So here we have an eccentric billionaire with several conflicts of interest playing a vital role in a major terrestrial war with no obvious end in sight. And the funny thing is that this might be just a dummy run for the next geopolitical conflict zone – space – and in particular the zone of low-Earth orbit, in which Musk already owns more than half of all the operational satellites up there and has plans to increase his stake ten-fold.
When Elon Musk’s ‘flying sofas’ give Ukraine internet access, we can’t sit comfortably
The Starlink system has been vital to Zelenskiy’s forces, but it can’t be good to have a volatile billionaire playing a crucial role in a major European war
In February 2022, as Russian tanks rumbled into Ukraine, a cyber-attack took down the satellite system run by Viasat that was providing high-speed communications for Ukrainian military forces, rendering them instantly blind, deaf and dumb. With his forces knocked offline, the Ukrainian digital minister sent a plea to an American billionaire, one Elon Musk, for help. Within hours, Musk responded that his Starlink system had been activated in Ukraine. Days later Starlink terminals began to arrive.
Pause for context update. Musk is the founder and Supreme Leader of SpaceX, an innovative firm that has found a way of building reusable heavy rockets that can launch cargo into Earth orbit and safely return ready to be used again, which is a very big deal, and probably why Nasa has become one of its regular customers. In 2019, SpaceX started launching smallish – “sofa-sized”, according to the New York Times – communications satellites into low-Earth orbit with the aim of eventually providing a global mobile phone system called Starlink. Thus far, it has mostly been providing internet connectivity to 60 countries via about 4,500 satellites, but it’s said that Musk plans to have 42,000 of them up there eventually, which is an awful lot of flying sofas.
The service is available in the UK, by the way. So if you live in a remote part of the Highlands and have given up hope of ever getting a terrestrial broadband connection from BT, Musk could come to your aid. The necessary terminal costs £499 and you can get 100Mbps download speeds with low latency for £75 a month. Or so the website says.
- “Without Starlink, we cannot fly, we cannot communicate,” one Ukrainian commander told the New York Times.
- “The huge number of lives that Starlink has helped save can be measured in the thousands,” Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister, told the paper.
- “This is one of the fundamental components of our success.”
- And the funny thing is that this might be just a dummy run for the next geopolitical conflict zone – space – and in particular the zone of low-Earth orbit, in which Musk already owns more than half of all the operational satellites up there and has plans to increase his stake ten-fold.
- Which makes one wonder if he’s been reading Robert Heinlein’s observation that “Once you’re in Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.”
- Including, perhaps, out of your depth.
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