Starlink is pretty amazing tech which can be used for both good and evil - from enabling reliable communication in disaster zones to letting civilians browse social media from remote locations to communicating with weapons of war.

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hinkley an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Every product has the same adoption curve. Early customers pay a premium which pays for building the factories, not just the product. By the time everyone is using them the prices have gotten low enough that the price is informed by supply rather than demand.

SpaceX being their own customer, and a lower priority one, lets them levellize their revenue, which also helps retain staff. And if anyone commoditizes launch systems, they have a hedge against that. However if demand for starlink ever does exceed capacity, the launch side could find their schedules being much more variable.

In software, you see this with priority queues all the time if you know where to look. Someone makes a “low priority” system that soaks up spare capacity. Internal customers become dependent on these systems and then become delay-averse. Meanwhile, other teams also start soaking up that spare capacity, by improved design or feature creep or both. That low priority system becomes starved of resources, and the internal customers start saber rattling. That system gets its own dedicated resources, and now stranded resources climb back to the original levels, if not worse.

Starlink will eventually become the same thing. And I wonder if they will spin it off when that situation arises.

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MetaWhirledPeas an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> to communicating with weapons of war

You could say the same thing for terrestrial internet. Not trying to be contradictory, I just find this a very interesting ethical topic.

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hinkley an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The Internet was built to be literally bomb-proof rather than figuratively. The utility of that has been self evident and “five nines” thinking continues this tradition. AWS AZs are meant to partially survive floods and wildfires. A super volcano would take out an entire region but people would have other problems at that point (the exception being if emergency services were on those machines, but disaster teams have been learning to bring emergency infrastructure with them ever since New Orleans).

As a UIUC student used to be fond of reminding me, part of the University of Illinois’ contribution to the old Internet was in a building that, if it were to collapse, would fall outward and not crush the basement. Officially that building was designed so every office has natural light, like a collapsible water cup, but it’s a very interesting coincidence that it (the basement) is bomb proof.

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MarsZebra an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah but Starlink also intends to put weapons ONBOARD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

	▲	bluescrn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Defensive weapons. It would be a pretty inefficient way to deploy offensive weapons.