hours ago
Some people will give it to china too. We have even caught a few (in other industries).
palmotea17 hours ago
> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.
Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.
fakedang7 hours ago
How Industrial Espionage Started America's Cotton Revolution
All of that, and the funny thing is /that is the easy part/. Moving payloads to space is just incredibly expensive, but not fundamentally hard in the same way that post-launch coordination of satellite constellations and RF tuning to support things like mobile connectivity are (I can connect to Starlink satellites from my iPhone through T-Mobile).
bryanlarsen16 hours ago
Connecting to a cell phone and/or selling a phased array antenna that can track an object travelling 17,000 mph for $300 is crazy hard.
But a military is going to be fine with an antenna that costs $3000.
assaddayinh18 hours ago
[dead]
thisislife218 hours ago
Can you explain what makes Falcon9 / Starship special (or needed) to launch these satellites? China, India, EU, Japan etc. all have the capability to launch satellites. So why is a Falcon9 / Starship a particular requirement?
mooreds18 hours ago
Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive.
Another major detail is that SpaceX is simply burning enormous amounts of money on this.
Starlink's revenue is comparable to the ESA's entire 5 billion euro budget, and it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service. (And kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits)
The chief problem "stopping" other countries from developing a starlink competitor is that starlink simply doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction. Fiber runs are expensive but not that expensive.
JumpCrisscross17 hours ago
> it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service
Starlink was profitable in 2024 [1] and should be materially profitable once V3 goes up.
> kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits
This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue. Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence. And the propellant depots SpaceX is building for NASA tie in neatly if the chips stablise enough to permit longer-lasting birds.
> doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction
Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
> This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue.
That it affects everyone just makes the problem worse. If China or the EU does commit to a starlink competitor, there's even more crowding in orbit. Even more collision avoidance required.
> Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence
That's the point. These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter.
The constellation is both expensive to build and to maintain. That makes it a lot of trouble compared to running a bunch of fiber once and having only occasional maintenance trouble when some idiot drags a backhoe through it.
> Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
The military interest is real, but it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it. Higher latency more conventional satellite internet will have significant cost savings in comparison.
JumpCrisscross17 hours ago
> Those are revenue figures
And also net income.
> just makes the problem worse
Did you skip the part where it’s not a serious cost issue? None of these birds are even close to being propellant restricted.
> These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter
Because they’re being intentionally deorbited to make room for better birds. They don’t have to be deorbited as quickly as they are. But overwhelming demand makes it a profitable bet.
> it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it
What would the cost be to deny these orbital altitudes?
SlinkyOnStairs16 hours ago
Incalculable.
The cost isn't in paying someone to not use the orbit, it's that the busier a part of space gets, the more expensive it becomes to do collision avoidance and station keeping.
What makes this impossible to calculate is that there's an unknown exponential involved. The more satellites, the more collisions that need avoiding. And the higher the chance that one avoidance will create new future collisions.
At some point the space is simply so busy that collisions can no longer be avoided.
JumpCrisscross15 hours ago
> What makes this impossible to calculate
It’s really not impossible to calculate, particularly if you’re trying to cause damage.
The answer is it’s cheaper to shoot down individual satellites than try to create a localized cascade. Kessler cascades propagate too slowly, and degrade too quickly in low orbits, to be useful as a military tactic. In high orbit one could feasibly e.g. deny use of a geostationary band. But again, it’s cheaper to just shoot down each satellite.
estearum17 hours ago
From the PCMag article:
> For example, although the Starlink subsidiary reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2024, the same financial statement doesn’t account for the costs of launching and maintaining a fleet of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites.
???
JumpCrisscross17 hours ago
Later: “The document also shows the Starlink subsidiary registered a net income of only $72.7 million for 2024. The year prior, the subsidiary incurred a net loss of $30.7 million. However, the financial statement notes the subsidiary purchased nearly $2.3 billion in Starlink hardware and services from the SpaceX parent last year.”
Those figures, to my understanding, include cost of services and launch in COGS.
bluGill17 hours ago
starlink has some travel niches where it makes sense. However not many cross the ocean. military where you can't trust the nearby infrastructure is the other big one. Disaster recovery where the local system is not working isn't big enough to fund anything though it will use whatever they can get.
fragmede17 hours ago
The cruise ship industry is $78B of revenue. He airline industry is $840B of revenue. Between the two, I think Starlink has enough customers crossing the ocean to be profitable, given how hard they drive down costs.
victorbjorklund16 hours ago
Because the Chinese govt doesn’t have money to burn…
samrus18 hours ago
Has to be the cost. A reusable launch vehicle is such a ridiculously better value proposition that it creates a discrete evolution. Some things just arent feasible to do without them
tartuffe7818 hours ago
Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.
palmotea17 hours ago
> Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.
But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?
iSnow14 hours ago
>But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability?
No. The German army wants a constellation of initially 40, and later just over 100 satellites. They do not want or need to replicate the massive Starlink numbers.
kolinko12 hours ago
The numbers just don't add up there. With just 40-100 satellites they need to be GEO, and this means crappy transfers, big lags (200-300 absolute minimum, more 500ms), and most importantly - big, power hungry antennas.
It's a PR project to calm people down, not a real solution.
maxglute10 hours ago
It's more tempo, less cost, resuable has faster turn around time, so more launch per unit of time. Long March 5 is ~$3000/kg, or ballpark enough to F9/kg, but disposables can't launch every few days.
kolinko12 hours ago
Reusability. Even if money were not an issue, other nations need to build a new rocket for every launch, and it's extremely hard/impossible to catch up.
tekla18 hours ago
None of those countries (well probably except China) have any significant launch capacity to deploy constellations
bluGill17 hours ago
They can build it in a few years though. It takes money and can be done overnight but there is nothing about that that costs 10 years. 10 years got to the moon - from a much lower base. 10 years means you are starting with college graduates and building it from no previous experience - or you already have a lot but only are putting minimal budget into improving.
kolinko11 hours ago
Apollo mission was a national mobilisation project that's size happened once/twice in a century. And it still took 10 years. There is no willpower to do that right now in EU.
Right now we, in EU, plan to have first reusable vehicles (Ariane Next) in around 10 years - around 2035. And that is for the first vehicles, not for scaling up the production.
Not true.
The reason why they launched with India is because Russia got sanctioned.
_whiteCaps_18 hours ago
In Canada, the CF is working on rebuilding their expertise in HF radio, as they realized that in case of large scale conflict, satellite systems aren't going to be dependable.
Any serious journalist/aid work efforts should be doing the same. It's too easy for countries to disable terrestrial internet to suppress reporting. And it's too easy for AI to generate believable but false video evidence. But if you can afford to put a man on the ground, he can get information into the next hemisphere with just a sandwich sized radio and a spool of wire -- a fantastic backup against inevitable systemic disruptions.
Joel_Mckay18 hours ago
Canada has a lot of obscure technology that would normally fall under export restriction in the US.
The problem I have with the Canadian business culture was there is zero protection on a global scale for your company, privacy, and or personal safety. =3
spwa418 hours ago
Ever notice just how many countries seem to be pretty convinced war is coming? And don't tell me it's all Trump, at the very least they believe that whoever follows Trump isn't going to be very different. Plus it's mostly EU that's rearming, and surely they aren't afraid they'll be attacked ...
roughly18 hours ago
EU had a reliable military and technological partner in the US until circa 2016, and maintaining that belief became untenable in 2024. The reason EU countries are all of the sudden investing in onshoring critical military capabilities is that until Trump it’s been the policy position of the US to prevent them from doing so by doing it for them, a policy we inaugurated after WW2 and expanded during the Cold War for various reasons that we seem very sure don’t apply anymore.
spwa418 hours ago
I've worked in defense tech. This is true, but it should be described much more as "Europe believed US would save their ass - for free, and did nothing" (with exceptions, like France, and some token efforts within NATO)
The US was not holding back much within NATO.
jltsiren17 hours ago
It's more that most European countries had little reason to spend money on defense. Until recently, Finland and Sweden were small countries close to Russia but outside NATO, and their defense spending was similar to West European NATO members. In other words, nobody saw any real military threats to Western / Northern Europe, and the NATO security guarantees had more political than military value. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the threat environment changed.
I'm less familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe. Many countries joined NATO as quickly as possible, because they understood the Russian doctrine and saw a real threat there. Russia tries to surround itself with puppets / friends / allies, by force if necessary, to avoid having to fight in its own territory. Many East European countries didn't want to be part of that so soon after the fall of communism. But it looks like the idea of being in friendly terms with Russia instead of fully committing to the West never went away.
spwa42 hours ago
You know, we're saying the same thing. The TLDR is that Europe systematically refused to spend even token amounts on defense, despite agreeing to spend more in international treaties (and then cheating on what little spending they do, e.g. "raising a bridge" for a tank to pass under it, as defense spending. Coincidentally doing this saved the maintenance spending that the government had unlawfully delayed. And most countries raised more bridges "for tanks" than they had tanks in the first place, and widened them to boot. This then was the promised defense spending ...)
They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".
The idea of all these is slightly different, but boils down to that because first the cold war ended and then communism "died" with the Soviet union, democracy would just win everywhere without any effort from anyone (or at least, no effort from anyone but the US). Because of this wars and militaries and ... would just end. Because why would you have these between trade-based democracy? Let's just leave some military rescue units in place and get rid of the rest!
In reality it was progress that ended. Or, at least, a lot of technological progress ended with the end of defense spending. For example, the EU (technically France), was the first nation with a starlink-like satellite network. Of course it was version 0.01beta of starlink, not remotely close to the capabilities of the current version, but it did do packet transmission over very long distances). I have helped write software to make it's use more tolerable. They let it wither and die, just like everyone since.
mopsi18 minutes ago
> They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".
Who is this "they"?
* "The end of history" - coined by Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist.
* "The unipolar moment" - coined by Charles Krauthammer, an American political columnist.
* "The peace dividend" - older term, popularized by George HW Bush, an American president.
* "Military-to-civilian conversion" - older term, popularized by Seymour Melman, an American professor of industrial engineering.
yostrovs17 hours ago
Europe wouldn't spend the agreed 2% of GDP on the military. Many presidents for many years tried to make them comply with the agreement, but they just ignored it. It was thought better to spend on the healthcare of the public and mock Americans for not having universal government healthcare.
Many people in countries in Europe, like Spain and Ireland, that effectively don't have militaries, are still laughing and mocking.
roughly16 hours ago
Again, this was a considered policy choice on the part of the United States. Unipolar military supremacy bought us a quiet Europe, a stable and high dollar, and the ability to set the terms on nearly every other negotiation we made with European countries. This was an intentional trade: we will spend on the military so you don’t have to. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, some US policymakers deluded themselves into thinking geopolitics didn’t exist anymore, and so we’ve come to start bitching more about our side of paying that bill, but we bought the American century with military spending.
And, to be clear, the US not having health care is a policy decision on the part of the US, not some lack of funding, as becomes clear when one looks at the expenditure per capita on healthcare in the US compared to other developed countries.
bryanlarsen17 hours ago
Militaries have to always behave like there is a war coming soon. They might not believe that one is coming soon, but they have to behave like it is. If they don't, they won't be prepared when one does happen.
spwa414 hours ago
This is politicians rearming militaries, not militaries rearming themselves. You're right that militaries want to arm, but they've been trying for a very long time, and just been denied, and denied and denied some more.
iSnow14 hours ago
Some EU member states are bordering Russia, of course they are afraid the next war will be on their soil.
cameldrv14 hours ago
I think also underappreciated is that Starlink can be used for purposes other than communication. It's already physically capable of acting as a giant radar, and SpaceX has gotten a missile tracking contract, and the E-7 wedgetail radar plane has been cancelled, which the DoD had publicly said was because it is obsolete given what's possible from space. It could be that they're planning on launching another radar constellation, but my guess is that it's already up there and it's called Starlink.
I think the next big war will involve a kessler syndrome, not because people start firing off anti-satellite weapons (since there's a strong component of MAD in doing that) but because the belligerents will have their own multi-thousand satellite constellations in orbit and they will quit coordinating with one another on collision avoidance.
bryanlarsen17 hours ago
Starlink is redeploying to 300 miles. Many consider Kessler to be impossible at 300 miles. Any unpowered satellite at a 300 mile orbit will deorbit within a couple of months. But a collision means fragments which deorbit faster because they have a higher surface/weight ratio, and because orbit disturbances lower that time considerably. Any single disturbance that raises aphelion lowers perihelion.
rationalist14 hours ago
Would collisions cause debris to be ejected into a higher orbit? Although I guess as long as the debris does not pick up any significant speed boost, its orbit would be elliptical and would just collide with Earth (burn up on re-entry)?
anabab5 hours ago
the 2009 collision was well documented and there are interesting reports online
which has a chart of apogee/perigee of debris. There seem to be examples of debris with _perigee_ above the collision altitude but the vast majority stayed beyond.
mylies4314 hours ago
Wouldn't a explosion give it that energy?
rationalist11 hours ago
I'm not sure every satellite would be exploding in the traditional sense with hot gases expanding.
There would be disentigration when satellite pieces rip through other satellites.
How many satellites carry compressed gas for orbit adjustments?
Maybe there is some compressed gas pushing against liquid fuel and oxidizers, but I don't think the fuel and oxidizers would explode. Shooting tanks of gasoline with regular bullets do not cause explosions like movies would have you believe. Well, maybe pure oxidizers might, would there be enough heat generated by the tank being punctured?
childintime17 hours ago
A smaller player like North Korea and Iran would not have as much to lose. Iran is doing something similar today, suicide bombing everything it can.
These LEO satellites are low enough that I imagine a Kessler situation would self-resolve within a few years.
dopesoap9 hours ago
Oh great more satellites to strip away the ozone layer. I love the military.
Bender18 hours ago
Starlink's first customer was supposed to be the US Army. I am curious what requirements they did not meet.
pantsforbirds16 hours ago
There is a separate entity, StarShield, that the US military uses. I think it's a fully separate set of satellites, but I'm not 100% on that.
kotaKat16 hours ago
IIRC it’s separate sats but same backhaul and they also leverage the same terminals?
ianburrell15 hours ago
Starshield means multiple things, or really it is SpaceX business unit with military. Starshield is the name for US military buying Starlink service. It is also SpaceX building Starlink-based satellites for the military. This doesn't have to be communications, the first ones were missile defense trackers.
I think the custom satellites came first and they rebranded the communications after it.
- The US military (including the Army) showed early interest in Starlink's potential, but this was exploratory rather than as the inaugural customer.
- As early as 2018–2019, SpaceX received funding and contracts (e.g., a $28.7 million award) to study and test military applications of Starlink technology, focusing on things like aircraft connectivity.
- In October 2019, SpaceX's President Gwynne Shotwell publicly mentioned the US Army as a potential future customer for Starlink.
- In May 2020, the US Army signed an R&D/testing agreement with SpaceX to evaluate Starlink's performance for military field use over three years. This was a trial to assess feasibility (e.g., low latency, bandwidth in remote areas), not a full commercial subscription or "first customer" status. Actual field testing and pilot programs by the Army ramped up later (e.g., 2022 in Europe).
- Starshield is SpaceX's dedicated business unit and satellite network designed specifically for government and national security applications, building directly on the technology and infrastructure of the commercial Starlink constellation.
- While Starlink focuses on providing broadband internet to consumers, businesses, and general users worldwide, Starshield adapts and enhances that foundation for more secure, classified, and military-oriented needs. It was publicly unveiled in December 2022, though related work (including contracts) began earlier.
I was probably conflating the exploratory articles with their intent to go that direction.
le-mark13 hours ago
I’ve often thought balloon internet aka googles abandoned project loon would be ideal for this use case. Specifically point to pint microwave to receivers near the front line.
agentultra15 hours ago
I hope this doesn’t continue unabated. LEO pollution of all kinds is liable to get out of hand. From particulates on re-entry combustion, gases from launch rockets, to light pollution from the orbiting swarm… seems like there’s too much traffic up there.
kkfx16 hours ago
People seem to have trouble understanding that orbital space isn't infinite, nor is the manoeuvrability of satellites; or to put it another way, there isn't room for everyone with launch capabilities.
spwa418 hours ago
They have suddenly discovered what engineers have been telling them for about 80 years, and theoreticians have known for 100+ years is actually true: directional beams that cannot realistically be distrupted + satellites out of reach + even if you can you can only take ALL satellites out of orbit (ie. including your own, not just the enemy's). So on future battlefields, everyone will have livestreaming.
Do governments and militaries even believe in the laws of physics? I mean that exactly this was going to happen (undisruptable radio comms + robots, on the battlefield) was perfectly predictable near ~about 1960, and it's an absolute miracle that it took so long to come to pass.
And even that is assuming you're only willing to believe in demonstrations. For physicists it must have been a theoretical certainty that this was coming before WW1 was done.
Joel_Mckay18 hours ago
Starlink direct connect LTE support is simply going to bury any telecom that ignores the technology.
Essentially, anyone with a smart-phone will now be able to text home from anywhere without specialized equipment. Elon can take a victory lap on that product.
Competitors naive enough to underestimate what it took to build Starlink are going to find spectrum auctions already well out of their league. =3
jmyeet17 hours ago
There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US.
An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on platforms run by EU companies subject to EU jurisdiction. Think EU AWS. This is easier said than done.
But this is really a consequence of the current administration having absolutely no idea what they're doing and they're intentionally and unintentionally destroying American soft power.
Another way this can come to pass is that the EU decides that the US is an unreliable partner for their security needs so you will find that various weapons, vehicles, platforms, etc for EU militaries will be supplied by local companies, particularly if the US effectively abandons Ukraine.
Starlink is just another piece of that.
The current administration paints NATO as Europe taking advantage of the US. It could not be more wrong. NATO is a protection racket for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy.
We kind of saw a precursor to all this with GPS. For anyone who has been around long enough, GPS used to be less accurate, deliberately. Why? Because defence (apparently). There was a special signal, Selective Ability ("SA") [1], that military gear could decode to be more accurate.
Fun fact: one of the clues to the first Gulf War was that the military turned off SA on the commercial GPS system because they couldn't procure enough military equipment so had to use civilian gear [2].
I think Europe was slow to learn the lesson of being completely reliant on the US but we did end up with Glonass and Galileo as a result.
To exert the kind of control the US does through tech platfoorms, the US needs to be predictable and reliable can't be too overt with exerting political influence such that American imperial subjects can pretend they're still independent. This administration has shattered that illusion.
You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation. Either NATO is a scam that exploits Europe, or it's a security umbrella that Europe needs.
The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades, outspending the rest of NATO combined, while the majority of NATO members continuously fail to meet their monetary contributions. Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs if the majority of their military capabilities weren't directly tied to the implied threat of the US military interceding.
America's allies haven't necessarily been that reliable for us either.
During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes, and the US could barely get token naval contributions from allies. The US deployed an entire carrier strike group while Norway sent ten staff officers, the Netherlands sent two, and Finland sent two soldiers. France, Italy, and Spain refused to participate; Denmark contributed a single staff officer while being one of the primary beneficiaries of the US naval protection.
With Operation Epic Fury, the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging, and Spain banned the US and then demanded that the American tanker aircraft leave. The UK refused to provide any support until drones hit a UK base in Cyprus, and even then, their mobilization was extremely slow. They weren't even able to deploy their carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, without getting an escort from France. Canada praised the removal of Iran's nuclear capabilities, while providing no support and heavily criticizing the operation itself.
Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them. The unreliability comes from trade policy (which I think is mostly dumb, but is also very much not a one-way action), hesitancy to fund Ukraine at levels that aren't being matched by NATO allies, and Trump's blustering about "adding a 51st state" (no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada).
America will continue to act as a deterrent against military action for her allies, and said allies will still not have to commit to the spending that would be required to field a military that is actually a near-peer to China or Russia.
Having said all of that, I 100% support America's allies building out their own cloud infrastructure and bringing defense R&D and manufacturing back locally. Israel has been moving to cut direct dependency on the US and instead acts as a partner in new joint defense capabilities. I think a similar strategy for Canada and Europe would be best for all.
I'm honestly not sure how practical an EU counterpart to Starshield is, but maybe a partnership with SpaceX would allow them to more realistically diversify while the EU builds up its space capabilities.
bryanlarsen16 hours ago
> no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada
Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.
pantsforbirds16 hours ago
> Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.
I believe those people are being a bit silly, and their position probably comes from a strong dislike of Trump as a person, and not a genuine belief.
Russia annexed a warm-water port and then shortly after attempted to incorporate Ukraine as part of a plan to remake the USSR. The only thing keeping China from taking Taiwan is the United States.
The US has no desire to annex Canada, and it also has no need to. If Canada proposed statehood or even a territory agreement with the US, I genuinely don't think it would even pass a vote.
bryanlarsen16 hours ago
Russia might have the desire to annex Canada, but they don't have the capability.
China might have the capability, but they don't have the desire.
Only US has both the capability and the desire.
pantsforbirds15 hours ago
The US doesn't have a desire to annex Canada; that's very silly. And the reason Russia doesn't have the capability is because of Canada's alliance with the US.
bryanlarsen15 hours ago
A sizable minority of the US population has the desire to annex Canada.
If Canada was not allied with the US, Russia would still not have the capability. And the reason for that is Ukraine.
mna_3 hours ago
You list "operations" that occurred after Trump burned bridges with us. Why would we help you after the insults, political meddling, and tariffs? Now go look at the Iraq War and Afghanistan War, when the US invoked article 5 (the only time it's ever been invoked). In those wars, our men and women died fighting for your country.
jmyeet16 hours ago
> You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation.
Sure I can. I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
> The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades ...
Ah, now I get it. This is Trump administration talking points eg [1]. Those talking points are just a shakedown for American defense contractors. Again, just like a protection racket. Because it is a protection racket.
> Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs
This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs. Even something like the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was only tolerated because of Norway's strategic position in the North Atlantic as a foil against the USSR.
> During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes,
America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
But again we come back to the protection racket. You can't both have a protection racket (and, by extension, defang the militaries of the protectorates) AND expect military help, particularly when the entire thing only happened because of the US material support to Israel's genocide.
> With Operation Epic Fury ...
Operation Epstein Fury FTFY
> ... the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging,
Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran other than the US and Israel. Everybody else, including Europe and other Middle East neighbours, all of whom are American client states, basically, begged the US not to do it. And they did anyway.
So yeah, you're on your own.
> Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them.
Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect any more than Fiji invading the Central African Republic. What are you talking about?
Ignoring the ... less substantive portions of your response
> I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
The US didn't deny Europe the means to defend itself. Europe chose not to build those means because it was cheaper to rely on the US. These were domestic political choices made by governments whose voters preferred social programs over defense budgets. A protection racket requires coercion; what the EU received is much closer to a subsidy.
> This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs.
Can you cite a specific example? The US has broadly pushed for capitalist markets or free trade via policy, but "done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs" is a very strong claim without evidence. Norway's sovereign wealth fund being "tolerated" because of strategic positioning is, at best, a conspiracy theory. There has been some tension over Norway divesting in American companies for political reasons, but that's hardly the claim you've made.
> America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
Rerouting around the Cape added weeks of delay and a high monetary cost to European shipping. Just because European ships could reroute doesn't mean the European economy wasn't significantly impacted. Why did the European trade association publicly beg for more governments to join the operation if the Red Sea shipping was only about Israel?
> You can't both have a protection racket and expect military help
You expect America to adopt a one-way obligation where it provides for the defense of its allies, and receives no help in return? Why wouldn't that deal fall apart?
> Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran
You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran. But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
> Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect
No country would seriously consider it a prospect because the entire might of the US Armed Forces would immediately engage anyone who tried. This despite the fact that Canada has anemic defense spending, a large arctic border with Russia, and strategic assets I'm sure Russia would love to have.
jmyeet13 hours ago
> You expect America to adopt a one-way obligation where it provides for the defense of its allies, and receives no help in return? Why wouldn't that deal fall apart?
If I drop you into a war zone and don't give you a gun, don't you have to kinda do what I say?
> You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran.
There's only one country on Earth that supports attacking Iran and that's Israel [1]. Americans don't support this war [2].
> But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
What targets did Iran strike in those 11 countries? Was it US military bases? Radar installations? There were also hotels housing US military personnel who had abandoned US bases because the US either chose not to defend them or was unable to.
Everybody, except you it seems, understands America is doing this for Israel and the Gulf states are caught up in this because they house American military bases and provide indirect or direct support an unprovoked war. These arne't innocent bystanders.
> There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US.
That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.
frm882 hours ago
because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least.*
Source?
badcarbine16 hours ago
[dead]
Razengan17 hours ago
God can we have an alien invasion already PLEASE
12 000 years of this shit
bluGill17 hours ago
Sorry, relativity is against it. They - if they exist (a debate I'm not touching) - don't even know we are here. Even if they knew we are here they can't get here.
Razengan17 hours ago
Or have a hands-off policy like we do with uncontacted tribes and some protected animal populations etc.
I'll settle for anything to be honest. A sign, a derelict, an artifact, a fossil, an echo.. anything to distract humans from shitting on each other for a little while at least.
bluGill17 hours ago
Again, physics says they can't. relativite and signal degrigation is hard. the energy of a star outside our arm of the galaxy isn't easy to detect, much less any signal of lower power.
johnnyanmac16 hours ago
Our current knowledge of physics says they can't. Who knows what others figured out. We still can't even explain 80% of the mass we measure.
bluGill11 hours ago
we know enough to know what we don't know is constrained by current rules. Newton physics mostly is good enough even when relativity is more correct - likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.
Razengan6 hours ago
> likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.
What? I thought it needs to generalize to/fit into quantum mechanics.
bluGill52 minutes ago
that too. However the well supborted expirements I'm talking about are in relativity, and we don't know how to generallze relativity to quantum mechanics. Thus my claim stops at relativity.
josefritzishere17 hours ago
It's worth pointing out that aside from Elons behavior the real issue with Starlink is that it's insolvent. Starlink does not make money. (The solvency gap is hotly debated) But that fact means it's long-term reliability is in question. No military wants to risk that kind of system dependency.
vardump17 hours ago
Anything to back that up? Starlink is widely considered profitable.
The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's.
(And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are.
The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.
I'd broadly agree that EU is pretty behind the curve. But I think China is probably only ~5 years max behind the curve in terms of Starlink.
But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX.
I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).
China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.
i don't get why more folks aren't just going for the much cheaper option like this https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/
That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight.
There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider.0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
Found those balloons very strange, hope they were up to something nice
Because they will be destroyed immediately
To shoot something down at 70,000 ft (21 km) all you need is a conventional military jet fighter, and a long-range rocket, or even a MiG-31 with a conventional cannon. At best you can make these birds cheaper than the rocket + flight time.
Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, but you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
The f-22 balloon kill was at the same height as the altitude quoted on their website .
Like you said either any fighter jet + missile or an high altitude jet + auto cannon will shoot it down reliably.
This is probably a good solution for redundancy if you already have air superiority.
> you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
You can fire a THAAD at one Starlink satellite, but probably not at 8000 of them.
For comparison we’re currently producing THAAD interceptors at a rate of 96 a year (though Lockheed is aiming to increase it to 400).
Exactly; it's a limited and very expensive capability. Nobody would want to spend it on a $100k stratospheric flying vehicle, if the latter existed. It does not exist though, if you do not count weather balloons.
There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.
>put up those numbers within a few years,
And potentially exceed Starlink cumulative payload a few years after that.
US via SpaceX generates most launches/payload due to reusability PRC built 2x more disposable launch vehicles. PRC figures out disposables and they can operate reusable fleet 2-3x the size of US and simply throw more payload per year and catchup/exceed cumulative SpaceX volume in a few years. A few years after, permanent kgs in space advantage due higher replacement as old hardware deorbits.
Spy satellites you can have way fewer, but for an internet connection you really need Starlink's scale. Otherwise you need full 360 deg view of a horizon (good luck with that on the battlefield), and a much higher power use.
Having said that, I double checked the numbers - it would take ~60 launches at the minimum to replicate Starlink 1.0. This is how many launches China does per year right now. So it is doable indeed for them, just absurdly expensive - $10-$30B, but they can afford that.
EU on the other hand - no way. We're doing 5 launches a year with Arianne, due to incompetent management over the last decade. Unless China or US allow us to use their infrastructure, we have no way of doing all this.
Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go".
suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.
So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.
And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.
China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things. They are not even hiding it anymore. It's almost comical how much they copied SpaceX. And I'd be surprised if they hadn't supply-chained themselves into some level of access in all the big aerospace corpos by now. But Europe? Developing this kind of stuff from scratch in a few years without an unregulated messy startup ecosystem and no army of state sponsored hackers? No chance.
whats the issue with that? US just cloned the Iranian drone.... all countries do this
Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.
If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".
Bloomberg's podcast "The Big Take" has been running an interesting series on Chinese industrial espionage called "The Sixth Bureau". Here's a link to the Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38L5UzLwt-s&list=PLe4PRejZgr...
Be serious, you don't really need a citation to know the CCP is using industrial espionage to advance their defense industry.
Sure, they're trying. But there's no evidence they've succeeded in stealing anything other than open source intelligence from SpaceX.
There's a lot of open source intelligence about SpaceX rocket designs available.
Be serious, do you think defense industry normally respects other nations' industrial secrets?
> China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.
They're even espionaging from themselves in the future!
Dude, have you ever _been_ in China? They don't need espionage, they're now way ahead of the world in technology, except in a few areas like biotech research and semiconductor manufacturing.
For the last decade, China has been having more engineers in _training_ than the total number of engineers in the US. Sure, the quality of Chinese universities is not that great, but the sheer number of them has its own power.
I strongly suggest to anyone who thinks this isn't true to go to Shenzhen and then SF.
One feels like the future. The other feels like you will get shot.
Nonexistent relevance to rockets.
Rockets are notoriously complicated, though. Only a few nations even managed to get to the orbit, and not for a lack of trying.
SpaceX is a rare bird - a space startup that actually achieved not just spaceflight, but (so far only partial) reusability of launchers. Most space startups died long before that, including Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. Given that they are gone, we don't think of them often, but the total graveyard of defunct space startups is quite sizeable.
Russia seems to be slowly losing their space capabilities. The EU still does not have a human-rated launcher. These aren't small entities either.
Getting to space is a dangerous business with extremely thin security margins, where previous experience matters a lot.
I think China will eventually have reusable rockets, but it will take some time.
China has at least two startups that launched rockets into space. Zhuque-3 launch even almost landed a booster.
It's the second-mover advantage. Once you know that something is possible, you can often avoid exploring all the dead ends.
>China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.
Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.
In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."
Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.
Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.
Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased. The fact they had to be stolen does not give them more weight. There is a lot of bias in US governmental opinion on french technology that such a small country cannot be so advanced without stealing; opinion which started with the french nuclear and space program. My opinion on those discourses about France, China or the USSR in the past are just mostly propaganda from the US MIC to ensure continued funding.
>Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased.
As opposed to...?
The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
> but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
How many starlink clones are there really customers for?
Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet.
Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do.
Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.
All the airlines, all the trains, and other government-supported entities may have a strategic interest to use a local version of Starlink. But everyone else? I don't think anyone will buy a service that will be 10x more expensive, 10x slower and 10x more energy hungry than Starlink -- this first mover advantage may be hard to beat.
Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)
But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.
China is a full blown superpower and it should surprise no one when they catch up to or surpass the West in technical feats.
How did Starlink get so far ahead of everyone that everyone else is 20 years behind?
We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive.
Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.
SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.
Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
If you are good at making businesses then why not make more?
I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?
India's ISRO already competes with SpaceX for these launches ( ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... ), despite not having any reusable launch vehicles (reason - it's in the top 5 in space technology and just cheaper - Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo ). Once it masters reusable launch vehicle technologies, it'll be hard to compete with ISRO on commercial launches.
36 compared to 10000. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude. It's like a corner store trying to compete with Walmart.
They have a list of 434 foreign satellites launched so far as of January 2026 on their website:
https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html
The point was that you don't need a reusable launch vehicle if a single use launcher is just as cheap.
I'm wondering if we will see a resurgence in direct to geostationary, It seems like it should be a lot easier to cover the planet when you only need a few satellites.
Bandwidth, input latency (250ms absolute minimum), energy use and antenna size (mattering for mobility and military). I don't think there is a way for geo to compete.
The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea.
Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.
China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.
The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.
The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.
More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].
China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.
And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.
I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".
[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi...
[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...
The Soviet Atomic Project was helped by starting early and capturing massive amounts of fissile material at the end of WWII.
British scientists helped some.
But the spies at Los Alamos were giving updates on US progress, not delivering secret technology.
> many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years.
Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
Yes, but how they got it is irrelevant. They got it, and that's what matters.
China can (and does) do the same for current tech today, through whatever means.
(Also, GP's comment directly said what you said; not sure what your comment adds to the discussion.)
Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.
At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.
Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.
In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.
The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.
In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.
also, the knowledge about how a nuclear bomb works wasn't a secret. The way to produce one was the hard part to figure out. Without the espionage, a industrialised country like the USSR would have figured out how to produce an atomic bomb eventually.
Some people will give it to china too. We have even caught a few (in other industries).
> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.
Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.
How Industrial Espionage Started America's Cotton Revolution
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...
All of that, and the funny thing is /that is the easy part/. Moving payloads to space is just incredibly expensive, but not fundamentally hard in the same way that post-launch coordination of satellite constellations and RF tuning to support things like mobile connectivity are (I can connect to Starlink satellites from my iPhone through T-Mobile).
Connecting to a cell phone and/or selling a phased array antenna that can track an object travelling 17,000 mph for $300 is crazy hard.
But a military is going to be fine with an antenna that costs $3000.
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Can you explain what makes Falcon9 / Starship special (or needed) to launch these satellites? China, India, EU, Japan etc. all have the capability to launch satellites. So why is a Falcon9 / Starship a particular requirement?
Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive.
0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
Another major detail is that SpaceX is simply burning enormous amounts of money on this.
Starlink's revenue is comparable to the ESA's entire 5 billion euro budget, and it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service. (And kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits)
The chief problem "stopping" other countries from developing a starlink competitor is that starlink simply doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction. Fiber runs are expensive but not that expensive.
> it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service
Starlink was profitable in 2024 [1] and should be materially profitable once V3 goes up.
> kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits
This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue. Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence. And the propellant depots SpaceX is building for NASA tie in neatly if the chips stablise enough to permit longer-lasting birds.
> doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction
Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-much-does-starlink-make-this-...
> Starlink was profitable in 2024
Those are revenue figures.
> This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue.
That it affects everyone just makes the problem worse. If China or the EU does commit to a starlink competitor, there's even more crowding in orbit. Even more collision avoidance required.
> Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence
That's the point. These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter.
The constellation is both expensive to build and to maintain. That makes it a lot of trouble compared to running a bunch of fiber once and having only occasional maintenance trouble when some idiot drags a backhoe through it.
> Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
The military interest is real, but it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it. Higher latency more conventional satellite internet will have significant cost savings in comparison.
> Those are revenue figures
And also net income.
> just makes the problem worse
Did you skip the part where it’s not a serious cost issue? None of these birds are even close to being propellant restricted.
> These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter
Because they’re being intentionally deorbited to make room for better birds. They don’t have to be deorbited as quickly as they are. But overwhelming demand makes it a profitable bet.
> it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it
$70mm per year for 22 birds [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-space-force-contract
What would the cost be to deny these orbital altitudes?
Incalculable.
The cost isn't in paying someone to not use the orbit, it's that the busier a part of space gets, the more expensive it becomes to do collision avoidance and station keeping.
What makes this impossible to calculate is that there's an unknown exponential involved. The more satellites, the more collisions that need avoiding. And the higher the chance that one avoidance will create new future collisions.
At some point the space is simply so busy that collisions can no longer be avoided.
> What makes this impossible to calculate
It’s really not impossible to calculate, particularly if you’re trying to cause damage.
The answer is it’s cheaper to shoot down individual satellites than try to create a localized cascade. Kessler cascades propagate too slowly, and degrade too quickly in low orbits, to be useful as a military tactic. In high orbit one could feasibly e.g. deny use of a geostationary band. But again, it’s cheaper to just shoot down each satellite.
From the PCMag article:
> For example, although the Starlink subsidiary reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2024, the same financial statement doesn’t account for the costs of launching and maintaining a fleet of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites.
???
Later: “The document also shows the Starlink subsidiary registered a net income of only $72.7 million for 2024. The year prior, the subsidiary incurred a net loss of $30.7 million. However, the financial statement notes the subsidiary purchased nearly $2.3 billion in Starlink hardware and services from the SpaceX parent last year.”
Those figures, to my understanding, include cost of services and launch in COGS.
starlink has some travel niches where it makes sense. However not many cross the ocean. military where you can't trust the nearby infrastructure is the other big one. Disaster recovery where the local system is not working isn't big enough to fund anything though it will use whatever they can get.
The cruise ship industry is $78B of revenue. He airline industry is $840B of revenue. Between the two, I think Starlink has enough customers crossing the ocean to be profitable, given how hard they drive down costs.
Because the Chinese govt doesn’t have money to burn…
Has to be the cost. A reusable launch vehicle is such a ridiculously better value proposition that it creates a discrete evolution. Some things just arent feasible to do without them
Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.
> Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.
But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?
>But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability?
No. The German army wants a constellation of initially 40, and later just over 100 satellites. They do not want or need to replicate the massive Starlink numbers.
The numbers just don't add up there. With just 40-100 satellites they need to be GEO, and this means crappy transfers, big lags (200-300 absolute minimum, more 500ms), and most importantly - big, power hungry antennas.
It's a PR project to calm people down, not a real solution.
It's more tempo, less cost, resuable has faster turn around time, so more launch per unit of time. Long March 5 is ~$3000/kg, or ballpark enough to F9/kg, but disposables can't launch every few days.
Reusability. Even if money were not an issue, other nations need to build a new rocket for every launch, and it's extremely hard/impossible to catch up.
None of those countries (well probably except China) have any significant launch capacity to deploy constellations
They can build it in a few years though. It takes money and can be done overnight but there is nothing about that that costs 10 years. 10 years got to the moon - from a much lower base. 10 years means you are starting with college graduates and building it from no previous experience - or you already have a lot but only are putting minimal budget into improving.
Apollo mission was a national mobilisation project that's size happened once/twice in a century. And it still took 10 years. There is no willpower to do that right now in EU.
Right now we, in EU, plan to have first reusable vehicles (Ariane Next) in around 10 years - around 2035. And that is for the first vehicles, not for scaling up the production.
India is already one of the cheapest service providers for such launches - ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... (They are ofcourse working to create a reusable launch vehicle too).
Not true. The reason why they launched with India is because Russia got sanctioned.
In Canada, the CF is working on rebuilding their expertise in HF radio, as they realized that in case of large scale conflict, satellite systems aren't going to be dependable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_Affiliate_Radi...
Any serious journalist/aid work efforts should be doing the same. It's too easy for countries to disable terrestrial internet to suppress reporting. And it's too easy for AI to generate believable but false video evidence. But if you can afford to put a man on the ground, he can get information into the next hemisphere with just a sandwich sized radio and a spool of wire -- a fantastic backup against inevitable systemic disruptions.
Canada has a lot of obscure technology that would normally fall under export restriction in the US.
The problem I have with the Canadian business culture was there is zero protection on a global scale for your company, privacy, and or personal safety. =3
Ever notice just how many countries seem to be pretty convinced war is coming? And don't tell me it's all Trump, at the very least they believe that whoever follows Trump isn't going to be very different. Plus it's mostly EU that's rearming, and surely they aren't afraid they'll be attacked ...
EU had a reliable military and technological partner in the US until circa 2016, and maintaining that belief became untenable in 2024. The reason EU countries are all of the sudden investing in onshoring critical military capabilities is that until Trump it’s been the policy position of the US to prevent them from doing so by doing it for them, a policy we inaugurated after WW2 and expanded during the Cold War for various reasons that we seem very sure don’t apply anymore.
I've worked in defense tech. This is true, but it should be described much more as "Europe believed US would save their ass - for free, and did nothing" (with exceptions, like France, and some token efforts within NATO) The US was not holding back much within NATO.
It's more that most European countries had little reason to spend money on defense. Until recently, Finland and Sweden were small countries close to Russia but outside NATO, and their defense spending was similar to West European NATO members. In other words, nobody saw any real military threats to Western / Northern Europe, and the NATO security guarantees had more political than military value. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the threat environment changed.
I'm less familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe. Many countries joined NATO as quickly as possible, because they understood the Russian doctrine and saw a real threat there. Russia tries to surround itself with puppets / friends / allies, by force if necessary, to avoid having to fight in its own territory. Many East European countries didn't want to be part of that so soon after the fall of communism. But it looks like the idea of being in friendly terms with Russia instead of fully committing to the West never went away.
You know, we're saying the same thing. The TLDR is that Europe systematically refused to spend even token amounts on defense, despite agreeing to spend more in international treaties (and then cheating on what little spending they do, e.g. "raising a bridge" for a tank to pass under it, as defense spending. Coincidentally doing this saved the maintenance spending that the government had unlawfully delayed. And most countries raised more bridges "for tanks" than they had tanks in the first place, and widened them to boot. This then was the promised defense spending ...)
They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".
The idea of all these is slightly different, but boils down to that because first the cold war ended and then communism "died" with the Soviet union, democracy would just win everywhere without any effort from anyone (or at least, no effort from anyone but the US). Because of this wars and militaries and ... would just end. Because why would you have these between trade-based democracy? Let's just leave some military rescue units in place and get rid of the rest!
In reality it was progress that ended. Or, at least, a lot of technological progress ended with the end of defense spending. For example, the EU (technically France), was the first nation with a starlink-like satellite network. Of course it was version 0.01beta of starlink, not remotely close to the capabilities of the current version, but it did do packet transmission over very long distances). I have helped write software to make it's use more tolerable. They let it wither and die, just like everyone since.
Europe wouldn't spend the agreed 2% of GDP on the military. Many presidents for many years tried to make them comply with the agreement, but they just ignored it. It was thought better to spend on the healthcare of the public and mock Americans for not having universal government healthcare. Many people in countries in Europe, like Spain and Ireland, that effectively don't have militaries, are still laughing and mocking.
Again, this was a considered policy choice on the part of the United States. Unipolar military supremacy bought us a quiet Europe, a stable and high dollar, and the ability to set the terms on nearly every other negotiation we made with European countries. This was an intentional trade: we will spend on the military so you don’t have to. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, some US policymakers deluded themselves into thinking geopolitics didn’t exist anymore, and so we’ve come to start bitching more about our side of paying that bill, but we bought the American century with military spending.
And, to be clear, the US not having health care is a policy decision on the part of the US, not some lack of funding, as becomes clear when one looks at the expenditure per capita on healthcare in the US compared to other developed countries.
Militaries have to always behave like there is a war coming soon. They might not believe that one is coming soon, but they have to behave like it is. If they don't, they won't be prepared when one does happen.
This is politicians rearming militaries, not militaries rearming themselves. You're right that militaries want to arm, but they've been trying for a very long time, and just been denied, and denied and denied some more.
Some EU member states are bordering Russia, of course they are afraid the next war will be on their soil.
I think also underappreciated is that Starlink can be used for purposes other than communication. It's already physically capable of acting as a giant radar, and SpaceX has gotten a missile tracking contract, and the E-7 wedgetail radar plane has been cancelled, which the DoD had publicly said was because it is obsolete given what's possible from space. It could be that they're planning on launching another radar constellation, but my guess is that it's already up there and it's called Starlink.
Starlink has become quite massive since v1.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10283270
I think the next big war will involve a kessler syndrome, not because people start firing off anti-satellite weapons (since there's a strong component of MAD in doing that) but because the belligerents will have their own multi-thousand satellite constellations in orbit and they will quit coordinating with one another on collision avoidance.
Starlink is redeploying to 300 miles. Many consider Kessler to be impossible at 300 miles. Any unpowered satellite at a 300 mile orbit will deorbit within a couple of months. But a collision means fragments which deorbit faster because they have a higher surface/weight ratio, and because orbit disturbances lower that time considerably. Any single disturbance that raises aphelion lowers perihelion.
Would collisions cause debris to be ejected into a higher orbit? Although I guess as long as the debris does not pick up any significant speed boost, its orbit would be elliptical and would just collide with Earth (burn up on re-entry)?
the 2009 collision was well documented and there are interesting reports online
e.g. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100002023/downloads/20...
which has a chart of apogee/perigee of debris. There seem to be examples of debris with _perigee_ above the collision altitude but the vast majority stayed beyond.
Wouldn't a explosion give it that energy?
I'm not sure every satellite would be exploding in the traditional sense with hot gases expanding.
There would be disentigration when satellite pieces rip through other satellites.
How many satellites carry compressed gas for orbit adjustments?
Maybe there is some compressed gas pushing against liquid fuel and oxidizers, but I don't think the fuel and oxidizers would explode. Shooting tanks of gasoline with regular bullets do not cause explosions like movies would have you believe. Well, maybe pure oxidizers might, would there be enough heat generated by the tank being punctured?
A smaller player like North Korea and Iran would not have as much to lose. Iran is doing something similar today, suicide bombing everything it can.
Iran also has a space program with Satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Space_Agency
These LEO satellites are low enough that I imagine a Kessler situation would self-resolve within a few years.
Oh great more satellites to strip away the ozone layer. I love the military.
Starlink's first customer was supposed to be the US Army. I am curious what requirements they did not meet.
There is a separate entity, StarShield, that the US military uses. I think it's a fully separate set of satellites, but I'm not 100% on that.
IIRC it’s separate sats but same backhaul and they also leverage the same terminals?
Starshield means multiple things, or really it is SpaceX business unit with military. Starshield is the name for US military buying Starlink service. It is also SpaceX building Starlink-based satellites for the military. This doesn't have to be communications, the first ones were missile defense trackers.
I think the custom satellites came first and they rebranded the communications after it.
That seems entirely plausible. I based my comment on one of Elon's tweets (xeets?) about it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2028261823678759335?s=20
You could be right. I got this from Grok:
- The US military (including the Army) showed early interest in Starlink's potential, but this was exploratory rather than as the inaugural customer.
- As early as 2018–2019, SpaceX received funding and contracts (e.g., a $28.7 million award) to study and test military applications of Starlink technology, focusing on things like aircraft connectivity.
- In October 2019, SpaceX's President Gwynne Shotwell publicly mentioned the US Army as a potential future customer for Starlink.
- In May 2020, the US Army signed an R&D/testing agreement with SpaceX to evaluate Starlink's performance for military field use over three years. This was a trial to assess feasibility (e.g., low latency, bandwidth in remote areas), not a full commercial subscription or "first customer" status. Actual field testing and pilot programs by the Army ramped up later (e.g., 2022 in Europe).
- Starshield is SpaceX's dedicated business unit and satellite network designed specifically for government and national security applications, building directly on the technology and infrastructure of the commercial Starlink constellation.
- While Starlink focuses on providing broadband internet to consumers, businesses, and general users worldwide, Starshield adapts and enhances that foundation for more secure, classified, and military-oriented needs. It was publicly unveiled in December 2022, though related work (including contracts) began earlier.
I was probably conflating the exploratory articles with their intent to go that direction.
I’ve often thought balloon internet aka googles abandoned project loon would be ideal for this use case. Specifically point to pint microwave to receivers near the front line.
I hope this doesn’t continue unabated. LEO pollution of all kinds is liable to get out of hand. From particulates on re-entry combustion, gases from launch rockets, to light pollution from the orbiting swarm… seems like there’s too much traffic up there.
People seem to have trouble understanding that orbital space isn't infinite, nor is the manoeuvrability of satellites; or to put it another way, there isn't room for everyone with launch capabilities.
They have suddenly discovered what engineers have been telling them for about 80 years, and theoreticians have known for 100+ years is actually true: directional beams that cannot realistically be distrupted + satellites out of reach + even if you can you can only take ALL satellites out of orbit (ie. including your own, not just the enemy's). So on future battlefields, everyone will have livestreaming.
Do governments and militaries even believe in the laws of physics? I mean that exactly this was going to happen (undisruptable radio comms + robots, on the battlefield) was perfectly predictable near ~about 1960, and it's an absolute miracle that it took so long to come to pass.
And even that is assuming you're only willing to believe in demonstrations. For physicists it must have been a theoretical certainty that this was coming before WW1 was done.
Starlink direct connect LTE support is simply going to bury any telecom that ignores the technology.
Essentially, anyone with a smart-phone will now be able to text home from anywhere without specialized equipment. Elon can take a victory lap on that product.
Competitors naive enough to underestimate what it took to build Starlink are going to find spectrum auctions already well out of their league. =3
There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US.
An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on platforms run by EU companies subject to EU jurisdiction. Think EU AWS. This is easier said than done.
But this is really a consequence of the current administration having absolutely no idea what they're doing and they're intentionally and unintentionally destroying American soft power.
Another way this can come to pass is that the EU decides that the US is an unreliable partner for their security needs so you will find that various weapons, vehicles, platforms, etc for EU militaries will be supplied by local companies, particularly if the US effectively abandons Ukraine.
Starlink is just another piece of that.
The current administration paints NATO as Europe taking advantage of the US. It could not be more wrong. NATO is a protection racket for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy.
We kind of saw a precursor to all this with GPS. For anyone who has been around long enough, GPS used to be less accurate, deliberately. Why? Because defence (apparently). There was a special signal, Selective Ability ("SA") [1], that military gear could decode to be more accurate.
Fun fact: one of the clues to the first Gulf War was that the military turned off SA on the commercial GPS system because they couldn't procure enough military equipment so had to use civilian gear [2].
I think Europe was slow to learn the lesson of being completely reliant on the US but we did end up with Glonass and Galileo as a result.
To exert the kind of control the US does through tech platfoorms, the US needs to be predictable and reliable can't be too overt with exerting political influence such that American imperial subjects can pretend they're still independent. This administration has shattered that illusion.
[1]: https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability
[2]: https://www.spirent.com/blogs/selective-availability-a-bad-m...
You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation. Either NATO is a scam that exploits Europe, or it's a security umbrella that Europe needs.
The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades, outspending the rest of NATO combined, while the majority of NATO members continuously fail to meet their monetary contributions. Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs if the majority of their military capabilities weren't directly tied to the implied threat of the US military interceding.
America's allies haven't necessarily been that reliable for us either.
During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes, and the US could barely get token naval contributions from allies. The US deployed an entire carrier strike group while Norway sent ten staff officers, the Netherlands sent two, and Finland sent two soldiers. France, Italy, and Spain refused to participate; Denmark contributed a single staff officer while being one of the primary beneficiaries of the US naval protection.
With Operation Epic Fury, the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging, and Spain banned the US and then demanded that the American tanker aircraft leave. The UK refused to provide any support until drones hit a UK base in Cyprus, and even then, their mobilization was extremely slow. They weren't even able to deploy their carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, without getting an escort from France. Canada praised the removal of Iran's nuclear capabilities, while providing no support and heavily criticizing the operation itself.
Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them. The unreliability comes from trade policy (which I think is mostly dumb, but is also very much not a one-way action), hesitancy to fund Ukraine at levels that aren't being matched by NATO allies, and Trump's blustering about "adding a 51st state" (no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada).
America will continue to act as a deterrent against military action for her allies, and said allies will still not have to commit to the spending that would be required to field a military that is actually a near-peer to China or Russia.
Having said all of that, I 100% support America's allies building out their own cloud infrastructure and bringing defense R&D and manufacturing back locally. Israel has been moving to cut direct dependency on the US and instead acts as a partner in new joint defense capabilities. I think a similar strategy for Canada and Europe would be best for all.
I'm honestly not sure how practical an EU counterpart to Starshield is, but maybe a partnership with SpaceX would allow them to more realistically diversify while the EU builds up its space capabilities.
> no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada
Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.
> Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.
I believe those people are being a bit silly, and their position probably comes from a strong dislike of Trump as a person, and not a genuine belief.
Russia annexed a warm-water port and then shortly after attempted to incorporate Ukraine as part of a plan to remake the USSR. The only thing keeping China from taking Taiwan is the United States.
The US has no desire to annex Canada, and it also has no need to. If Canada proposed statehood or even a territory agreement with the US, I genuinely don't think it would even pass a vote.
Russia might have the desire to annex Canada, but they don't have the capability.
China might have the capability, but they don't have the desire.
Only US has both the capability and the desire.
The US doesn't have a desire to annex Canada; that's very silly. And the reason Russia doesn't have the capability is because of Canada's alliance with the US.
A sizable minority of the US population has the desire to annex Canada.
If Canada was not allied with the US, Russia would still not have the capability. And the reason for that is Ukraine.
You list "operations" that occurred after Trump burned bridges with us. Why would we help you after the insults, political meddling, and tariffs? Now go look at the Iraq War and Afghanistan War, when the US invoked article 5 (the only time it's ever been invoked). In those wars, our men and women died fighting for your country.
> You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation.
Sure I can. I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
> The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades ...
Ah, now I get it. This is Trump administration talking points eg [1]. Those talking points are just a shakedown for American defense contractors. Again, just like a protection racket. Because it is a protection racket.
> Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs
This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs. Even something like the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was only tolerated because of Norway's strategic position in the North Atlantic as a foil against the USSR.
> During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes,
America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
But again we come back to the protection racket. You can't both have a protection racket (and, by extension, defang the militaries of the protectorates) AND expect military help, particularly when the entire thing only happened because of the US material support to Israel's genocide.
> With Operation Epic Fury ...
Operation Epstein Fury FTFY
> ... the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging,
Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran other than the US and Israel. Everybody else, including Europe and other Middle East neighbours, all of whom are American client states, basically, begged the US not to do it. And they did anyway.
So yeah, you're on your own.
> Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them.
Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect any more than Fiji invading the Central African Republic. What are you talking about?
[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/us-slams-czech-republic-over...
Ignoring the ... less substantive portions of your response
> I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
The US didn't deny Europe the means to defend itself. Europe chose not to build those means because it was cheaper to rely on the US. These were domestic political choices made by governments whose voters preferred social programs over defense budgets. A protection racket requires coercion; what the EU received is much closer to a subsidy.
> This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs.
Can you cite a specific example? The US has broadly pushed for capitalist markets or free trade via policy, but "done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs" is a very strong claim without evidence. Norway's sovereign wealth fund being "tolerated" because of strategic positioning is, at best, a conspiracy theory. There has been some tension over Norway divesting in American companies for political reasons, but that's hardly the claim you've made.
> America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
Rerouting around the Cape added weeks of delay and a high monetary cost to European shipping. Just because European ships could reroute doesn't mean the European economy wasn't significantly impacted. Why did the European trade association publicly beg for more governments to join the operation if the Red Sea shipping was only about Israel?
> You can't both have a protection racket and expect military help
You expect America to adopt a one-way obligation where it provides for the defense of its allies, and receives no help in return? Why wouldn't that deal fall apart?
> Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran
You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran. But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
> Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect
No country would seriously consider it a prospect because the entire might of the US Armed Forces would immediately engage anyone who tried. This despite the fact that Canada has anemic defense spending, a large arctic border with Russia, and strategic assets I'm sure Russia would love to have.
> You expect America to adopt a one-way obligation where it provides for the defense of its allies, and receives no help in return? Why wouldn't that deal fall apart?
If I drop you into a war zone and don't give you a gun, don't you have to kinda do what I say?
> You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran.
There's only one country on Earth that supports attacking Iran and that's Israel [1]. Americans don't support this war [2].
> But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
What targets did Iran strike in those 11 countries? Was it US military bases? Radar installations? There were also hotels housing US military personnel who had abandoned US bases because the US either chose not to defend them or was unable to.
Everybody, except you it seems, understands America is doing this for Israel and the Gulf states are caught up in this because they house American military bases and provide indirect or direct support an unprovoked war. These arne't innocent bystanders.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/13/success-uncertain-b...
[2]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54284-americans-think-war-...
> There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US.
That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.
because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least.*
Source?
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God can we have an alien invasion already PLEASE
12 000 years of this shit
Sorry, relativity is against it. They - if they exist (a debate I'm not touching) - don't even know we are here. Even if they knew we are here they can't get here.
Or have a hands-off policy like we do with uncontacted tribes and some protected animal populations etc.
I'll settle for anything to be honest. A sign, a derelict, an artifact, a fossil, an echo.. anything to distract humans from shitting on each other for a little while at least.
Again, physics says they can't. relativite and signal degrigation is hard. the energy of a star outside our arm of the galaxy isn't easy to detect, much less any signal of lower power.
Our current knowledge of physics says they can't. Who knows what others figured out. We still can't even explain 80% of the mass we measure.
we know enough to know what we don't know is constrained by current rules. Newton physics mostly is good enough even when relativity is more correct - likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.
> likewise whatever we don't know needs to generalize to relativity.
What? I thought it needs to generalize to/fit into quantum mechanics.
that too. However the well supborted expirements I'm talking about are in relativity, and we don't know how to generallze relativity to quantum mechanics. Thus my claim stops at relativity.
It's worth pointing out that aside from Elons behavior the real issue with Starlink is that it's insolvent. Starlink does not make money. (The solvency gap is hotly debated) But that fact means it's long-term reliability is in question. No military wants to risk that kind of system dependency.
Anything to back that up? Starlink is widely considered profitable.