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.

You haven’t put your eggs in any basket.

$38 billion in government funding. huh.

what reality do you live in?

Stuff it tankie. Nobody gives a shit.

And the international customers, what about them? The ground stations, POPs, and terminals in other countries, hmmmm?

And the international customers, what about them? The ground stations, POPs, and terminals in other countries, hmmmm?

No, they're fine remaining as private companies. If the government wants to better control over the companies then they can pass regulation and if they want total control then they can build their own alternatives. Nationalization of companies should never be used as a political weapon.

Those are different to taking over private companies. The government should, imo, compete against private enterprise in those areas, in turn bringing prices down and making it better for the taxpayers.

NASA is government owned. Look at the state of it. Do you think the government taking over SpaceX would really be a good thing?

Tankies live in alternate reality where they think that nationalization is extremely common and is a magical solution to all of societies problems... even though this view is entirely delusional.

For example, only 3 countries have nationalized the entire ISP industry, and those are Cuba, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. All three of which are horrid tyrannical dictatorships with horrible internet. We should NOT be like them. Even when it comes to health insurance, except for 3 countries I just mentioned, every single country allows private health insurance, even if their system is public. Clearly nationalization is not what you think it is.

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.

Yep that's my point. Not everything needs be a business.

You don’t nationalise a company (SpaceX) just because the existing government owned company (NASA) is significantly worse. What do you think would happen to SpaceX if they did nationalise it? Lol. It would go to hell, like NASA.

The government should not be responsible for things like this. The government should provide services for necessities for human rights and general standards of living, but they shouldn’t take over successful companies just because they couldn’t do it themselves.

That would literally be the worse thing that could happen with regards to them, because they only exist and thrived because they are private enterprise. If the government were capable of doing what those companies do and doing it well, SpaceX and Starlink wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Can you even imagine just how much money would be wasted and misused and unaccounted for, while nothing actually got done?

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea is delusional

Fair enough, you got me there. Didn't realize there was such a population of internet craving people in what's supposed to be one of the last relatively untouched areas of nature on the planet.

That being the case though, why didn't this all happen in 2013, when O3b launched to specifically solve this problem for them? It's still running, by the way, after several rounds of upgrades, and significantly more stable than Starlink with their dinky little 5 year disposables. Microsoft, Honeywell and Amazon all use it. But the original and ongoing intent of the project was explicitly to bring internet access to all otherwise unreachable areas, such as islands, deep in Africa, and the open ocean.

I don't oppose Brazilian villagers having internet if they want it, but the situation in which it arrived to them feels suspect to me. I have no proof that Starlink actively went out and pushed internet service onto them like a drug dealer but it would not be out of character for Musk and his subordinates to do so, and that just feels bad.

Regardless there is already an existing solution to this. If you want internet in the Amazon you can use satellite internet. It does not have to be Starlink. If you want good internet, maybe don't live in the Amazon. People in general should probably be leaving that place alone. The article you linked even talks about one of the village leaders splitting his time between the village and the city. We can try and run a fiber line to Manaus and/or Porto Velho and that should be able to serve a reasonably large enough area around them, but even if that fails there are already other solutions.

I love how you completely ignore how starlink is only viable for ukraine because the US military industrial complex.

There was satellite internet before Starlink and Starlink should be banned for all the 5ghz interference it creates

American exceptionalism definitely sucks, but this is not an example of American exceptionalism. The source is an article from an American magazine, published for an American audience.

Ruthless "dictators" who saved a billion lives through the elimination of Nazism, the industrial development of the second most populous country on Earth and half the continent of Europe, and through the refusal to participate in the exploitation of the global south.

Communists saved Europe from Nazism and you will never forgive them for it

........ only after they were betrayed by Hitler after they allied themselves with the Nazis to invade Poland.

And then raped and killed civilians in the countries they "liberated" by forcing millions of people from their Eastern European vasal states to die to protect the Russians.

Then replaced Nazism with a slightly different authoritarian system that opresses it's people and performs ethnic cleansings, but has a red and gold cost of paint.

And then also exploited the global south, but just weren't as good at it as the west, and filtered even more of what was exploited up the chain to the party leaders.

And tried to make up for that lack in ability to exploit the global south by exploring Eastern Europe.

Communist we're allied with the nazis at the start of the war and as someone who's great grandmother fled Poland to the UK to avoid being rapes and murdered by the red army, I will never forgive them for that.

Isn't that part of the grift?

At the time it looked like one of the main reasons to launch Starlink was to provide SpaceX with a new market, much larger than the usual space launching stuff. Also this meant Felon could get subsidies through 2 different companies.