• Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    To put into scale how wrong you are about taking out a satellite, the last satellite the US shot down was in 2008, and it took a specially modified 9 million dollar missile to shoot it down. A Starlink satellite with launch costs included is just under 2 million dollars. Not only is it technologically difficult to take out a satellite, but it’s much more costly to shoot them down than it is to put them up.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost

    It’s not a trivial thing to take out a single satellite, let alone a whole constellation of satellites.

    You literally could not be more wrong about this.

    …Russia bombed their power plants, all the cabling, and it was a literal war zone.

    Here you are acknowledge that ground-based systems are very vulnerable to attack. Guess what still works in Ukraine right now (or at least when Elon allows it to work). You got it. Starlink.

    How about another comparison. Starlink has a full project estimated cost of ~10 billion dollars, that’s with launches and satellites. The estimated cost to rebuild Ukraine’s telecom network is 4.7 billion dollars, and that is just for the damaged infrastructure in Ukraine. Starlink has already generated 72 million in profit (not revenue, but profit!)

    We gave telecom providers 200 billion in tax breaks to build a fiber network in the US, and they didn’t even finish the job. 20x what Starlink’s estimated cost is.

    Serioualy, the scale of how wrong you are about all of this is staggering.

    • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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      7 hours ago

      Here you are acknowledge that ground-based systems are very vulnerable to attack.

      Which includes the ground stations that Starlink uses.

      • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        Still works over Ukraine somehow… Maybe that fancy satellite network just carries it to the next available ground station?