The tech billionaire and Trump adviser “donated” Starlink service to the White House. The move resembles a previous maneuver by Microsoft, which used “free” trials to lock in costly upgrades across the federal government.
After all of the sketchy contracts that musk seems to be getting under this regime, the next administration should nationalize SpaceX. With their corrupt self dealing, perhaps give him a dollar or so for it.
So there were some military contracts that were just awarded.
54 missions total:
SpaceX: 28 missions, $5.9 B = $210.7 M per launch
ULA: 19 missions, $5.4 B = $284 M per launch
BO: 7 missions, $2.4 B = $342.9 M per launch
SpaceX did get the most money, but they were also the cheapest provider due to their reusable 1st stages.
Just with those 9 extra launches over ULA SpaceX saves the US government and taxpayers 668 million dollars.
If SpaceX didn’t exist, it would have been
82 billion more but actually worse since the other providers can’t supply that much and wouldn’t have had as much competitive incentive. Just look at BO the next one which was almost 60m more than ULA. It easily could have ballooned to 4b more adding a 3rd even more expensive option.Doesn’t seem so self dealing to me, they were able to bid lower and win more, and saved, (I’m assuming you given your
rageupset) a shit load of money.This is what SpaceX has been doing for years, well before he got in bed with Trump.
remember the time that Leon Skum turned starlink off for Ukraine just before a Russian attack?
he can never again be trusted. especially when it comes to safety and security
That‘s how silicon valley has been operating for longer than I live. You bet that‘s what‘s happening as has been happened a million times.
the difference is microsoft’s products actually worked.
Mostly. Office 365 has pretty frequent outages.
In a different time, and a different age, somewhere around year 2000. The Phantom Menace, The Matrix, Peter Jackson abusing LOTR fans. PlayStation before it got boring, Web before it got stupid, Sun Microsystems before it got dead, construction and aerospace and software design alike being done by actually competent people.
Microsoft did the barely necessary to be taken seriously.
The difference here is that felon charges the government a fuckload to use Starlink already. Trial was years ago.
Not really though. Starlinkn doesn’t scale up well. And it only makes sense in niche circumstances. And it is vulnerable. You could easily imagine a future president just taking it over for national safety reasons.
Elonia has proven such concerns already with actions.
There’s a very good premium episode of This Machine Kills from a week+ ago which touches on this topic. It’s is a conversation with Katie Wells and totally worth a listen.
“There’s nothing more expensive than a free gift.” - Michel de Montaigne
