SpaceX's largest customer is the US government; once that relationship has been repaired I'm ambivalent about private/public ownership.

HMmmmM?

because let's be honest, without tons of US GOV'T SUPPORT, SpaceX wouldn't have ever been able to provide all those POPs, terminals and services. Funny thing that.

The precedent that will set and the implications

and what precedent is there for dealing with the executive of your country's entire space launch infrastructure when they become dependent on horse drugs?

No really, what's the precedent here, I want to know. Because if we set a precedent by ignoring it until the problem is impossible to ignore, that's gonna be a far more expensive fix.

So yeah, yeah we should consider this very strongly.

Tankies

boy howdy you've got the entire strawman army mustered in this thread.

That would also make latency worse and the signal weaker.

Would the small ground starlink dish be able to reach higher orbits? I guess if the satellite is going to stay up longer you could afford to make it's antennas a bit bigger to mitigate that.

isn't it amazing how much private companies can do when given hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from the federal teat?

wow. that private enterprise just rocketing up out of the atmosphere by yanking on it's bootstraps so hard.

just, you know, after a few more hundred million, burp. ahem. just a few more.

remember the halcyon days when NASA could do something and the president might not like it, but they were all FUCKING ADULTS and the grift was well distributed amongst the congresscreatures, so it never devolved into adolescent twitter whining?

goddamn those were better than whatever this shit is

By your logic spaceX should stop taking gov $ then.

Just because something is private doesn't mean they should get public funding.

Well you wouldn't want to put them much higher, but if you raised their orbit by say 40%, they'd be getting significantly less atmospheric drag. It could probably extend their life by 15 years. And yeah, they'll be 40% further away, so slightly more latency. Perhaps going from 70 ms ping to 100 ms ping. Not awesome, but definitely not a huge problem.

Who's buying satellites?

SpaceX is putting up satellites for SpaceX, they're the manufacturer and operator...

It's definitely in their best interest to keep them working as long as possible.

That said, they're high end communications devices, very fancy routers essentially. And like all computer technology, these things become obsolete quickly. So even if they could last 20 years, you wouldn't want them even 10 years from now. 100 GB/s speeds might be great now, but 10 years down the road 10 TB/s could be the norm, so at that point why are you still trying to provide service with ancient hardware 100x slower than it should be.

I'm sorry... dick rocket? Your issue with SpaceX is that the rockets are.... rocket shaped?

Like everything else notwithstanding, physics dictates the shapes of these things. That is why they all look rather... dick-ish

NASA was pretty damn efficient with the budget they used to have.

The wasteful NASA storyline is tiresome and busted.

I'm not sure what isn't viable about it, I mean it's demonstrably viable, it's working now.

It's kind og funnier if you don't get it.

Yes im coming out against dick rockets here.

DOD is also responsible for what they accept.

Nasa with less risk aversion. If a Nasa rocket blows up that's big news. If a Space X rocket blows up, that's a Tuesday.

And why do you think they have zero budget? The government lol. You think if the same government takes over SpaceX they'll all of a sudden give them the huge budget that they need?

You haven't put your eggs in any basket. SpaceX are a private company. The government owns NASA, they can pour money into that and hire people to do what SpaceX are doing. Hell, they could poach people from SpaceX!

Why do you think they haven't already done this? Because the government don't care about it. If someone else will do it they can use them to provide their services via ludicrously expensive contracts, and give them massive subsidies, as is the Government way.

The government taking over SpaceX is not something anyone with even half a brain should be wanting. It makes ZERO sense. It doesn't matter who owns it privately, just not the government because they will fuck it up and/or neglect it - like they did with NASA and most of their other projects.

It's not up to SpaceX to stop taking government handouts - it's up to the government to stop giving handouts.

I agree with you - they shouldn't get public funding. IMO anything the government funds they should own instead, but this doesn't mean they should take ownership of the things that they fund - they should instead use that funding to start their own taxpayer owned competitor.

I'm completely against government handouts for private business and NGOs btw.

And isn't it amazing how little government entities can do despite being given the same or more taxpayer dollars from the federal teat?

Private enterprise gets shit done because if they don't they go out of business and people lose their jobs, money, and livelihood. Government departments don't get shit done because they'll all keep their jobs and their pensions and their benefits no matter what. Again - NASA vs SpaceX.