291–300 of 500 posts
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> Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high bandwidth SATCOM market? I agree, but those satellites shouldn't have been there to begin with in my opinion. But it's too late now.
Genie is out of the bottle. DOD has seen Starlink in a real hot war and they love it . The constellation has become a national security asset. If it disappears, Pentagon will pay for another one.
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> What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? - falcon 9 - $2700/kg - falcon heavy - $1400/kg - ariane 5 - $9000/kg > If the current one works - why would they? This is just low quality flame bait. If any of the before-mentioned (US) companies succeed commercially long-term, they will transform world-wide internet access especially in less developed countries. For clarification: as…
Last time I checked launch costs, and tjose are incredibly hard to come by, SpaceX prices were the LEO-launch equivalent of Ryan Air's 20 Euro tickets. So hard to compare. Also, for a bunch of launches, Ariane-5 was already a couple of years ago competitive with SpaceX launches. And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for Starlink.
> for a bunch of launches, Ariane-5 was already a couple of years ago competitive with SpaceX launches.
Ariane 5 is in no way competitive against SpaceX in anything, and hasn't ever been. The only customers launching on it at all are the ones that have some good reason to avoid SpaceX, and the ones that bought launches early as a hedge. It has very real issues attracting any competitive commercial launches. This satellite constellation plan is, among other things, a way of bailing out Arianespace because they will fail unless they get more launches.
> And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for Starlink.
SpaceX launched 60 reusable F9s last year, of which 37 were internal Starlink launches (of which some had additional customer payloads). In comparison, Ariane 5 launched 3 times.
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> some way-too-rich sociopath's private company. I am certainly you've developed this view in November of 2022. Meanwhile any European stuck with DSL - which would be most of my family - would be ecstatic to get sensible bandwidth today.
There's a few comments in this thread from self proclaimed Europeans, but this one is the weirdest. The internet infrastructure here is great. I haven't seen a sub 10mbps offering in years (with 100mbps being fairly common). The only spotty places are small villages (which is a rather common theme everywhere). Europeans aren't stuck with DSL.
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True, but we were speaking about Germany's ability to pull economic growth specifically. Italy won't be saving European economic growth anytime soon, possibly ever, even though I actually love Italy.
Italian economy wasn't so bad until they joined the euro. The northern part still has decent industry even now.
Italy is economically coasting since the 1980s, basically since the termination of QE of Bank Of Italy toward Italy Treasure in 1981, and since then politicians struggled to finance their banana republic policies resulting also in less subsidies that boosted businesses, lowering growth. Tangentially Italian business culture is rooted in nepotism and old ways of doing things (basket case of low trust society), so most of companies stay at a family level and new ideas tend to come from family members/offsprings. Capitals are mostly obtained through lending based on superficial personal connections at banks (harder to get financing since 2008) on "clean" balancesheets that in some sectors cover less than 50% of real revenues (small companies found easier to cheat on taxes). R&D expenditures on GDP averaged around 1% since 2000.
TLDR: Italy always has been addicted to subsidies and stimuluses backed by debt to grow on paper, most companies didnt innovate/grow past family businesses in semi-informal economy in the last 30-40 years and now the overrall economy finds really hard to compete/grow. Plus the Pension system is a TITANIC unfunded liability similar to social security but already in deficit waiting for a gigantic wave of baby boomers to enter pension earlier due to whatever populist scheme politicians foster (Quota 103, Opzione Donna, etc...). A lot of retirees lower also internal consuption, weaking the economy further
Regional variance applies, some areas (usually in the north) are competitive/dynamic "globally" and others are on "life support"
This is probably something that the US (or other major powers) should really think about doing too. Military tactics and capabilities have generally been driven by communications capabilities. For example, radio communication technology was at least as important as the tank in for the German blitzkrieg. This becomes all the more important with drones, etc. I just punched up some quick numbers to make sure I’m not tal…
... of course one can question how safe they are given Musk's condition.
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> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech, while small nations like Estonia and Finland punch well above their weight. I'm still waiting for the Estonian space rockets and Finnish airplanes and high speed rail. Seriously your rant is a bit misplaced.
Tech is only tech if it runs on javascript
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> There are many concerns about giving a centralized authority more power > Also, since the EU is a vassal of Pax Americana So the problem is giving a centralized authority (EU) more power. At the same time the EU is a vassal of the US (Pax America, which is a fairly ridiculous notion in and of itself). I can only conclude from the horrible word salad you gave me that individual member states without the EU would als…
Yeah, cognitive dissonance is strong with this one
I think IRIS² is actually an extension of the EU's GOVSATCOM initiative: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/... This means it's for government use, and is not really comparable to commercial end user services.
Well, in Europe most palces can be reached either by fibre or 5G relatively easily, it is a quite densly populated cintinent after all. Let's ignore Germany's utter failure to build out fast internet, which is story of its own and totally unrelated to the EU in general.
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It's honestly got to the point where I barely open comments related to EU projects any more. While most of the time there's somewhat nuanced discussions in comments, once the EU gets mentioned for some reason most of the comments basically boil down to "EU bad, US better", and "Big government bad", completely ignoring the actual contents of what the post it about.
The odd part is that these bad takes seem to typically come from people that don't even live the EU, and don't understand how it works. They just don't like that it exists.
The US is used to this. The EU still have to adjust.