[New York Times] Elon Musk’s Unmatched Power in the Stars
[New York Times] Elon Musk’s Unmatched Power in the Stars
The tech billionaire has become the dominant power in satellite internet technology. The ways he is wielding that influence are raising global alarms.
Soft paywall, more of a minor speedbump.
This is hard to dismiss as a mere "hit piece". The main point is some people expressing concern that one erratic person, sometimes seemingly pro-Russian, has so much control over important infrastructure. The main example is Ukraine, but Taiwan is mentioned too. Despite measured negativity, it is also mentioned how Starlink has helped Ukraine, with a positive comment from Ukraine's digital minister.
It also has some nice animations and pictures (though the Starlink interconnect diagram looks hopelessly wrong).
I’m surprised the Starlink satellites don’t have cameras and sell realtime imaging as a product. It seems like a natural way for SpaceX to increase revenue and become indispensable to governments around the world. Or maybe they do and we just don’t know about it.
I can only speculate on reasons. Cameras would add mass and energy consumption, and they're already launching a lot fewer satellites per launch as it is. I suspect that good imaging requires a lot of specialist knowledge and experience, like how to build lenses and sensors, and what frequencies of light to look at (visible? infrared? radar?), and how to do destriping and other image cleanup. There are already other companies with satellites in low orbits with frequent imaging and sales channels to customers, so I don't think SpaceX would have that much of competitive edge (except having more satellites). Some Earth imaging is provided by governments for free, says Wikipedia's Satellite imagery, including Landsat, MODIS, and ASTER for the U.S. alone. There are lots of private providers with high resolution, like down to 41 cm, so they probably have big imaging systems on their satellites.
As I understand it, the super high resolution satellites have to be super large because you run into optical limits on the lens structure. The Maxar 30cm resolution ones are the size of a small school bus.
While there's probably a market for imagery that's low resolution and ultra-fast refresh, it'd still add mass and complicate things and starlink is already a complicated project.
I half expect the next move will be space-based datacenters. I can imagine twitter's new owner seeing the benefits in hosting entirely outside the jurisdiction of any government.
I used to like elon but after watching him handle Twitter he seems to be getting more and more unstable. Every headline I see about him I think this guy is terminally online.
Howard Hughes syndrome? Becoming rich enough to involve the news reading public in your mania...
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Concern troll