How about no
How about we take down every starlink satellite so NASA can operate unabated, and our telescopes aren't interfered with.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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SpaceX can fuck right off with that plan.
Fuck off and give me the fiber that was promised and paid for decades ago.
If Intel has to give the US government 5%, Starlink should have to give back 25%.
American taxpayers paid for both Starlink and Space X. Overpaid, actually, that's why he's the richest man in the world. None of his businesses are profitable, he just skims hundreds of billions off the enormous government grants he gets.
Since we overpaid for that tech, we should just confiscate it from him. He can be thankful that he doesn't go to prison for misappropriating government funds.
He can keep Tesla. It'll be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.
Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.
Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.
"Oligarch mouthpiece demands diverting of major public funds to oligarchs instead"
Story of America, really.
Remember how Elon Musk conned Vegas out of millions with the hyperloop.
Satellite internet is not the future; it's cell internet.
Conned them and then Nashville, I think it is, is also paying him for it. True stupid, the US isn’t a country of learners, it seems.
Fuck. That.
I got a better idea: a civil war against oligarchs
No fucking thanks. Gigabit+ fiber > Nazi-ass satellite internet that doesn’t have even remotely near the needed bandwidth for actual dense population centers.
Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.
They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.
The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.
I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.
Cory Doctorow described it as anti-futuristic tech. Where fiber networks get better, faster, and cheaper the denser they get, wireless satellite will get slower and less reliable the more people share that spectrum.
I have a better idea: don’t do that.
Going from the most secure, hard wired formats to a con man's satellites would be a fatal error. Any sort of military conflict and the network is all down, atleast broadband keeps secure networks intact.
Just have a look at what's going on in ukraine. Once they started using drones, the drone were attacked through their wireless connections. Now they trail fiber optic cables for control. What does that say about the relative reliability and security?
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You cannot actually serve hundreds of millions in the US even if you invested the 75B it would cost to give every household a satellite it just can't support the bandwidth.
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