Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck says Elon Musk is "just a guy," but he is concerned about his apparent disregard for safety.
Video / NZ Herald
Telcos in New Zealand and Australia have been flocking to SpaceX’s Starlink service as a quick and easy way to provide 100 per cent nationwide coverage, even in difficult-to-reach areas.
Well, full coverage is to arrive some time in late 2024, or maybe the year after that. Who knows, andit won’t be The Full Monty mobile service offering either.
You can see why Starlink is attractive to telcos. Someone else builds and manages most of the tricky and expensive techie bits, and then you just buy capacity on the network.
A dream come true? Not so fast.
Starlink undoubtedly works as advertised, but did our satellite-besotted telcos think to cover off SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s obnoxious political leanings in the contracts that were signed?
To recap, Musk is currently under heavy fire after the revelation in his biography that he denied Starlink service coverage in Russia-occupied Crimea.
A Ukrainian serviceman shouts to paramedics in front of bodies, as people were killed after a Russian rocket attack on the food market in the city centre of Kostiantynivka, Ukraine, on September 6. Photo / Evgeniy Maloletka, AP
Ukraine tried to launch a remotely controlled, through Starlink, drone boat attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet which was at port in Sevastopol in Crimea, which could have been a decisive strike.
The satellite coverage failed and with it, the attack on the Black Sea fleet. Russia’s warships were able to continue to fire missiles at civilian targets in Ukraine, killing children and innocent people.
At that stage, it becomes neither here nor there if Musk as he says never promised Starlink coverage over Crimea, and refused to extend it to there, or simply switched it off to thwart the drone-boat attacks on the Russian Black Sea fleet by Ukraine.
Musk took Russia’s side in the conflict, and nothing much he says from now on will change that perception.
Sure, Musk “resolved” his Ukraine issue by creating a military-use equivalent to Starlink called Starshield under United States government control, but the damage was already done - to Ukraine, in a horrific way.
Now there are hashtags like #ElonWarCriminal trending on Twitter, that formerly useful social network turned into a vile cesspit of extreme rightwingers, cookers and antisemites and which doesn’t seem to have the technical ability to suppress the increasingly loud jeering of Musk’s indefensible actions.
Bizarrely, the source and creator of the furore is Musk himself who has tweeted what he’d done, trying to present excuses like not wanting to be involved in the Ukraine-Russia war, or fearing it would escalate if the Sevastopol attack had succeeded.
He even pointed to Starlink’s terms and conditions prohibiting the service being used for military purposes, which contrasted with Russia firing cruise missiles into apartment buildings across Ukraine is just stunningly tone deaf.
Perhaps as a telling sign of the capricious billionaire’s gigantic arrogance, Musk gave his biographer access to confidential messages between him and the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who pleaded to have the Starlink service activated.
Fedorov reportedly didn’t know Musk had shared the messages with Walter Isaacson, the well known American columnist and biographer, until the story broke worldwide. The Ukrainian official was shocked to see them reported in Western media.
Musk reportedly gave his biographer access to confidential messages between him and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Photo / Andrew Kravchenko, Bloomberg via Getty Images
There is no doubt Starlink is a technological feat that solves a bundle of problems higher orbit satellites have. Starlink needs very large constellations of small and inexpensive low-Earth orbit satellites to provide uninterrupted coverage.
The low orbit means much better performance than geostationary satellites tens of thousands of kilometres in space provide. And users get high data speeds with low transmission delays for streaming video, good gaming, clear-sounding phone calls and responsive web applications.
Small, portable Starlink terminals for users instead of large, stationary dishes that high-in-the sky satellite service offerings require are another distinct advantage.
In fact, they are the exact qualities that both civilian and military customers desire. This includes ANZ telcos.
Starlink isn’t perfect, especially for hilly and forested areas where the signal is blocked.
Local support is pretty much how good you are at using a search engine, and Starlink isn’t part of the telco dispute resolution process.
However, the service is relatively affordable for what you get and growing in popularity around the world.
So much so that Starlink has run into capacity constraints with network congestion as a result.
This is fixable to a degree by hoisting more satellites into orbit to bump up capacity. It’s not clear how big Starlink constellations can grow, however, especially with competitors like Amazon planning to launch low-Earth orbit satellites as well.
From an environmental point of view, launching more and more satellites into orbit is ugly. While the satellites are relatively small and cheap, they don’t last long and have to be deorbited and replaced as they fail.
Then there’s the SpaceX owner himself, who’s now meddling in serious geopolitical issues.
Perhaps it’s time to look again at completing the Ultra-Fast Broadband with as close to 100 per cent nationwide coverage as possible, rather than being at the whim and mercy of a capricious billionaire whose connection with New Zealand is his pal Peter Thiel?
Juha Saarinen is a technology columnist for the New Zealand Herald. He covers technology issues in depth and joined the Herald in 2014.
