The article phrases this weirdly, but they are talking about the 40,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine that Eutelsat is trying to match, not about LEO satellites.
Eutelsat's oneweb subsidary currently has something over 500 satellites in LEO orbit. I think starlink has over 7000. I don't know much about all of this, but I assume if it just about covering ukraine they won't have to match the 7000 starlink satellites. The whole situation might open a opportunity for oneweb to catch up with starlink.
The CEO is blatantly lying to you at a level that I would call securities fraud.
First off the basic facts are wrong, SpaceX has just over 7000 satellites, not 40,000.
Secondly it is physically impossible to launch even 7000 satellites within a few months, even for SpaceX. The satellites do not exist and would need to be built which takes over a year at a minimum. Europe launches rockets into space a couple times a year and you can only launch around a dozen or two satellites per launch. That means just to reach 7000 satellites, assuming 20 per launch and a generous 10 launches per year is over 3.5 years to launch all those satellites.
Edit: The problem appears to be with the low quality terminology.
It is using the word "satellites" to refer to ground terminals. Ground terminals are not "satellites".
It is still incorrect however as Eutelsat doesn't have the bandwidth required to serve what SpaceX is providing to Ukraine. They can provide a backup, but it will be significantly degraded versus what Ukraine already uses.
I'm not sure. It might just be related to the US (and by extension American companies) being seen as less reliable in light of recent political developments.
Of course. The US "negotiators" for the so called mineral deal trying fleece Ukraine, a state fighting valiantly for it's freedom and continued existence, out of 400 billion dollars in protection payments, had it as piece of the coercion to threaten cutting Starlink access. In context, that's literally an act of war.
Nobody wants to be addicted to this and vulnerable to being coerced and manipulated by threats of having service revoked at catastrophic times unless they do exactly whatever Musk and his puppetmasters say.
Cutting off Starlink was never threatened on Ukraine access. SpaceX, Musk and Ukraine themselves (both Zelensky and other Ukrainian government officials) have all denied it.
Unpopular opinion: How else should Ukraine pay for the military assistance it's receiving? That's not cheap. The US, NATO and EU taxpayers don't owe Ukraine anything for free since there's no contractual obligation to do so. Money doesn't just rain from the sky, the US and EU taxpayer are ultimately bankrolling this.
Sharing profits from your natural resources in exchange for military resources seems like a great deal to me. Nothing in life is ever free, someone is always paying for it, usually through taxes. If you think this logic is flawed, argument me why.
Speaking as a European now. I give Ukraine money via taxes and occasional donations. Ukraine repays me many times over by their blood, sweat, and tears to keep Europe free and democratic. This is an easy and cheap trade for me, and I could/should probably pay them even more for what they give in return.
They're fighting to keeping themselves free. My country's and NATO's defense is what's keeping me free. Any additional assistance from my tax money to Ukraine (which I agree with) is entirely optional and should be repaid.
I think you do not understand the framework you are living under and keeping you free. After WW2 and the formation of the UN we got a new world order, the whole Pax Americana is based on this order where collectively the world decided that invasions and annexation of territory is something we should all band together to fight against.
They're fighting to uphold this order, to show that it's not simply yet-another-treaty that a warring nation can break and take territory from another country with few consequences, where allying to countries doing that will be met with absolute resistance to hold to this ideal.
That's what we are paying for in Europe, if that doesn't have any value to you and you prefer to see it as a purely transactional interaction then go ahead to hold this opinion, other people believe in something further than simply tit-for-tat transactions. Morally speaking is a better way of living.
Why are you making baseless accusations in bad faith? Reductionist accusatory comments like yours similar to George Bush's infamous "if you're not with us then you're against us", are what makes honest discourse impossible.
Just because I don't want my tax money going to aid another country's war any further, doesn't mean I want Russia to win. I want Ukraine to win, just not with my tax money, especially knowing how corrupt Ukraine is and how luxury car sales have boomed in Ukraine in 2023-2025, maybe they should look internally for war revenue instead. I'm already doing my part housing Ukrainian refugees in my country on my tax Euros, even though a lot of them are military aged males and come with cars worth more than I make in a year.
> Just because I don't want my tax money going to aid another country's war any further, doesn't mean I want Russia to win. I want Ukraine to win, just not with my tax money, especially knowing how corrupt Ukraine is and how luxury car sales have boomed in Ukraine in 2023-2025
I'd like some trustworthy sources on the luxury car sales since whatever search I do return results from absolutely sketchy websites with similar naming to real news outlets ("globaleuronews.com" instead of the real "euronews.com", "news-pravda.com" [which is very much a Russian propaganda site]), or stuff named using extremely generic terms (such as "automotivelogistics.media", "good-times-invest.com", etc.).
I believe you were victim of propaganda but would like to check what sources you have to challenge my assumption.
Which such blatant accusations it seems you've already made up your mind, and it would be a waste of time to entertain this further and go nowhere. I have already expressed all my arguments above. If you don't believe them, that's fine with me, I don't have to make you change your mind, I'm OK with you expressing a different opinion than mine, I'm not OK with you making accusations about me when you don't know me and expecting me to disprove your accusations as if I owe you that.
I explicitly asked for the sources because I could not find a reliable one and said "I believed" in the sense that it's a belief since I couldn't confirm it until you shared how you got that information. I was trying to be helpful, no need to be antagonising.
Please, share your sources and we can further the discussion, no need for the defensiveness.
Edit: also even if it's the case you have fallen victim to propaganda in no way I put any sense of judgment in that, anyone can be victim of disinformation, what is a failure of character is digging deeper into that belief after being shown one was bamboozled. Up to that point anyone is just another victim.
> I have already expressed all my arguments above.
I do not understand why questioning where your information might have come from triggered a whole meltdown, your argument might be based in disinformation (that Ukrainians have bought luxury cars and your taxes are being wasted on that) and if that's the case then your argument has no basis to it. I would like more information...
> Are you concerned more tax Euros may be spent if Russia wins?
I'm fairly sure, if Russia wins less tax Euros will be spent. That's because the European economies will be doing worse, and less GDP also means lower taxes.
Some people only see today, others look forward. When people say Ukraine is fighting for European democracy and freedom, it's about what happens after Ukraine if they fall.
When your bank balance is zero or negative and rent and bills are due, do you care about your own today or do you care about the tomorrow of another country hundreds/thousands of KM away?
Because that's how most people think in private. Only the privileged with a warm home and a full stomach can afford to think about other countries. Everyone is rooting for Ukraine if you ask them, but not many are willing to sacrifice their own welfare for it.
Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
See what Ukraine is doing right now, and add more weapons and money.
They won't 'defeat' Russia in the sense of Ukrainian soldiers marching down Red Square in Moscow. But they will make Russia lose the war.
> Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
Because we, no matter how arrogant, cannot predict the future. Putin could have a heart attack. He might be assassinated by an insider. The soldiers may even decide the war isn't worth fighting.
Putin is not a God, he is a man. The circumstances of that are extremely unpredictable.
Small animals can defeat large, powerful predators simply by being too prickly to bother with.
Russia is almost certainly not going to deploy nukes over Ukraine. The cost/benefit is just not there: they won't help take or hold territory, and they invite strategic retaliation from more actors than just Ukraine.
So. Putin's political position is not unassailable (remember how touch-and-go things were with Prigozhin? How hardly anyone stood up to him?). If holding Ukraine becomes genuinely untenable, he'll have to make some excuse to leave, or fall. It's even possible he'll die of old age or pneumonia and be replaced by a more reasonable psychopath.
Invokin NATO article 5 requiries an unanimous vote. There is a high risk that the US will vote against invoking 5 in case if Putin will invade a NATO member in Europe: 1. Trump is cozying up to Putin and hard to predict how far he would go. 2. Trump may times said that Europe's security is not his problem.
Trump literally refused to say the USA would intervene if Poland or Lithuania were invaded... He just said Poles are nice people and Lithuanians are in a tough spot.
Assuming one isn't interested in their fight for freedom: they are paying for this in blood. Ukraine is dismantling Europe's only local threat, and the oldest geopolitical rival of the US. They have already destroyed most of Russia's Cold War arsenal of conventional weapons. If we put this in a bit of a cynical way, the situation as it stands is an extremely cheap deal both for Europe and the US.
If one isn't interested in their fight then cheap=/= maximally profitable. Foot in door by luring proxies to trade blood for $. Once proxies dependant and fully sunk cost, enshitification commences. If one is cynical, RU as future competition is done, extraction of UKR can begin. Dead horse still worth something as glue.
Whenever I read theories like this, I am saddened that we don't live in such a utopia where eg the US (and Russia etc) have perhaps some weird and questionable goals, but go about achieving them rationally and efficiently.
> How else should Ukraine pay for the military assistance it's receiving?
Boots on the ground. They're fighting an excellent proxy war against Russia on behalf of NATO, severely stretching NATO's largest geopolitical ally, at the extreme cost of young Ukrainian men ending up in the ground. Sweden and Finland have been brought into the alliance, very valuable lessons have been learned, exceptional military intelligence gained, for a bit of cash and essentially no NATO causalities. By the end of the war, an exhausted Russia will have almost zero capacity to mount a conventional attack against any NATO member for a decade.
In short, why should Ukraine be paying with treasure when they're already paying so much with blood?
For the same reasons the US entered WWI and WWII - the US economy has gained more than any other from a stable rule based world. The US paid to rebuild Europe after WWII and that act did nothing but pay dividends.
Thought of another way, if those minerals in the ground are useful resources for the US, it's more in the US benefit to pay now to stabilize the situation so they can later buy the minerals from a happy and productive population - as the amount of trade going the other way will probably be vastly greater.
Same is true of Russia, if it was possible to undo the fuckup there after the fall of the USSR. It could be a huge economy. It's not a zero sum game, if Ukraine and Russia have bigger free economies then everyone else gets bigger too.
That's the idea anyway, it's worked before. It maybe didn't work with China because we forgot the free part. But Ukraine was already heading in the right direction with democracy and fighting corruption - which is pretty much the reason for the war.
Historical fact: US population also didn't want to enter WW2 because they saw the war as Europe's problem, just like how I see this war mostly as Ukraine's problem. The US only entered WW2 after Pearl Harbor.
Your analogy means you would only like to enter war after Russia bombs somewhere else in Europe? When it becomes inevitable to go to war and we have to pay orders of magnitude more in economical terms, and an immeasurable price in lives?
Sorry, I didn't expect that an obvious historical fact (which I believe is common knowledge) was being used just as trivia.
It's the second time I interact with you today, it's the second time you become extremely defensive and reactionary. Do you behave like that in real life? Rather exhausting.
On that note, I would invite you to read my reply to you earlier today [0], might help to put down the armor a little, and perhaps think about engaging with more curiosity and less aggressiveness out of the bat, not everyone is out to get you.
The problem is that stopping support now after US congress and president had vowed to support Ukraine "for as long as it takes" is going to be far more expensive.
Small things like Tesla sales crumbling, which means less tax revenue.
The US had 320B USD in arms sales 2024. Usually about 60% of that stays in country as tax revenue. Europe is upping its spending massively but a big part is developing production capacity for the most complex and expensive stuff that will be in direct competition to the US. Never mind such BS like the US vetoing Grippen to sell their planes to Colombia because of the use of US engines.
All in all the US has proven itself to be an unreliable ally. This lack of trust will result in additional costs and lost opportunities in the next decades.
>How else should Ukraine pay for the military assistance it's receiving?... Sharing profits from your natural resources in exchange for military resources seems like a great deal to me.
Sorry, where did you get that this deal is for _FUTURE_ military resources??? Seriously - where did you hear that?
The only way the Trump administration characterized the mineral deal is as repayment for PAST military aid, even though it was perfectly understood that those were GRANTS (i.e. there were no terms attached to the military aid). The Trump administration also accused Ukraine of cheating/tricking the US/Biden administration to get this military aid ... and also of starting the war ... and also of being a dictatorship ... and also of being an obstacle to peace.
Trump administration also made it clear that the mineral deal is NOT a security guarantee, nor is the mineral deal payment for FUTURE military aid.
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It is a common pattern that whenever Trump says X, apologists, like you, come out of the woodwork and say something like "Well, what he really meant to say is Y".
Yes, it would be different if the mineral deal was payment for future military aid .. but it isn't - so why are you saying that?
It's a shame that asking an honest question is getting downvoted. It's like downvoting learning. I'll answer from my perspective, before you're greyed out to oblivion.
My understanding is that for the USA, sending weapons isn't the same as giving away money. The military industrial complex gains from more weapons needing to be built, for one thing.
For the free world at large, it's beneficial to oppose Putin via a proxy war for obvious reasons.
We're all getting something out of this, and I'd say if it's in return for sending weapons, that's a good deal (for us!).
> Killing Russians is basically one of the best things a government can spend money on.
I wouldn't be so cynical. Dismantling the power of the Russian government: yes. But that doesn't necessarily have to involve offing Russian men. They are also people, and their lives are worth something.
> Killing Russians is basically one of the best things a government can spend money on.
In that sense the Russians have managed to get a long history of governments with fantastic spending policy. They are even spending other nations' money to get the job done!
Real shame about the aim and timing though. Even with that volume, they barely get any of the worst ones, and when occasionally they do purge it's always after purgee has done plenty of damage and maybe even started considering repenting a little bit...
And, like, particularly companies _owned by US government officials_. I can't see how any country could be particularly comfortable with this for official use.
From my experience, it depends. Some European brands and some US brands build goods which you can leave for future generations.
US brands are more visible since they have not been affected by WWII too much, and Europeans had to rebuild things, but there are brands and tools which I enjoy using, and some of these tools are pass-downs.
Yes. That's OP is true. Let me add some more things which are not used anywhere on the world.
- Bosch Automotive: Probably powers at least half of the cars one way or other in the US.
- Chrysler's MultiJet Diesel, actually invented twice by Fiat, and led to Fiat's absorption of Chrysler since they have failed their "usage" obligations.
- Siemens' industrial automation, probably powers half of the world's advanced PLC requirements.
- ASML: Building the machines almost everyone uses to create the ICs you're using to read this very comment.
- NXP Semiconductor: A spin-off of Philips of Netherlands.
- Wera: Purveyor of premium hand tools. Not made for heavy abuse, but used by companies like Apple (a small startup in US which has more money than a couple countries combined) in their factories and service centers as official tools supplier (Plus Japanese Camera Manufacturers Group use them to make JIS approved screwdrivers).
- Rolls Royce Aerospace: They just make puny airplane engines which most of the world uses.
- Airbus: Makes planes which doesn't have doors which disassemble mid-flight.
Dunno. This is what I came up in five minutes. They're irrelevant, indeed.
> Europe was also totally without any launch capacity for quite a while since Ariane 6 didn't work out great.
As someone else mentioned, Vega C was operational during this period, but also, define 'quite a while'. Last Ariane 5 launch was in mid 2023, First Ariane 6 launch was in mid 2024.
Eutelsat is a commercial company, of course, and doesn't have to use Arianespace/ESA stuff; they have in the past used Ariane 4 and 5, Proton, Falcon 9, and various Atlases and Deltas, and are a fairly obvious candidate customer for Blue Origin.
Cost is very much relevant since money doesn't fall from the sky. Someone is still paying for it.
@lm28469 I'll edit and answer for you here instead of an additional reply: Falling from the ECB's printers is not free money from "the sky", it's money created by additional inflation, which is a tax on all of us, especially on the poor, which in turn leads to a lower standard of living, desperation and votes towards political extremism. How can people be this economically illiterate is beyond me. You can't complain people are voting right when you're making them poorer through your economic policies. For every action there is a reaction.
There's a heck of a lot of good people doing great work at SpaceX and Tesla, and all the lashing out at Elon's companies is mostly going to hurt them, not the man himself.
I don't think he is "evil" as in "wanting to make people suffer", just going through a peculiar period of his life and because of the power he has he is able to influence the lives of others more than earlier when he was just an interesting and at times funny Internet phenomenon.
Apart from that, we do see the world change in front of our eyes so when your ex-allies are becoming unstable it's natural you are evaluating your options, it's not specifically about Musk in this case.
> He was such a legend on Komarr. And yet when I finally met him, he seemed just an ordinary fellow. [...] He was not... what I expected."
> Not a monster? Laisa was a polite Komarran; you had to give her credit for that. "Real monsters," observed Miles, answering her thought instead of her words, "often are just ordinary men. Only more confused in their thinking. [...]"
> "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real."
Even if they somehow are compatible in principle (frequencies etc) it would be like developing a new product, but one where you will never get any new hardware, and without any documentation on said hardware. I.e. a nightmare.
It makes sense what you say, though for some hellish physical working conditions it might have been worth to pay the engineering nightmare for a while.
Do you think it's achievable for basic functionality in time to be meaningful, if it were for a few months that would otherwise have outage / shortage i a lot of places?
Unlikely to be easily possible. The chips inside the Starlink terminal will not work with Eutelsat or any other network than Starlink. In theory Eutelsat and Starlink might be able to work together to make them compatible, but it would be difficult and complex. It is easier just to distribute new equipment.
The title is intellectually dishonest. Eutelsat is not in any way a rival to Starlink. They are not at all playing in the same league.
Starlink has over 7000 satellites. Eutelsat has several hundred they got from their purchase of OneWeb and isn't increasing them by much.
The reason why Eutelsat stock is increasing is because investors think that Europe is going to go nuts with "buy European" in the military space which would allow them to sell their services at inflated pricing as it's no longer a fair market between OneWeb and Starlink.
> The reason why Eutelsat stock is increasing is because investors think that Europe is going to go nuts with "buy European" in the military space which would allow them to sell their services at inflated pricing as it's no longer a fair market between OneWeb and Starlink.
I cannot follow. Where did this happen? Isn't it the US that is not offering Starlink anymore? And did Eutelsat increase prices or did their competition change TOS? This is a form of victim blaming.
The US has not stopped providing Starlink in any way. This is entirely based around fear that the US government may suddenly stop supplying Ukraine with Starlink connectivity. Also Eutelsat is not a victim. My point is that they're capitalizing on Europe's fears.
(And there is no historic precedent for Starlink to stop serving anyone either as they have never done so in the past.)
There hasn't been any threats to stop providing Ukraine with Starlink either. (There was a single news media source claiming this, but it was denied by SpaceX, Musk, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials.)
3. Trump is pressuring Ukraine by taking away any US support. He paused military equipment delivery that was already approved, and now cut intelligence sharing.
It doesn't seem that far fetched that they would use cutting Starlink in these negotiations.
A counter argument could be that Elon still wants to get revenue for this (I think Poland is paying for it).
In my opinion, Starlink is a threat to European security, in an ever growing hostile US. Remember that Trump explicitly didn't exclude taking EU territory by force.
Even if Starlink isn't cut, they would most likely use it in their negotiations for Ukraine to "peacefully" surrender (partly) to Russia.
Wow, that's faster than I would have expected. Good thing in this case!