This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU.
There are many relatively market-friendly nations in the EU, especially in the eastern half, but the EU is mostly an extension of the French model and without the British, it really started leaning heavily into the protectionist bureaucratic model. The UK acted as a brake of sorts on those tendencies and its influence is sorely missed, at least by people like me. (Certainly the bureaucrats rejoice.)
Germany wants that crisis because it's the only way it's moribund industries can be competitive in the global market. Well not any more after their dependence on Russian gas exploded in their face, but for the past 20 years.
Britain after Thatcher got a rich financial center while the countryside impoverished. The market-friendly changes didn’t produce the promised tide that would lift all boats. I recognize that the UK produces more market-friendly rhetoric, but outside the handful of wealthy city centers the UK is shockingly poor.
To quote "Yes Minister" (British political satire from the 1980s):
"You know what they say about the average Common Market official. He has the organising ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the French. And that's topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish."
> This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU.
True. I still think Thierry Breton does a really good job, though, despite being French. Sylvie Goulard would have been a disaster -- she couldn't even speak English!
(The wiki page lies and says she speaks English -- no, she really doesn't. Her German is pretty good, though.)
I think a modest proposal for curb stomping the bad French influence in the EU is to have all EU civil servants retake their entrance exams in another language if they originally took it in French. We should also form an alliance to automatically reject Commissioner candidates who 1) don't speak English and 2) speak French at the confirmation hearings in the European Parliament.
If you have to compare the UK and France on free market vs "protectionist and bureacratic" (i disagree, there are but notes of protectionism sometimes - e.g. Alsthom power was sold to GE without the most important bits, but it was sold nonetheless), which is better for the everyday humans? A couple of examples spring to mind, all of which are extremely disfavourable towards the UK, so please help me have a more nuanced argument:
* The privatisation of UK railways has been an unmitigated disaster
* The privatisation and selling off of various UK heavy industries (like steel, automobiles, trains, aeroplanes, shipbuilding) has been somewhat of a disaster with the majority of it closing, and the rest being foreign owned. Where the UK were a leader in many areas, they no longer are, with a drastic impact on the people who used to work there. As a counterpoint, France has managed to maintain shipbuilding, airplane, train construction at a pretty good level.
* Where the UK is "better" is financial services - IMO in part due to the English language, in part due to money laundering with the help of the various crown tax havens; and the startup scene - again the English language surely helped, but so did less rigorous labour laws (and that has been slightly relaxed in France).
Everybody has seen what Starlink does in Ukraine. Expect similar initiatives from China, India and Russia (once the shitshow is over.)
Heck the Pentagon probably has a plan B in the drawer for a Starlink-like constellation dated fall 2022 should Musk go more unhinged that he already is. LEO constellations went from ‘interesting’ to ‘paradigm shift’ overnight, nothing to be surprised about.
I certainly do believe that there will be initiatives, but I am really curious about their results.
One of the necessities is cheap access to the orbit, and I just cannot see the national behemoth space agencies developing economic, reusable rockets. The traditional rocket industry in the US was unable to do that either.
Oh I agree. But now the situation is quite different: the impractical became necessary, both in cheap launch capacity and leo comms infrastructure. They must make it happen.
It is also possible to land on the Moon, we know that. But no one else tried for more than 50 years.
The barriers to becoming an agile space company are formidable. When looking at SpaceX, we forget how many space startups from that period are now defunct and forgotten. John Carmack founded one, too; it is gone.
Carmack's was very much a part-time venture. It was interesting to read their blog and watch their videos. It was clear that they were very good at certain things (code + welding) and not very good at others (electronics, fire-proofing, planning, testing, finite element analysis, any kind of simulation that Carmack didn't write).
An interesting fact is that they did very well as long as they could conduct cheap tests very often. As their rockets got bigger, they could no longer do that and then they floundered.
Well, solid-fuel rockets are a pretty old tech (medieval China) and even if we restrict ourselves to liquid-fueled rockets that crossed the Kármán line, the first German A-4 did so several years before the transistor was invented :)
What is religious is the outright aversion to state intervention without good reason.
No, it's coordination between aligned states to do what is needed to improve things in general. GDPR wouldn't have been possible if it were a Danish or Estonian thing only. Same goes for DMA and DSA, the rail packages, anti-competitive rulings, normalisation in standards (like Micro USB and now Type C) and a million other things.
The SPD is every as bit as psychologically conservative as the CDU/CSU, a party of the 65+ electorate and 65+ membership.
The FDP and the Greens are the more modern ones, but there is an anti-tech undercurrent in the Green party that distrusts anything industrial. The space industry has a nontrivial carbon trace; its development in Germany would be, at the very least, pretty controversial.
Europe bashing on HN is so lame. A German start-up developed a working mRNA vaccine the same time an American start-up developed a stupid blood test fraud. You wouldn't hear the end of it if it was the other way round. What big tech came out of the US the past decade? The juicer? If it's about Europe, every quibble is used for sweeping blows, when it's about the US, the failures are all swept under the rug.
Depends on whether you are facing a disinformation campaign on a social network or whether you need to crush Russian armor rolling over the border.
Technology is notoriously two-faced. Or zero-faced if you can't produce it. The medieval people didn't have to worry about Facebook memes influencing the clergy and triggering heresies.
Fair point, not all, just the hours of ChatGPT got to me. That said I was replying to someone who seemed to think nothing major had come out of the US in ten years and like, well, as mentioned my ChatGPT usage begs to differ.
"A German start-up developed a working mRNA vaccine the same time"
True, but not very relevant. A continent with 25 per cent of humanity's wealth is expected to produce at least something sometimes.
But just look at the brain drains. How many Nobelists or other important scientists moved from the US to Europe and vice versa? We are losing our most talented people to a better research environment.
There is no shortage of European workers in Google or SpaceX, where the main limiting factor is actually ITAR laws, not lack of interest. How many Americans moved to Germany to work in SAP or to France to work in Arianespace?
There is no country called EU and there is no single market in that a startup could scale seamlessly in all 27 members - it'll still have to follow local laws. So it's mostly a matter of scale - if you can't outscale US/China/India, you can't compete with those that can.
That is somewhat of an indictment of the "single market" idea, or, more precisely, of its implementation.
We still have shocking differences not just in tech, but in food quality across the EU. Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good. I can't imagine the same happening in the US; Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different economic power.
To some degree, this is caused by the babel of languages and resulting cultural barriers. I am not parochial, and yet I am totally ignorant about who is a popular singer in Hungary or a popular writer in Belgium. The same barrier influences businesses and consumers.
> Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good.
I'm shocked that that is still the case. I remember recurrent news stories years ago on German TV about that exact thing, except with Poland. Poles who lived close to the border shopped food in Germany for that very reason.
I don't understand why food would be more expensive in countries with lower wages. The VAT rates are not that different.
There's a similar situation between Czechia and Poland currently. Folks from .cz travel to .pl to buy food, cigarettes, medicine and even coal. I have no comparison of goods quality, but Poland is cheaper for Czechs.
Cross-border shopping used to be a big thing for Danes as well but mostly for soft drinks, alcohol, candy, and petrol. They all used to be a lot cheaper in Germany but that was because of our taxes in Denmark. It was our own bloody fault.
There are Danish supermarkets right across the border in Germany for the locals because things are still a bit cheaper there but most of us no longer bother driving all the way to Germany with a trailer on the car just to buy stuff. It used to be common to do that a couple of times a year.
"I don't understand why food would be more expensive in countries with lower wages."
The multinationals do what they can get away with. A fine from a Bulgarian authority is likely to be trivial to them, and if it actually bites, they can always withdraw from the market as a retaliation.
No one wants to lose market access to Germany, but the smaller countries don't have as much leverage.
It's still a thing. A lot of people in Croatia still buy specific food products in supermarkets like Lidl and Muller because they carry the same products as in Germany or Austria. So of much better quality of course.
The price at the time is generaly considerably higher than in neighbouring countries because VAT is just a part of the general taxation scheme. Whatever taxes companies get saddled with just get transferred to the general population via prices on the stuff they sell. And taxation in Croatia is crazy high unfortunately for everyone.
>Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different economic power.
And yet, it's the case ? Sure, you can find the same products if you go looking, but the average food quality between those two states will be wildly different. And that's without taking into account that the average food quality in the US is awful.
SAP is also 51 years old. There is no shortage of big, old companies in Germany. There is a visible shortage of successful young companies.
In my comment edit, I mentioned the 20 year limit specifically, because the ossification in last decades is real. The US generates a lot more startups, even the London scene is livelier than the rest of Europe taken together.
There are roughly 1500 mid-sized companies in Germany which are among the world-leaders in their tech sector. You may never have heard it, but Elon Musk runs his factories with process automation from Germany (he bought a company) and robots from Kuka/Germany.
Germany alone has roughly half of all so-called hidden-champions world-wide. Many of them are in High-tech.
Europe lacks the large internet and software companies. Though T-Mobile is German and known in the US. SAP provides the software which runs large enterprises. But high-tech is much more, it's factory automation, it's aerospace (think Airbus), it's biotech (think Biontech), ... Soft- and hardware are a crucial factor for those.
The Mittelstand is pretty much the only reason why Germany's prosperity is still a thing. Countries like Italy and Spain, which lack this backbone of mid-sized companies, are in deep trouble and unlikely to get out of it.
But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well, not just reliable suppliers to foreign big players. Don't you count this as a regression?
> But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well
We have the world leader in civil aerospace in France/Germany, Many high-speed trains in the world are coming from France or Germany. There are many large high-tech sectors.
It's nice that Estonia is successful, but it's not where the next big chip manufacturing sites will be build. Intel and TSMC are in talks to move to the former East Germany (Saxony has roughly 70000 employees already in the chip manufacturing industry). The big Internet exchange node is in Frankfurt.
The EU has a lot to catch up in many countries, but it's not that we have no high-tech.
Both? Good and broad infrastructure is expensive. I was using a new plane with onboard Internet, two modern airports, three modern high-speed trains, three large train stations, driving through a clean and nice landscape. My local train line in my home town is fully digitalized and prepared for autonomous trains. Plus I made a stop in a town where Carl Friedrich Gauß was born in 1777, which was inspiring.
> love trains -- but planes are usually a better solution than high-speed trains.
Not for short to medium distances they're not. Everything under 3-4 hours of train is faster, more comfortable and with much less hassle than flying (going to an airport, security checks, uncomfortable seating, interruptions for take off and landing, long queueing).
The trouble is that this has been known since at least the late 1990s, discussed quite often, plans made, and yet the gap hasn't grown appreciably smaller. It has arguably widened. 15 years ago, you could choose from a plentitude of European feature phones. Now the vast majority of our own mobile phone market is dominated by US or East Asian products.
The more important is to use the EU to create the large market which is needed.
Btw., I'm a happy user of a bunch of US tech products. It's not that I need to replace all that. I want the EU to be competitive, but I'm also using other stuff. Apple in the recent years made some excellent product technology, like their chips, which are produced in Taiwan, also with a lot of technology from Europe.
SAP legitimately seems to be to be one of the least innovative software companies out there. Are they doing anything even mildly interesting? And it's not like they've found some global optimum - they just benefit from having been around so long that trillions of dollars now depend on them. Not due to any other merit though.
My latest smartphone is mostly EU with Taiwanese manufacturing. It's the best phone I've used yet. The only thing Google adds is branding. True enough about search engines though.
> Meh, the EU (where I live) is an ossified behemoth whose VIPs (Germany and France) don't really understand or appreciate tech and cannot innovate their way out of a paper bag.
It's telling that you're lumping France and Germany together that you don't know what you're talking about. France has come an extremely long way in the past few years, with pretty good mobile and fibre coverage (there are villages with hundreds of people with proud signs "Commune fibrée"), and vast government digital services. The last time i had to interact with a government office physically was to file the (online prepared) form for ID and passport, where it's purely done for verification purposes. There's a government SSO which gives access to all government services online, for free.
There's also a very healthy startup culture and scene (check the FrenchTech's Next40).
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc. Real world companies solving actual problems and widely used in France and starting to export (Back Market have an EU wide presence, Ornikar are in a couple of Western EU markets, etc.).
"Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc."
Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low single digits?
Compared to Google or Meta or Apple or Microsoft, these are not successes. And yet, France with its relatively big population and relatively good schools, should theoretically produce at least one or two comparable companies.
A company is a success only if its market is the whole world, or at the very least covers the USA where most of HN's users live? That's an interesting take.
And a pretty mainstream one. One of the niceties of software is that it scales quite easily and that if it really solves an important problem, it can grow explosively all over the world, where people do have the same problem that needs solving.
Specializing in a niche corner of the market can be called a success, but a cunning dwarf is still a dwarf. For one, it lacks the necessary capital to invest into something more risky but potentially more rewarding.
None of the listed examples were purely software. You can't build a website that store health data about patients and scale it to the whole world and its dizzying regulatory variations overnight. You can't setup a shop for second-hand electronics that serves the whole world overnight. Etc.
It is certainly not bad, but it makes no sense to pretend that they play in the same league as the global giants, or even just one level under them.
At this level of significance, countries like Thailand or Turkey can play, too. I would expect more from France, one of the heavyweights of the Western civilization and a cradle of Enlightement.
Estonia has high-tech exports of 2.6 billion USD. Germany has high-tech exports of around 200 billion USD, which makes it world-wide number three, with the US being number four. Data from the World Bank.
The city I live in has roughly four times the GDP of Estonia. We have for example one of the largest civil airplane manufacturing sites here. 40000 people are employed in aerospace in the larger region -> more revenue than estonia has GDP.
There is literally two orders of magnitude of high-tech you are ignoring.
Also ignoring that estonia has a population of only about 1.3 million, let alone the geographic size. It's a tiny country, which makes it easier to build infrastructure. Estonia has received heavy subsidies from the EU which went towards infrastructure projects. Germany on the other hand is the largest financial contributor to the EU by far. [1]
The plan has worked, to share the success of the big economic powers within the EU with the lesser fortunate so that they could be competitive in the future and even the grounds. It's not a surprise that coming out like the original commenter isn't exactly well received.
It's great to see those countries making good progress. Investment is important, but the countries need to make it work, which Estonia is a positive example.
Funny that Germany managed to provide good internet infrastructure for new EU countries but in their own country Deutsche Telekom has managed it that Germany is now behind those countries.
Estonia is miles ahead of other EU countries when it comes to software culture and hygiene: other countries (such as France) still mostly see IT as a center of costs / necessary evil.
Estonians think from first principle and bring software early in any new endeavors.
Add to that the “show don’t tell” culture necessary in a world where Estonia is (still) an underdog
Look at companies like AMSL which no one comes even close. It is likely that every device you own has a microchip made with a machine by AMSL. Is it sexy? Is there a narcissistic tweeting CEO? No, but there is inovasion at the highest level.
The mRNA vaccine also came out of the "EU".
What the EU has little off and what you are probably complaining about it throwing money at a hundred things to see what sticks. Those methods cause things like
Theranos to spawn.
Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die. You may get a few unicorns with some inovation but you can get there without the suffering as well.
And even there, if you look at the sheer amount of R&D projects funded by the EU... Anyone serious can't say the EU doesn't invest massively in R&D. Interestingly enough, most of what I see funded and successfully becoming products are incremental development (increasing wireless bandwidth for specific apps or constraints, improving industrial productivity or getting to next gen for any tech) and few moonshots. I work with a lot of tech SMEs and most consider these projects key to their survival, as they get put in touch with (international) customers to work on hard but specific use cases and they get funded for R&D, improve their portfolio...
But as you said, it's not very sexy, there's a little bit (not that much really) of management/bureaucracy (and most actually understand that state of things as the european equilibrium between corruption and too-much-red-tape) and it's not that hard to get funded on small to medium projects.
This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail.
Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.
Most of the groundlaying work on mRNA has been done by Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian scientist who moved to the US to continue her research in better conditions.
The history of mRNA research is pretty tangled, but its majority took place at the American side of the pond. Unless you want to cherry-pick one particular moment and disregard all others, then no, mRNA technology is not a European, or even majority-European invention.
Absolutely not. The most common Covid vaccines originated in Europe (AZ, BionTech) with the exception of Moderna (US).
To take an example were all the ground work was done in Europe and later propelled US companies to riches: MP3.
But hey, if you want to play Super Trump with countries, and the US to win, fine for me. The US win by virtue of being the most exceptional country on earth.
Katalin Karikó moved to the US in 1985, from a Warsaw Pact country.
She did her research at UPenn and accepted a demotion and pay cut in 1995 because grant agencies decided this weird mRNA stuff wasn't worth funding.
In 2006 she founded startup company RNARx, funded with 100k USD of government grants, but didn't come to an agreement to license patents of her own work which UPenn held.
So in 2013 she joined German company Biontech, funded with 150m EUR of venture capital, which was finally able to productize the research.
> This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail.
I’d be surprised to learn that it would have been possible to run packet data on the original telephone system.
I’d be less surprised to learn that decades of incremental improvements ultimately enabled packet data to run on top of telephone lines.
I said most, but if you're looking at the projects funded by the EU, there's plenty of heavy projects such as the EPI (that can be criticized of course) and contributions to many fundamental research projects.
Incremental research is needed, and as a collaborator or downstream from many of these projects, the developed tech is often disruptive in many ways, be it cost reduction (keeping the industry competitive) or creating new features, improving safety of security of the products. Yes, developing a slightly better telegraph has its use and it doesn't beat inventing email but email itself was a incremental progress from telegraph, telex, fax, BBS, internet... Haven't seen a 747 assemble itself from a DARPA project yet.
A lot of the cutting edge stuff on all kinds of wireless or fiber communication is funded through the EU and I'd say looking at funded projects year after year you can see lots of research lab work percolate quite quickly to a large network of SMEs that then provide new services to lots of European companies.
Why did BioNTech have to partner up with American Pfizer to get anywhere with their (groundbreaking!) technology? Why did we give the Americans the secret sauce?
> Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die.
Ill-informed but strongly held attitudes like that are a big problem in the EU. There would be a lot fewer people on Earth and they would suffer a lot more if we didn't have Capitalism. They would suffer even less if we had more of it.
I am not saying no capitalism, I am saying regulation is good. Such as in no child labor[1] and enforced safety standards[2], which yes, slows down innovation but safe lives. Sadly most regulations are made in blood.
No regulations are fine and dandy unless you are one of the first 346 to die from Boeing's MAX disaster until the "market corrects itself".
Even the EU has been complaining how expensive it is to run rail through Switzerland. The reason being regulation which prevent such disasters as in Ohio. [3]
Paper routes and other forms of light work are good for children.
The bad kinds of child labour disappear as poverty disappears. No need for any hard regulation there.
I actually looked at the reported workplace safety violations and the reported workplace accidents for Tesla a couple of years ago to see whether the reporting was biased against Tesla or not -- turns out it was. It still is.
> The bad kinds of child labour disappear as poverty disappears. No need for any hard regulation there.
I'm sorry but that is extremely cold hearted, mostly useless and bordering on the sociopathic. As an excuse for child labour. Just "fix" everything, have enough money and no children will need to work in risky conditions? You should go and tell the DRC government that, as well as the families whose children are dying/poisoning themselves for their whole lives, they would be overjoyed.
It is not a solution in any way a form, it's a desired state. Hard regulations banning these kind of undesirable practices will be an immediate (ish, with time for enforcement) fix and literally save lives.
Is your view similarly useless and sociopathic with regards to all regulations? Building codes are only a chore and increase housing prices, once everybody is rich all housing will be of good quality (until an earthquake or hurricane or poor living conditions strike and kill, but who cares, right?).
I'm from the US originally and emigrated about 10 years ago; I think you're conflating different aspects of technology. The boom of US tech isn't superior infrastructure, it's that tech is a very lucrative investment vehicle so it gets a ton of attention. (Well, it was anyways, not sure what 2023 is going to do to this)
While I understand what you're saying, I think what you're observing and commenting on is the huge amount of money that is thrown at technologies developed in the US compared to similar technologies developed by an EU nation which don't get the same attention. US tech infrastructure is by no means exceptional. It's good in many places, don't get me wrong, but it's an extremely similar or lesser experience compared to many EU nations (including the ones you mentioned), and a lot more costly for end users.
Even when I lived in Russia for a time, the infrastructure/costs were amazingly better in Russian cities (outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg even) than in many US cities.
This is not to say everything US == bad everything EU == good; far from it. Instead just try to understand that the main difference between the tech you read about in US that gets millions or billions and the tech in the EU which just stumbles on like any other business is simply the high attention from investors looking for investment vehicles.
Beat for beat, the day to day technology that I used in the US has either an acceptable or better EU-accessible version, and the EU version is often even a bit cheaper.
The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by the US government; it's the US residents paying person like Elon Musk to let him sell them something right back, without having any real control or input over the way that money is spent by Musk and other similar corporations, or even ensuring that everyone has a chance to use the stuff that billions of dollars of their tax dollars are going to. It's an oligarchy that's been fully legalized and approved.
I really don't think that's the direction we want any nation to be taking, as it does _not_ provide good results long term for the people. US broadband is a perfect example for this with the incumbent providers doing everything in their power to offer as little as possible while still technically qualifying for the subsidies so they can pocket the remainder after the bare minimum requirements are met.
Don't misunderstand the high investor attention that US tech companies get as always being great innovation; investors want a good investment vehicle, and that doesn't always mean the vehicle is a worthy and innovative product. It just means it's something that has a way of providing good returns on investments, including short term fads.
This question was, lest say, discussed between the EU and the US for litteraly decades regarding Airbus subsidies and Boeing subsidies. The former came directly the latter came through government contracts. Government contracts are one of the easiest ways to subsidize a company, and SpaceX got plenty of those.
I am well aware that EU claimed for decades that Boeing's military contracts were some sort of hidden subsidy for its civilian business. That does not make said claims accurate, or why McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed would not have sought to benefit from such subsidies, as opposed to selling itself to Boeing and exiting the airliner business, respectively.
SpaceX gets plenty of government contracts because it has proven, reliable, and volume-capable launchers of government payloads. Many within NASA were fiercely opposed to SpaceX for years.
Whether or not government contracts can be considered subsidies was the question of the related WTO dispute. And it was never ruled that they are not. Since the WTO is the highest authority in those questions, everything else is just an opinion.
There is a waste over estimation on how large SpaceX government contracts are.
You are ignoring that Airbus is also getting additional government contracts. Arianespace gets massive infrastructure subsidy, they are gone get at least 5 billion all said and told for Ariane 6, and that does not cover the last 20 years of sub-component level development for things like the engine and the solid fuel. Lots of the testing and development for sub-components is all done in govenrment funded institutions that all have their own public funding.
In addition to Arianespace has received lots of 'contracts' for development of things like engines, carbon fiber second stages, different re-usability prototypes and the list goes on.
And when all that is done, Ariane 6 will STILL GET GOVERNMENT contracts, such as launches from ESA, EU governments projects like Galileo and countries own launches.
SpaceX actually likely lost money on development of Dragon 1 and Crew Dragon. The had incredibly competitive bids and the govenrment got absolutely amazing deals by anybodies accounting.
For Arianespace to claim SpaceX is subsidized and that's why they can launch cheaper is simply the height of hypocrisy and and Arianespace actually knows that they are outright lying when they say that.
The reality is Arianespace and Europe dominated the market for 20 years and barley made any technological or price progress in that time. Even in the 2010s they mostly launched Russian rockets developed in the 1960s. If that's not a complete failure I don't know what is.
No, Arianespace literally launches and markets the Soyuz. So basically using European company to sell a Russian rocket in the international market.
Basically Ariane 5 was only worth flying for double GEO launches. That was Okish because this was during a time period where there were a pretty decent amount of GEO launches. Europe had the tiny Vega rocket as well.
However between those two things the Russian Soyuz launched by Arianespace and Russian Proton rocket were successful.
> Are/were Arianespace designs based on Russian rockets?
Europes own rockets, like Ariane 5 and Vega are not meaningfully derived from Russian designs. The are more a product of copying from the post-Apollo, Shuttle area in US space flight. Basically Ariane 5 was suppose to be the base of a European Shuttle.
This is why Ariane 5 is so big, instead of doing the sensible thing and making a mid-sized rocket to take over all the market, they made a huge rocket so it can fly a big space plane (Hermes). And then of course they canceled the space plane but didn't reevaluate the rocket.
The Ariane 5 uses hydrogen core stage with side booster, so its basically like the Shuttle. Notably why these European designs can never be reusable like Falcon 9. The Core stage is way higher energy then the Falcon 9 Core stage.
Vega, Vega C, Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 all use solid fuels, something that Russians don't use much. Its basically a lot of research done by France on the ICBM program that is being use here.
> I know that the US used Russian engines for years.
This was a post cold war development of course. By that point Europe had started development on their own hydrogen engine and didn't have much interest in RP-1. Hydrogen and solids were the way to go, or so they thought.
I wish Europe had just picked up the Nk-33 and built a medium sized rocket with it.
> 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.
OP words are dramatic, but he does have a point – bigger players in Europe could (and should) do better.
You are on the other hand setting unrealistic expectations for Estonia / Finland.
Hardware is obviously a lot more costly than software, hence why you hear more about software tech from Estonia (Skype, Transferwise, Pipedrive, Veriff to name a few) than hardware (Milrem robotics, Co-Module, Woola...) as the latter are of much smaller scale (respective to the size of Estonia) than the former: software scales a lot better.
> In practice, there will be a flow of taxpayer money into something highly subsidized that no one will ever use.
Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are really that concerned about widespread peace time use.
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them much more recent). Most of these have raised between $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns:
Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK and Germany in terms of tech startups.
Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years, what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding capital back into VC funds.
You are right, though I’d add that the EU correctly reflects Europeans’ policy preferences here. European voters, more often than not, seem to believe they can have their cake and eat it too: free public services that remain competitive and cutting edge, somehow efficiently run by the government and delivered on time and on budget. Ask those same people about how <insert any existing government service> is run, and they’ll have a litany of complaints.
The flip side of it is exploitative large commercial almost-monopolies which do their best to make you spend money you shouldn't on things you don't need. Markets full of almost exactly the same deal dressed up so many different ways that you don't realise you're going to be stiffed any way you go. Cheap initial prices hide very expensive prices later on etc etc.
The amount of effort to evaluate everything and work out where the "catch" is ..... it's just understandable that we might look for our governments to shoulder a bit of that burden in the critical areas. At least our healthcare systems usually help us that way.
> The flip side of it is exploitative large commercial almost-monopolies which do their best to make you spend money you shouldn't on things you don't need. Markets full of almost exactly the same deal dressed up so many different ways that you don't realise you're going to be stiffed any way you go. Cheap initial prices hide very expensive prices later on etc etc.
Yes, Europeans are fond of telling scary tall tales about these kinds of strawmen. "Our economic growth may be sclerotic, our regulatory environment may be completely uncompetitive, and every third company may be relocating operations elsewhere, but the real win is that we don't have too many kinds of products to be confused choosing between!"
California has a bill right now to do with preventing hidden pricing so you cannot argue that its' not an issue. We also have those problems so we don't need to "be scared by stories in the US" as we experience them.
As for decline....look in the mirror. Everyone experiences it.
Defining a problem by reference to the amount of the legislation proposed to tackle it seems somewhat backwards. By that logic, Europe has a much greater gun problem than the US does, and its people are terribly confused by the geographic origin of food and drink.
> As for decline....look in the mirror.
I’m in Europe, so I can just look out my window. It’s very pretty! And completely sclerotic and dysfunctional.
Ariane 5 is done. Ariane 6 will launch maybe once this year. And then its already massively overbooked. So much so that many of its launches will likely fly on Falcon 9.
And on top of that Amazon has bought a huge amount of launches. Flying these will take many years.
Its unlikely that they have capacity. Realistically this is a ~2030 at best, not 2027.
Nice, good to see them acknowledge that a slightly better "pre-f9" rocket won't cut it. Doesn't say anything about their chance to succeed, but better than trying something that's essentially worthless even in the best case.
No, Ariane Next is not even being seriously worked on. For this rocket to exists there will be at least 3-5 years of political discussions. The Ariane 6 has not even flown yet and Ariane 6 was already very decisive.
If Ariane 6 first flies this year, don't expect funding for a new rocket for at least 5-10 years and then at least 5 years of development.
Any Ariane Next will not exist before 2030 and likely not before 2035.
The only viable European rocket is the Ariane 6. And that has already been booked by Amazon. So unless they want to kick out Amazon, there is no way this will launch before 2027.
> This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU territory.
Satellite internet isn’t great for speed. Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable. I think satellite internet is cool, but it doesn’t serve a real need and I expect this project to flounder.
Also, notice that an entire continent has less ambitious goals and merely tries to keep up with one guy.
> satellite internet is cool, but it doesn’t serve a real need
Starlink’s 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European countries fixed averages and most’s mobile medians [2].
Also, the second sentence of this article cites the need: “critical scenarios where terrestrial networks are absent or disrupted, as observed, for instance, in the unfolding war in Ukraine.”
> Starlink’s 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European countries fixed averages and most’s mobile medians [2].
But Starlink also doesn’t deliver those 100 Mbps reliably. Starlink is an awesome choice if you are in an underserved region but in most EU countries most people have better alternatives.
The capacity of Starlink is very low for many countries in the EU. If people were to actually use it at scale it wouldn’t work.
I am not sure how fair that comparison is. E.g., in my country most people can get 1GiB downstream/50 MiB upstream through cable internet (even in small villages), more than 50% of the households can get fiber with 1GiB downstream/1GiB upstream.
Yet the average fixed download/upload speed is 123/40 MiB. Why? Most people just want enough bandwidth for Netflix (TV is reserved separately), Youtube, and basic surfing. So, they'll go with the cheapest subscription, which is usually 100MiB downstream (except on budget providers), pulling down the averages. Starlink-like bandwidth is really cheap on cable/fiber. Heck, I have unlimited 5G and I think it's only 25 Euro per month, less than a third of a Starlink subscription and the bandwidth is usually much better. Even in the small village my parents live I get 100-200MiB downstream.
At any rate, it is no problem at all to get 1GiB downstream in most of the country and much cheaper than Starlink (we currently pay 35 Euro p/m for 1GBit up/down). For European countries that can't offer this yet, it makes more sense to invest in 5G and wired broadband.
That said, I think the EU should also do this. Satellite internet is good for remote areas and in the case of calamities (war, disaster, etc.) and crucial infrastructure should be in European hands.
> Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable.
Broadband via fiber (fine, let's save money and use VDSL for the last mile) is totally doable for the population centers. But we can't even manage that reliably at scale.
In Germany, mobile internet of any speed gets spotty once you're outside of the cities. It's just a sad state of affairs.
Germany's problem is German, not European. Germany also used to have waiting lists of many months for getting an extra line (+ they were expensive). Apparently, that was a Good Thing because it was because the state monopoly was protected against competition from Evil Capitalism (usually Foreign as well).
I'm not sure if you've noticed who's calling the shots in the EU. Germany's problem is the EU's problem.
I often feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding in German politics which then spreads to EU politics. They make the same basic mistake the Soviets made: believing that people are perfectly rational, don't react to incentives, and will do what's best for everyone if given the chance. Why have competition, you'll just waste resources. If someone says they're not able to work, surely that's true, so just give them money. If we just give billions to academics, surely they'll spend it wisely and get us a first class satellite internet. If we elect someone, it's always wise to give them plenty of power so they can make their job efficiently, there's no way they'd abuse that power. If we establish a bureaucracy, surely they'll focus on being efficient and nobody will try to grow their department beyond necessary just to increase their status.
Let me try again: Germany has bad internet because Germany is German, not because the EU forces Germany to be German.
I agree with the other sentiment you express: that Germany's bad German ideas cause problems for the entire EU due to Germany's size and influence. France's bad French ideas are of the same dumb variety and they also cause problems for the entire EU due to France's size and influence.
All member states have their favourite dumb ideas. That's not much of a problem if they balance out with each other. It's a big problem when they don't.
And of course the EU would be better with less German and French influence. The EU would also be better if the UK could Brenter to counter the Big State and Big Planning ideas of not just Germany and France but also Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, etc. The "Frugal Four" certainly can't do it alone.
Broadband via fiber (fine, let's save money and use VDSL for the last mile) is totally doable for the population centers.
Why VDSL and why only population centers? 50% of the households in The Netherlands have access to fiber internet. My parents live in a small village and have fiber (their village is about as remote as a remote German village). Heck, they are even hooking up farms out in the fields to fiber. It just takes some subsidies from the government, but it'll last for decades, so it is well worth it.
In Germany, mobile internet of any speed gets spotty once you're outside of the cities. It's just a sad state of affairs.
Internet is just hopelessly behind in Germany. We have lived in an economically strong area in Southern Germany. But wired broadband was deplorable (slow on paper, even slower and less reliable in practice). And mobile internet is not only spotty, the pricing is insane. E.g. unlimited 5G was 90 Euro per month last time I looked (I pay 25 per month).
There are a lot of places with surprisingly poor mobile coverage even inside the Berlin city limits.
I think one way Starlink could massively improve the digital infrastructure here is to be a demonstration that it's possible to be better; the existence proofs of other nations doesn't have the same emotional valence as the existence proof of your coworker.
>Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable
Whenever this is brought up a lot of Germans will reply that the 5G/4G situation in Germany is hopeless and only Elon Musk can save them. But looking at the 5G/4G coverage in Denmark and the rest of the Nordic countries it becomes obvious that the problem is Germany and not 5G/4G.
> notice that an entire continent has less ambitious goals and merely tries to keep up with one guy
This doesn't have to fully compete with starlink. A working secondary provider is a great goal in itself if the network is independent. Currently the critical military communication in Ukraine depends on how he feels today for example.
On a policy level, there are likely also issues with using a private US company for critical EU communication.
Having a single global provider is never a great idea. It's even worse when it relies on someone like Musk.
> Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable.
The main goal here as I can see is to learn from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the main infrastructure (including electric grid) was targeted.
The issue is much broader than you may consider. Besides the obvious benefits for military communication, consider the following points (all from my experience living in Kyiv):
1. Modern society depends on the internet heavily - banks, shops, eCommerce. Your ATMs need internet to allow you to withdraw cash. Your enemy will target your power infrastructure to stop economic activity very early.
2. In case of long-term power outages, you can expect most of the land lines will stop working after 12 hours when batteries on the ISP sides start to be depleted.
3. Your 4G network will become less and less useful very quickly, the more people will start losing wired internet and switching over to 4G. The cellular will not be able to fulfil demand and eventually will halt under the load.
4. It is very difficult to power wired internet with mobile generation, as the infrastructure is huge and requires power generation in multiple places at once.
Satellite internet solve this miraculously:
1. you can get internet where you need it without reliance on any other infrastructure - i.e. bank, office, ATM, etc... Just plug the dish to the nearby router.
2. Mobile power generation becomes much more useful, as you can have it only where it needed (i.e. to power satcom).
I know, I have been visiting Italy since the 1990s and the change is heart-wrenching. It used to be a much more dynamic and optimistic country. Now it feels ... drained and exhausted.
But has it really been only the now-absent lira rollercoaster that kept the economy afloat? I'm far from convinced that an independent currency would have been a decisive advantage in dealing with the economic challenges of the recent decades, they might even be in a worse position without the euro (not speculating that they would, just refusing to take the other outcome as a given)
This is unfortunately a populist trope (here in italy) hijacked by no-euro, no-europe, no-nato that need some data/debunking:
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"
Italy success was largely being a proto-China (or proto-Vietnam) before those existed. Basically no respecting copy right and producing knock of stuff.
Do you actually have information about the funding of this project or just joining the EU-org-bad crowd? ESA has a decent budget + optional projects. Those are agreed fairly early too https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Funding
How did the invisible hand cause Elon Musk to exist?
I'm not saying we wouldn't have had reusable rockets and ubiquitous internet access without him; just that it probably would not have happened in my lifetime.
Exactly: any constellation built with pre-falcon9 rockets might be non-Musk, but it won't even be remotely starlink-like. They'd inevitably aim for orbits higher than "throwaway-LEO" and the much sparser constellations those orbits enable (lines of sight less constrained by horizon) will cause considerably more latency (far from geostationary-bad, but a meaningful quality difference) even if the inherent SNR drawbacks were somehow solved. It seems quite rational for governments to desire a fallback, but it won't ever be more than that and as long as starlink is on the market any hope for significant customer contribution seems unwarranted.
Without rocket parity to f9, it's just hopeless to get meaningful customer contribution as long as starlink exists. At least as long as they don't find some miracle tech to massively extend VLEO lifetimes (solar powered VLEO Bussard jet or something similarly far out), but even with that the numbers required would be virtually unachievable without an f9 equivalent (it's a somewhat crazy project even with the f9!).
They should absolutely go for it, if they consider having a starlink fallback worth the investment, but they should really not base that decision on illusionary hopes for customer contribution.
The whole controversy around Musk is mostly a North American topic. I'm pretty sure that most Europeans that were left out in the rain regarding useful Internet speeds would love to use Starlink (if they can afford it) no matter which crazy billionaire owns the satellites.
I am European and I hate Musk, but that's not the reason why I wouldn't use Starlink.
I just don't want commercial companies to send hundreds of thousands of satellites and pollute my sky, just to enable more consumption in a world that has passed its limits.
For terminally online people, prehaps. But in real life, no, people aren't generally obsessed by twitter drama. Real life usage is what matters, and if it's good enough for the ukrainian army in an active war zone...
They cut off access to military drones... drones which will still have access to military satellite data feeds from NATO countries. Yet every video posted on Reddit of commercial drones used by UA soldiers is still obviously using Starlink. Beyond drones it's still a critical asset, probably as much or more important than Javelins / HIMARs.
This is a PR move, since Starlink is trying to deploy globally it doesn't look good when they are supporting a military.
Making it seem like you're ostensibly a civilian org is a wise move, while in practice Starlink remains the #1 technical contribution by a foreign entity supporting the war effort.
Of course, what it actually means IRL won't stop the people looking for a villain and spreading FUD as if they cut off the entire military.
Because Russia might just blow up LEO satellites, civilian objects/devices can now be blown up for national security reasons, the US recently normalised it with their weather/spy balloon saga.
He's referring to the fact that SpaceX are trying to abide by weapons export restrictions, so they are trying to prevent Ukraine from using Starlink from drones etc.
That is a spin which leaves out the moralising I think.
This is a newspaper quote:
"A senior Ukrainian presidential aide has reacted with anger after Elon Musk’s SpaceX said it had taken steps to prevent its Starlink satellite communications service from controlling drones, which are critical to Kyiv’s forces in fighting off the Russian invasion."
'Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief operating officer, said at a conference in the US that the surprise decision had been taken because it had never been the
company’s intention to allow Starlink to be used “for offensive purposes”. '
That's quite an interesting claim as I wonder what one would expect from people fighting desperately to save their country. It was at the least going to be used for command and control.
'Shotwell said Starlink was “never, never meant to be weaponised” by Ukraine, although it cannot come as a surprise to the company as Kyiv’s military has been using it to pilot drones for months. “Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement,” she added.'
'She said SpaceX was able to take measures to curb Ukraine’s use of the technology to pilot drones, although it was not immediately clear what those were and whether Kyiv’s military could work around them.'
'The row is not the first between Ukraine and Musk. Last October, Musk asked Twitter users to vote on a poll for Russia-Ukraine peace that included Ukraine handing over Crimea and allowing UN-supervised referendums on whether Moscow could keep other land it had occupied after its unprovoked invasion.'
I think it's reasonable to say that Starlink is far from the ideal solution now and you can also see why it's going to be essential for there to be competitors no matter what the economics are - perhaps national ones with only local coverage. Why would anyone build any reliance on a system which is controlled from afar and suddenly becomes unreliable when it's needed the most?
>Why would anyone build any reliance on a system which is controlled from afar and suddenly becomes unreliable when it's needed the most?
This would make sense if it was China or Russia proposing this, but for NATO countries I don't see the risk. The US would presumably be fine with Starlink being used to guide NATO weapons.
Possibly but maybe only if the conflicts were ones in which NATO was involved. Some French involvement in Mali or whatever might not count and might even conflict with the national interests of other Nato members.
Do we need satcom if we have good enough terrestrial communications? EU is reasonably densely populated. So why just not go with simpler and maybe even cheaper terrestrial solutions?
Gallileo can detect a distress beacon in the middle of the pacific ocean and send gelm. No other system can do that.
Civilian gallileo has better accuracy than GPS or any competitors.
Every mibile phone has multi-system reciever and accuracy of navigation has tripled in the past 10 years precisely because Gallileo and Glonass and the chinese system went online.
There is always bashing if there is something about the EU and its national projects, not always deserved. However sometimes I wished HN showed more of local projects. For example: has there been a post about the European AI?
or we need a European chip manufacturer, so we take the most pathetic legacy brand around, and give it billions to build chips from the old generation. Oh, hi Intel!
Are you talking about the satellite navigation system that's been usable and widely used for about a decade? The one that gives location data ten times more precise than GPS (1m vs 10m)? That's a "failed copy costing billions to Europeans"? Really?
Clearly you have no idea how these kinds of issues are resolved, and how policies are reviewed and modified, following such an occurrence. An abhorrently depressing view on humanity's future that you believe there is nothing that we learned from this. I thought this discussion forum was about our progress toward the future by the virtue of the hacker spirit?
Are you sure you're writing from an informed perspective? Galileo holds a LOT of expensive, time-consuming lessons that this project will do well to absorb. Outages are only scratching the surface.
You'll note that I didn't say "Galileo sucks," or "those guys are morons," or that there was no reason to build it. But the fact that it took longer to commission than the original NAVSTAR GPS system doesn't augur well for a Starlink clone. Which, in any event, will probably be so highly regulated and censored that it will be more like an orbital Minitel than a conventional ISP.
Bureaucrats -> Horizon and the other incredibly murky EU funding programs that a good bunch of these projects come from, with the ”businesses” ending up only having the lifespan of whatever runway they have been able to build with EU funding
I presume thats the gripe with a lot of these ”EU” technologies
US has no bureaucrats? All the EU member states, no bureaucrats? How many projects in member states cost the tax payer billions? Btw the EU budget is tiny in comparison.
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.
A crowd that is ideological resistant to reality in quite a entertaining fashion. Just remember the Boing 737 Max, which was never explored under this focus. Why does European airbus thrive, while us aircraft industry declined? Both are heavily state subsidized, so it is not that. There is something dysfunctional in us business culture, that extracts value first, and then runs without creating something for the value extracted.
It sometimes is almost reminiscent of the eastern European oligarchs that emerged at the end of the coldwar.
> Why does European airbus thrive, while us aircraft industry declined?
The documentary "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing"[1] goes into this topic, and I believe the wiki page[2] summary captures it nicely:
> "There were many decades when Boeing did extraordinary things by focusing on excellence and safety and ingenuity. Those three virtues were seen as the key to profit. It could work, and beautifully. And then they were taken over by a group that decided Wall Street was the end-all, be-all. [...]"
Of course, I have no idea if this is just cherry-picking information, but it does seem plausible why things "suddenly" changed.
I've heard one theory that the merger with McDonnell Douglas swept the bean-counters from there into executive positions ruining the engineering focus at Boeing.
The Microsoft spreadsheet happy-hippos are relying on India to buy enormous sums of Boeing passenger planes is one headline the media is running with, and another line of propaganda is to not bet against India. They say.
>> There is something dysfunctional in us business culture, that extracts value first,
You just said it. When we prioritize the money over the activity that makes the money... We deprioritize the activity - it's at least second place if not worse.
If there was a machine that increased a company's stock value by crushing orphans invented today, tomorrow there would be lobbyists in Congress pushing to allow corporations to directly apply for adoptions.
>A crowd that is ideological resistant to reality in quite a entertaining fashion. Just remember the Boing 737 Max, which was never explored under this focus.
Boeing was heavily criticized by HN in every thread I saw about it. You picked a wrong example.
I can’t comment on the broader US/EU perception question, but I would partly attribute Airbus’ success to its harnessing of smaller scale engineering excellence always present in Western European aviation. Airbus merely solved the problem of risk of high scale production which has historically been a challenge for European manufacturers relative to Americans operating in their large, uniform market.
I think pointing out Airbus is a bit questionable. Yes Airbus does well now, but Europe tried to do these kinds of things in many different places and most of them didn't end up so well.
And at the same time, if we stay within Aerospace, why is SpaceX utterly dominating anything from Europe. Is US business culture to blame?
Pot, meet kettle...seriously though, I don't think many people are inclined to "grow out of" advocating for their own self interests by giving up their freedoms to the state/bureaucracy. As long as there are power dynamics, those on the lower rungs will dare to annoy those on the higher rungs by sticking up for themselves...and vice versa
Perhaps you meant "they will eventually sell their soul" instead?
> 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 also be vassals of the US, which is itself a centralized power. So the EU existence, following your logic, is inconsequential.
Your thoughts were mildly entertaining to parse through. Sorry for not giving credence to your thoughts beyond mere entertainment however.
> EU is a vassal of the US (Pax America, which is a fairly ridiculous notion in and of itself).
You don't believe me? Perhaps Pax Americana needs to blow up another one of Europe's oil pipelines to remind you...
I wonder how long the sycophantic politicians can keep up the act before the freezing & unemployed citizens notice.
Here's a word of advice though, don't give the Nazis too many weapons. It may end up in a bad situation. They may hate Putin today, but tomorrow their prerogatives may change...
For the record, this is a standard Russian talking point. Stepan Bandera was a nationalist Ukrainian leader and his remembrance is one of the reasons why Russian propaganda now paints Ukraine as Nazified.
"War is terrible."
Indeed, and being absorbed into the Russian World is even more terrible. I get it, the Kremlin isn't exactly winning on the battlefield right now, so it tries to undermine the will to fight among its opponents. Nazis, Peace Now etc., the standard Russian word salad.
No, you are not getting Ukraine, forget it. That invasion was a bridge too far and Russia will lose badly. Good. I will never forget nor forgive the Soviet rape of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but Russian defeat in the Ukrainian war will at least somewhat soothe the bitterness.
Interesting that my anti-war reply gets flagged over here. Can't have anyone critical of wars allowed to speak out. Nor can certain extremist ideological movements with a history of mass destruction, whose current activities are well documented, be acknowledged. I believe that answers your question...
Sure...We should not support wars where many people die & we should choose diplomacy instead. We should not funnel arms to violent ideological extremists as well. One of these extremist groups calls themself "The Right Sector". Many members of "The Right Sector" have tattoos that are Nazi symbols, hold large tiki torch marches, & have publicly proclaimed Nazi ideology. Do I dare mention the over 16000 civilians killed (many of which are children) in the Donbas after the 2014 coup in Kiev?
My opinion is, you know, "right wing libertarian stuff". I must be off my rocker...So must Vice & the various other media outlets that extensively reported on this over the past decade.
```
Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshipers at a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, and several members of the U.S. “Rise Above Movement” who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, have been trained by the Azov Battalion.
```
Pax Americana & the EU is sending weapons to the Azov Battalion in this war. Here is more on the "Rise Above Movement", which Wikipedia describes as ```a loose collective of violent neo-Nazis and fascists", white nationalist, white supremacist, and far-right``` and ```Social media accounts used by the group shared photographed of members meeting with far-right and neo-Nazi groups in Eastern Europe, such as the Ukrainian political party National Corps and the Azov Battalion```
I also don't support Pax Americana destroying the Nordstream Pipeline, where the German people bear the brunt of this act of violence. I lived in Panama City, FL, where the divers who destroyed the Nordstream Pipe live, as reported by Pulitzer Prize journalist Seymour Hersch.
Sounds like I failed some sort of purity test here. It's a chilling time we live in; that simply saying we should not eagerly enter into wars & arm violent extremists is so controversial. Reminds me of the 1930s Germany, where so-called pacifists (imo people with common sense) were so wholeheartedly denounced when they did not support the tenants of the same extremist ideology that created WW2...whose modern direct adherents we are sending $billions of weapons to.
But shhhh, we can't talk about this. It's the dirty secret that shall not be mentioned. Who in their proper mind would support this? Consolidated power inevitably gets corrupted & turns into a bully because it attracts psychopaths, sociopaths, & sycophants into positions of leadership.
So please, denounce me & downvote me. Flag this post. Silence this thread. Many people critical of wars & arming extremist groups have been denounced & silence in the past and continue to be denounced & silenced. Show us all who you really are...Are the dead Ukrainians, dead Russians, & rise of Nazi ideological extremists worth it?
I wasn’t sure what you meant. It’s hard to tell what someone is indicating in online comments. I don’t think the world should stay out of Ukraine but I agree America doesn’t have to be in the war the way it is. Europe is powerful.
I keep thinking Russia is a joke now. Whatever they get of Ukraine, isn’t the country a mess now? Would they be able to invade Georgia in 5 years? Other regional power like Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia are much more successful at their imperialism. Israel is the most successful of regional powers. Israel is unique in that it is plenty more powerful than any neighboring country while having fewer people. Not to mention engaging in ethnic cleansing and an open air gulag/internment camp in the Gaza Strip.
I guess my thinking is who cares? Relatively speaking. We were still bombing Yemen with Saudis pretty recently. Israel kills so many Palestinians. America keeps trying to overthrow leftist leaders in Brazil, Cuba, and Venezuela. American intelligence assassinated the leader of my parent’s country a decade ago.
I never quite understood the intense hype of Russia and Ukraine. I’m guessing it’s because they are white and the Global North is white and controls the world, relatively speaking.
I realize my comment borders on whataboutism. I don’t think it is. I’ve condemned Russia’s actions.
These neverending wars & the incentives that perpetuate the neverending wars are a tragedy. I've been following the Russian state's reasons for the invasion, which is to combat NATO encroachment & to de-Nazify Ukraine. Putin stated that the US is "agreement incapable" & Xi told Biden something to the effect "you say one thing but do another". India & the global south do not condemn the invasion. Putin's rhetoric about fighting imperialist colonialism is received well not because Putin is a wonderful guy, but because these words ring of truth to the audience.
I'm not happy with the invasion but given the aggressive expansionist behavior of Pax Americana, I don't know if there are any alternatives other than the West using diplomacy in good faith. Russians see this conflict as "existential" & will not back down. Given such a position, does diplomacy not make sense? Why don't we know more about their positions? The captured media only tells one story. "Putin is a madman hell bent on invading Ukraine", when in reality Russia, after Gorbachev decided to end the Soviet Union, has tried diplomacy for years but the agreements were violated.
There was a US backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, which the Nazis played an important role in. The Minsk 2 agreement was broken by Ukraine as it continued to attack the Donesk & Luhansk Republics, both of which declared independence from Ukraine after the 2014 coup.
Zelensky & Putin were about to come to an agreement in February before the west, via Boris Johnson, intervened.
My main point here is diplomacy is possible & the natural course but bad actors in Pax Americana, like the NeoCons/NeoLibs only push war & double down on war when these misadventures fall apart. This behavior also drives the conflicts in Yemen, Israel, South America, etc.
The NeoCons/NeoLibs used to be known as "The War Party". Fitting name. They push for war & as we have seen, war is what we have gotten for a long time. The War Party has caused widespread destruction & sponsored widespread terrorism throughout it's history.
The alternative is peaceful coexistence with Russia, China, South America, Africa, the Middle East, etc. BRICS & a multipolar payment system are developing, which I believe will usher in a new age of global prosperity. The question is, will Pax Americana dissolve just like the USSR dissolved or will it remain by sticking to it's stated policy explained as:
```
we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population...Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security
```
or as the Chinese govt officials call it, The Thucydides Trap.
> Extreme individualism and libertarianism is an extremely seductive ideology. Its simplicity and self-justification is very appealing to many HN posters.
Forgive me for not taking their opinion about an economic block that they don't seem to understand and that their country doesn't belong to very seriously.
Well, as someone who has lived in various parts of the U.S (mainly Utah, Oregon and Northern California), as well as Germany, Denmark, and is married to an Italian: Germans, Danes, and Italians often have a lot of cursorily formed opinions of the U.S, while in the U.S if people have strong opinions about the EU (and not actual familiarity) they are often not just wrong or stupid but also just as often completely unhinged from reality.
I'm guessing this is due to stupidity manifesting in different ways in their respective regions.
Like apparently the UK bring a knife-ridden crime epicentre, when the knife-crime rate is, while unacceptably high, actually rather lower than the US, and that's before you consider guns which are about 10 times more on top of that.
(And let's please at least pretend that the UK is still in the EU for argument's sake :)
if I was suggesting that they're right to criticise the EU, I would have said that. what I was suggesting was that "America number 1, everyone else turds" is an extremely normal and expected attitude for a lot of Americans, and not something that I would describe as "odd". you seem to have read it differently
I guess the question is, is that level of response what one would expect or hope for in a forum like HN? Maybe we could aspire to a better level of discourse?
It is odd that you believe citizenship demands some kind of absolutist factionalism that is not just felt but continually reinforced using all available media channels.
I think the benefits far outweigh the downsides. To be frank, I think a big chunk of its problems is that it is not integrated enough.
Then again, my perspective is from someone not originally from Europe, that chose to migrate here and declined job offers from the US even though I would receive considerably more money had I accepted. I have zero regrets, by the way.
So take my opinion as one without the social nuance from someone born here.
I think many of the benefits could be achieved with better methods, other then putting a French style barley democratic bureaucracy on top of all existing democracies.
The reality is also that almost non of the people in the countries were actually asked if they wanted to join.
There is a difference between being pro European integration and pro existing EU structure.
how where people not asked if they wanted to join?
mind you, European integration is a major political pillar in national politics of basically all countries inside of europe and its periphery.
People vote on parties based on there political program, and most people seem to want to vast economic benefits being a member states brings. (heck, ukraine is basically fighting a war at the moment about an issue which basically boils down to European integration).
People definetly had a say if they wanted EU membership through the political process of there country.
The only case where this is a bit of a grey area is of the founding countries of the precursor of the EU. (european community of coal and steel). Most of those measures got passed as policy without a lot of democratic process by the populance.
But we cannot change the past, and considering the state of most of europe during the 1950's i wouldn't judge them so harshly for it.
I mean those problems are well understood. There are not that many parties to vote for and people vote for the party they dislike least. Some of those parties wanted to join the EU. In general it was elites that wanted to join the EU, not the party base. People might have voted social domestic because they wanted domestic labor laws but instead their country was integrated in essentially a super-national state.
The reality is most people vote primary for domestic polices, and the extent what the EU would do was not understood by voters at the time. There is a difference in initially joining and then having very little choice in the continue growth of that institutions power.
And in fact, in many places where aspects of the EU were put to a popular vote it actually fails.
There is also the reality that things like the EU/Euro were political projects and that Germany after the Cold War had to agree to some of these things in order for France and Britain to accept its unification.
People certainty were not asked if Eastern nations should be allowed to join the EU. Again, shouldn't a popular vote be in order when an institution like the EU considers adding a new member that can massively impact its economy and will receive untold billions in subsidies?
I'm Swiss so for me, a decision of such huge importance should actually be based on a popular vote. Not 'well in the 70s leftist parties were broadly more popular'. And once you are in, its incredibly hard to get out, and that is by design.
A real European Union based on fundamentally pro European pro Democracy principles would have been established over many steps and many votes. This would give some granularity to the choices. Maybe the population like one aspect of the many EU polices, but not the other.
In Switzerland we rejected the EG, but we joined Schengen, both based on popular vote. We join institutions such as ESA and many others. That seems to me to be a much better process of incrementally growing together.
> the state of most of europe during the 1950's i wouldn't judge them so harshly for it.
As a British person, I'd suggest you reconsider. Things over here are not so rosy. Drugs shortages, crazy inflation, no discernible benefits at all except to a government that hates judicial oversight of any kind.
I see Sweden the "utopia" that some claim has even higher inflation than UK, I guess that must be because of Brexit too right? And Italy, the land of the great food?
The UK would do much better had they not chosen Brexit. Basically everyone here admits that (bank of England etc) apart from some zealot politicians. And the health system has collapsed. The problems are not solely caused by Brexit but it exacerbates nearly all of them.
Exactly. Brexit long term net effect could be a few points off their GDP. That's not the end of the world, but it's certainly significant and it will make British people a poorer, which of course has an impact on public services. Whether this is worth it's up to British people to assess.
My personal suspiction is that UK citizens were mislead about the consequences of leaving but, hey, democracy is about taking decisions with incomplete information. People have spoken and their decision is sacred. I wish the UK the best luck and it's with sadness that I believe they will need a lot of it.
If your definition of Democracy requires no deception or falsehood in politics then there likely has never been a Democracy in human history. The voters never work with perfect knowledge, and the politicians always lie.
Euro Area inflation is significantly lower than UK, same as Germany, France, Spain, ...
In the EU as a whole it's slightly higher because of the East countries (Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, ...) where inflation is crazy high because of their dependency on Russia for energy.
UK is in the very West of Europe, not East, and not reliant on Russia as East countries are. The economic impact of Brexit has just been significant, as it was supposed to be. Everybody knew it would be. Brexit was never about economy, but mainly sovereignty. That's a legitimate trade-off, of course, and many in the UK prefer to be a bit poorer in exchange for less dependency on their neighbours. I respect that. But it's important not to fool oneself thinking that leaving the highest economy in the world (EU economy was bigger than US' before UK left) was going to be good for the UK economy. That's just nonsense.
The fact is not everything was the EU's fault. There was a lot Westminster could have done to make things better. They choose not to and indeed actually gold plated many EU directives due to virtue signaling which made them much more difficult to follow.
The fact is politicians at all levels including EU take credit for things they didn't do and try to ignore the fallout from things they did.
All the while blaming the voters.
Mainly because changing public perception of policy choices takes time and effort and they have limited of both and tend to want to focus on things they actually care about.
Can you share more about this 'drug shortage'? Is it like the empty shop shelves and empty fuel pumps that is claimed to still exist for years now despite being resolved within days/weeks at the time?
The UK has been doing a bad job at a lot of things and they ended up blamed the EU. Now all the problems are blamed by the opposition on leaving the EU.
The reality is that most of the UKs problems were not because of the EU before and are not because they left the UK now.
I think most Americans have literally no opinions about the EU. I’ve always assumed anybody talking about it lives there. It’s virtually absent from our lives here.
I’m American and my opinion is EU good. Also euro expanding east bad; single currency for radically different economies doesn’t work out well in theory and practice, ends up saddling everyone with a lot of debt since inflation in just Greece isn’t an option for France.
The EU is a major world power, like the US and China, which means everyone in the world will have opinions about them, of every level of informedness :)
The US is used to this. The EU still have to adjust.
Not all too different from Europeans smugly commenting about how crazy Americans are for having different priorities in threads that happen to relate to American issues.
As a third party (New Zealander), I don't think that's correct. I think the US criticism of EU is much more often baseless compared to the reverse situation (as evidenced by the number of issues which are picked up by the residents of non aligned countries).
Also as a New Zealander - I think the opposite - EU criticism of the US really misses many points about the competitiveness of their society and burden they bear protecting the rest of the world's democracies. I think it is really about people's personal politics - Kiwis generally are much more aligned (left) with EU socialism/interventionism and hence relate more and see US criticism as baseless. It's all a matter of perspective & personal politics vs one side being more baseless than the other.
"burden they bear protecting the rest of the world's democracies"
As an Australian, that's a pretty glowing interpretation of the US intervening where they aren't wanted or needed
Was the US protecting 'democracy' when they annexed Hawaii, or how they've treated Cuba? Or Vietnam or South America or Iraq or any litany of other countries
Hell. They helped depose Gough Whitlam because he dared threaten to nationalize our mines ala Norway, not to mention that worthless spying ring that is Pine Gap
You’re completely disregarding that they’re talking about the US being the armed forces of all western democracies and strawmanning about 19th-early 20th century imperialism (which Western Europe took part in far more than the US did.)
This is a further straw man when the point is that American economics and politics is what allows for the military that protects western democracies around the globe. Address the point don’t change the subject.
The US helped bomb Yemen this decade. Drone strikes still happen in multiple countries if I’m not mistaken. America funds Israel now. That’s all happening now.
The subject is about how the US sucks and should be critiqued. You're talking about defending what the US does around the world. I'm giving examples of how the US really is around the world, at least the Global South. What discussion do you think is happening?
As a USian, I think it is super important to question a super power that takes it upon themselves to protect the rest of the world's democracies--even if they have to force them into democracy first.
The same way I think it is super important to challenge Russia's current defense against Ukrainian aggression.
America is an awful country and they have lead 50+ coups. Murdered many millions. Installed tons of fascists, right wingers, and dictators. How is that protecting the rest of the world’s democracies?
If you’re in NZ you don’t have to fall for American capitalist agitation propaganda. It’s obvious the US only cares about advancing capitalism and its own imperialist whims.
In my experience, criticism of the US is of the "this is clearly harming more people than it helps" variety, while criticism of the EU is of the "look at what these silly people are trying to provide as a service to their citizens" variety.
Nah criticism from Europeans generally comes down, “look at dumb Americans doing things differently than us, don’t they know we’re objectively right about political and economic institutions?”
The same can be said of your posts. I pushed back against someone, so buzz off. You aren’t the arbiter of usefulness just as Europeans aren’t the arbiter of what other countries should be doing economically or politically.
This is a bit crazy to me since it seems like there is a constant, almost never ending praise for everything related to Europe here. But I totally get that it's probably a difference in what topic we browse and what comments we read, so your experience is just as valid. I guess it's just surprising to me!
You are right: here in the EU we often refer to ourselves as 'Europeans', thus implicitly excluding people from the non EU part of Europe. That's inacurate (and a bit disrespecful to non-UE Europeans, if you ask me). For that reason I try to always use the expressions 'EU' and 'EU citizen' instead of 'Europe' and 'European'.
Which reminds me that USA != America, also. It would be perfect we should not have to deduce from context when 'American' refers to anyone from the whole continent, from Canada to Chile, or just someone from the US. I guess it would be more practical to use 'US' and 'US citizen', for clarity...
I think the EU is ultimately the best option for europeans.Though I also think that it will always be prone to making super weird or counterproductive decisions by design (steering a ship with 27 different rudders will always be hard).
I guess I have a generally slightly negative opinion of Europe (or more accurately, of the portrayal of Europe I generally see online), having lived there for a little while. I guess it's that I honestly see a lot, lot more of harsh america bashing than criticism of europe. But ultimately, I'm a bit of an outsider to both the US and Europe and it might be that the constant, louder "america bad" makes eu bashing less apparent to me.
I am American and think it sucks. America is also closely aligned with capitalism which is praised far too much. Combine that with any American praise and America is warmly received here. The entire site is based around neoliberal capitalists. Of course it’s going to be slanted pro America in some sense and negatively EU and maybe Europe on the other hand.
I worked for the EU gov. and I believe that Europeans are more naive about the foundations of EU than Americans are about the US.
And far more sensitive about it.
All Americans are cynical about their own country and government.
The EU is a wierd entity, and few Europeanns have a true understanding of the mechanisms of power, the horrible democracy deficit; a result of a kind of 'blind faith' in institutions, and a naivte with respect to the power and motivation of their leaders.
I guess it's a bit like the 'faith' we have in something like the UN, it's all well meaning, but when you look at operational elements it's bizarre. There's a kind of utterly detached academic view that permeates UN culture, it reminds me of Brussels.
The French population roundly rejected the trety of Lisbon, the French government went ahead with it anyhow, and future referendums in Europe were annulled because the elite had no will to allow the plebes to have a voice. In their view, the plebes woudl be too dumb to make the calculation.
The European Court of Justice is one of the most insane things in Judicial history of the world - it was never granted the powers it has (!), rather, it 'took them'. ECJ 'Judicial Supremacy' is the longest political sleight of hand in history. It's a bit mind-melting and the smoke that the institutions throw up to try to imply legal foundations are established. In Germany, they still contest the legitimacy of ECJ Supremacy, as they should, but it's not allowed to be talked about outside Germany. If they bring it up in the UK or Poland it's considered 'alt right' inanity.
Nobody ever voted for Ursula Von Der Leyen and nobody even knew who she was (outside of Germany) before the election - and yet - she speaks for everyone now! Because Democracy! All of the arguments in support of this system of choosing leadership fall flat, like Russians justifying their invasion of Ukraine. European elite could 'fix' that specific representation problem instantly, they very actively don't want to.
Those are tiny examples, there are so many more.
Commenters here and other places are super pro-EU in a way that if it were some other country we'd recognize it as being very nationalist, but for some reason, maybe because the EU is not quite a country, we judge the defensiveness by a different standard. Americans might say things that are effectively pro-America, but rarely in a directly nationalist manner. No Americans is going to run on about some government program, rather more like a story about something that is 'great', but which happens to be in America.
Also, for some strange reason the Swiss are the other hyper-sensitive nationalist group here in that if you say anything they will come out like an Army. I'm not necessarily complaining, just nothing that oddity. Also maybe Canadians, except nobody ever talks about them (or rather 'us' as I am Canadian).
As for satelites, we have every right to be skeptical - the EU is 20 years behind in this regard and talk is cheap.
They are 'reacting' to this war, which is a function of careless strategic orientation of the past.
Maybe this 'wake up call' will reveberate into other sectors.
.... it was amazing to see Germany drop it's dependance on Russian Oil very quickly, I'm sure we are all as impressed by that as Ukrainian resilience in the face of invasion. So let's hope for more than Satelites.
Americans aren’t cynical. 95% can’t define an economic system outside capitalism or a stance outside liberalism of conservatism.
Americans don’t know anything about America. They love the Founding Fathers and founding of the country. There’s nothing critical to them. Holding the govt or corporations accountable is never done.
Americans can’t talk about great govt program because there’s so few of them. Of the Govt programs they do talk about, the major ones are: Defense, Social Security, Medicare. That covers most of the usefulness of the government. That’s unfortunately capitalism.
I’m first gen POC American, but I don’t like America. Anything Europe or EU is going to be better. Or Canada.
Americans are not cynical people, but they are cynical about their government.
Remeber 'Rambo'? The simple Vietnam Vet who comes home and is harrassed by the Police for no reason?
Or the 'Most American Film Ever' aka the Godfaather, which is criminal family's rise to power - and the Patriarch wanting the son to be 'something legit' aka a 'Senator'? That's JFK.
The American military, DARPA etc. are all amazing things, and frankly so is the Constitution and major institutions aka Congress even as people are cynical they are 'believers' in the end.
Anyhow - 'crude nationalism' isn't that common in intellectual circles where as defensive pro-EU (as an institution) commentary is all over the place and people who don't go for it are 'alt-something' etc. This is unique.
You're surprised a headline like "The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink" from "reneweuropegroup.eu" [1] stirs up nationalistic mud flinging?
It's silly to blame HN for this. This sort of headline is just asking for the conversation to be derailed. Which is exactly why your comment is #1 and the comments below it are quickly derailing into it's own version of EU vs US.
This article and your link reek of, "but Europe can do it too".
I don't know why the EU / Europe can't just do interesting things without coming across as so desperate to prove something – can we not just start a cool AI company without branding it a "European AI company", as if that's something so unlikely we should be proud of it?
An AI company started by kids would be something worth noting, an AI company started by the world's most prosperous and well educated continent is kinda cringy. I can't think of a single American company which does this.
I don't like putting more junk into LEO than we absolutely have to because it disrupts our space telescopes (which the EU has also invested over 1 billion euro in). I much rather have the funding go to improving land based internet infrastructure.
Putting more junk in LEO is a serious problem but SpaceX started this and now others will also enter the market. Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high bandwidth SATCOM market?
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.
Why should the not be there? They are in an orbit that has essentially 0 practical chance at causing long term harm. They provide a service that is clearly very useful.
Land based internet infrastructure doesn't solve the problem described in the article.
Specifically:
> It will secure the Union’s sovereignty and autonomy by guaranteeing fewer dependencies on third-country infrastructure, and the provision of secured telecommunications services for EU governments in critical scenarios where terrestrial networks are absent or disrupted, as observed, for instance, in the unfolding war in Ukraine.
In a large enough war, space infrastructure would actually be very vulnerable. Imagine a cloud of a few tons of shrapnel, spread around in an orbit that intersects all the 550km orbits of the Starlink constellation. This shrapnel cloud could be deployed with a single launch.
It's not that simple. Because enemy nation states also have their own satellites. They will just be damaging their own infrastructure, specially Russia with their huge land to cover they need their satellites.
I think these things would happen as a result of a process of escalations, not as a result of rational decisions.
Perhaps one side temporarily blinds a spy satellite with a laser[1], to prevent it from observing something sensitive. Then the other side reacts by blinding another satellite in the same way, but oops, the laser was a bit too powerful and it does permanent damage to the sensors. Then a single satellite is outright destroyed in retaliation. Etcetera.
The solution, I think, would be to have redundant terrestrial communication links. A spiderweb of links between nodes, with routing around damage. And fallbacks to slower microwave or radio links when fiber gets cut. And developing plans to make due with very low bandwidth (i.e. text based protocols) during a crisis.
Competition is almost the only thing that has ever lowered prices, raised wages, raised quality and invented new things. It's weird to demonise competition.
Yeah under capitalism that’s sometimes true. Otherwise, Cuba has great doctors and great medicine for example. A lot of America’s competition is BS. Companies behaving like cartels is more common.
Companies can start to behave like a government and reduce or eliminate competition, it's true. I don't think it's proportionally a big effect, but happy to read sources.
There are 10s of thousands planned and other companies eager to put up their own constellations.
Those that fall are planned to fall and to be replaced .. the issue is that are now thousands (and will be more) sats in LEO orbits polluting the night sky with both visible light and transmission spectra energy.
Doesn't matter much to those that live in cities and can't see the stars in any case .. but it's a blight to those that formally had clear skys, and to both visible and radio spectrum astronomers.
> are not visible to people when the satellites are in the shadow of the Earth (at night)
Night is altitude dependent. Satellites can be in sunlight while the ground below is pitch black. (That said, I find the complaints about visual pollution silly.)
Out of interest, where do you live on the light polltion map [1], Bortle scale [2]?
Do you have any sense of what you're missing out on or how bright and distracting tens of thousands of LEO sats glinting in the sun are, or to what degree they mess up long exposure visible astronomy shots, or the noise they make for radio astronomy?
I have no issue believing that you find "complaints about visual pollution silly" .. I'm guessing that would be because it has zero impact on you.
The Desert Fireball network is visible astronomy used to find rocks on the ground within 24 hours of impact - thus delivering insights into the early formation of the solar system and occasionally insights into extra solar material.
I think of it more as science than as a luxury pass time but you're welcome to your opinion.
> think of it more as science than as a luxury pass time but you're welcome to your opinion
There may be a niche for an open-source error-correcting model. These birds’ orbits are known and can be filtered from public databases. If you’re tracking meteors, you’re collecting enough data to project those orbits onto your field of vision and thus remove them as false positives.
For the luxury of taking beautiful photos, I unfortunately have nothing. (Though again, I find their paths pretty.) For the other, there are workarounds.
I live in Bortle class 3 and I don't notice more satellites now when star gazing then I remember 10 years ago.
The hundreds of starlink satellites are totally invisible to me, except sometimes right after launch.
A starlink satellite train is amazing to watch and I'd love to see it a few more times.
EDIT The light pollution that really bothers me is the terrestrial light pollution. There's several cities within an hours drive of me, and they make such a large glow in the sky.
FWiW I'm deep in class one area with no human glows on the horizon at night .. and in a large radio quiet zone - save fromn the chatter of unsheilded LEO sats above.
Some are switched off on over pass, many aren't.
I look forward to when all constellations are set to shut up when over head and the their surface an attitude are altered to minise reflection.
> when all constellations are set to shut up when over head
Total off is unreasonable, but a safety mode where chatter is reduced is doable. Particularly with LEO constellations. This could be done by e.g. the FAA, perhaps even solely through rulemaking.
I'm european and dont like thousands of satelites swirrling around in the sky as well but I'd rather have government-founded satelites for the public benefit than from some way-too-rich sociopath's private company.
Of course - this project would probably not exist without Starlink, so credit where credit is due.
Personally I find it quite sad that we're destroying the night sky in the sense that before these projects people could look in the sky and know that all humans before them had more or less the same sight.
Now there are just so many satellites swirling around in your sight. I find that quite sad.
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.
And yet, it does not matter when anybody became aware, but when it became a real problem.
Further, one can make use of a service or product today, and still be happy that there are better alternatives in the pipeline. I am certain that is how many Tesla owners view their vehicles, for example.
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.
So pressure your governments so that they invest in infrastructure either directly of by incentivising private companies while keeping them in competition with each other. Even some poor European countries have amazing internet connectivity right now.
I have reliable gigabit fiber, my internet is just fine. But I have plenty of colleagues in some parts of Europe that still have chronic issues with crap internet. Most of these are not in small villages, they are just subject to the whims of companies that simply don't care for whatever reason.
The quality of internet access is pretty variable most places in my experience, and there is more to it than just the notional bandwidth of the network drop you get. Some do it better than others but universally good quality internet for a country-sized region is still pretty atypical.
That's something that has occured to me right after posting, my bad. For context I live in a small-ish town (~50000) in the Czech Republic. However, we have about 5 local competing providers each offering decent speeds. Some have started offering 1Gbps speeds recently (though I'm still on ~600mbps myself).
> Personally I find it quite sad that we're destroying the night sky
That's not actually a thing.
> Now there are just so many satellites swirling around in your sight. I find that quite sad.
Except 99.9% of the time you can't see any of them. So for 99.9999% of people who don't do advanced space photography the night sky looks like it has always looked.
You can’t see Starlink satellites with your eye unless they are in sunlight while the ground is not (so a vary narrow time of day and set of satellites given a particular location).
The whole point of Starlink is that it's economically unfeasible to reach everywhere. Specially in rural areas, neither cables, fiber optics or 5G will make it. Keep wasting money in Europe.
You're moving the goalposts. First came the cities and then came the public infrastructure. 200 years ago none of that infrastructure existed yet cities were already there. That's because there was a need for it, which was self financed.
Then someone had the idea to reverse the cause effect relationship in a way to promote moving people to smaller towns and away from big cities. To the point of Italy selling houses for €1 to motivate people to move back from big cities. It doesn't work.
No he’s right and this is brought up here all the time. There are large swathes of America where people don’t have neighbors for miles (sometimes tens of miles) while there are comparatively few places in Europe that meet this definition.
Right. So it's not exactly about connecting those who are remote and need it... unless we consider that having access to TikTok on a ship is a fundamental need.
The comment you are replying too never said they were dependent on it. You’ve pivoted the discussion. The poster said Europe doesn’t have rural people by American standards. Revenue wasn’t mentioned.
He said “rural by American standards” not just rural. No one is pretending the word rural means that, that’s why additional context was added to the initial comment.
In Europe sure. That's why Energy is so expensive compared to the USA.
But in general that's not true. In particular, public resources such as electricity and water are installed for a specific planned capacity... the limit of how much resources to install is how much we can pay it back.
Public infrastructure is financed from taxes which is financed from jobs, this there's a cause effect relationship between infrastructure and productivity. That's the very meaning of self financed.
There are all kinds of hurdles to running fiber. Even if you eliminated them, running power to remote properties is also expensive. If we had the ability to beam power from orbit to a relatively inexpensive dish, that would be even more revolutionary than StarLink.
Your name calling is inappropriate, please keep your discourse more productive.
I'm a very big fan of astronomy, but I can't seem to care at all about satellites blocking terrestrial telescopes. Ubiquitous connectivity is simply a larger concern than land based telescopes.
Further, space based telescopes seem to be the future of the discipline. While land based radio telescopes are less effected by satellites.
A bigger concern is Kepler syndrome, but that threat seems minimal in LEO.
Land based will have an important role to play for a long time simply because we can easily service, upgrade and design new experiments for them which for a long time isn't going to be easy for space telescopes.
I don't like putting out huge amount of objects on any orbit because if they collide bits of them might spread to any orbit depending on the size of chunks and exact collision geometry.
This is vastly overestimated problem. Changing orbits takes a lot of energy and most of these crashes don't have enough to put significant materials in a significant different orbit.
If something is already on an orbit that decades within a decade or so, it still will.
If two things collide heads on there's decent probability of some chunks going twice as fast and twice as fast is 4 times the energy which means way higher orbit.
A fragment of a low orbit collision can't end up in a higher circular orbit, because the old orbit and new orbit inevitably intersect at the point/height of the collision, so in the best/worst case the new (more energetic) orbit's perigee/low point (which is the one that matters for the drag and deorbiting - and small fragments deorbit faster than large satellites) happens to be exactly is at the height of the collision and only it's apogee is raised; and in every other case the new orbit has a much higher apogee but the perigee is even lower, which means that the fragment deorbits on its own even faster.
So no, if satellite swarms are in orbits low enough to deorbit on their own within some years (e.g. 550km for Starlink), then a mass collision doesn't result in a Kessler syndrome as the resulting debris is effectively self-clearing. Doing the same at twice the height (e.g. 1100km original Starlink plan) would have that risk though.
2.4 billions is not enough for such a project given the EU overhead in cost. Espacially since the deadline is 2027, so 2030 with delays really, that means 350 millions a year for paying satellite design, build them, send them to space.
Does it annoy anyone else that the title says "Musk's Starlink"?
Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and owns half of the company, but any project like this is a collaborative effort between tens of thousands of people.
> Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and owns half of the company, but any project like this is a collaborative effort between tens of thousands of people.
You named the reason. Another is that Musk is incredibly high profile.
High profile individuals accrete accolades and renown. If you don't like it, stop working for someone else and build your own startup. (I mean this in the sense of encouragement.)
Well okay, that's true, but they would lose their jobs and not have billions of dollars to fall back on. So there is a strong personal element for them. In the classic pigs/chickens formulation, Elon is closer to the chicken side — he's got other companies to devote time to.
Being blamed has nothing to do with taking responsibility.
In this case, being blamed means that everyone will attribute the failure to him personally and say more nasty things about him and people will stop investing in his companies.
Sure. I guess just like Musk got blamed personally for his screw up with Twitter employees all over the world? He did a whole bunch of illegal stuff there, I'm still waiting to see consequences.
If they were actually illegal then we should see some settlements or court cases resolved over the next year or three. The justice system moves slowly.
He'll get fines ("settlements", I guess), and that will still have been cheaper than going the legal way. In the meantime many people lost their job in an irregular way (w.r.t. their country), and maybe they can't afford it.
That's how much responsibilities too rich people have: it's cheaper for them to go the illegal way and screw those who worked for them.
Yeah, it's always weird to see. I get that it's probably SEO related, still seems so dumb. Even ignoring the contribution of the employees, it's just a weird way to phrase it. Especially in articles like these, since the EU isn't doing this in response to Musk specifically owning Starlink, it's doing it in response to Starlink not being European.
The other day I saw an article referring to Twitter as "Musk's Twitter" which was even weirder because IIRC none of the content of the article was actually about Musk.
They still haven't finished Galileo yet; with the project seemingly going backwards ever since the British were forced out. How will they deliver yet another moonshot project like this? They don't even possess reusable rocket technology yet to make such a LEO project economically viable.
The Sentinel satellites ARE the Copernicus program(me). Why are the EU spy sats, sorry, totally-not-spy-sats, so poor and so few compared to what the US has?
> going backwards ever since the British were forced out.
It was already going badly for years before UK left. Galileo was scheduled to be finished in 2021, shortly after Brexit and around the same time UK parted from the project.
Galileo has been operational for a few years. Even customer mobile devices Support and use it.
Further more the British had a referendum and decided to leave on their own. Quite hard to call that force out. In fact it's impossible to expell a member state.
Operational? Yes. Reliable? No. It has had numerous outages in the last 4 years.
How do you explain several non-EU states being members of the Galileo programme - namely Switzerland and Norway? Hell, even China invested into it in 2003. And yet, the UK which invested almost a quarter of its funding is booted out on the basis of an unrelated political issue? It doesn't make sense. The British even offered to continue funding and investing into it. So "forced out" is an accurate description.
The UK was trying to negotiate a special agreement/treaty regarding Galileo. But the EU did not want to even consider it. Indeed even today the UK has not really given up on trying to be friends with the EU and continues to remain open to rejoining Galileo and Horizon programmes. Bizarrely, the latter of which, the EU seemingly had a moment of weakness during the negotiations by agreeing that the UK could remain members of Horizon - but then later had a change of heart and decided to break the agreement (international law?) in choosing to cut the UK out to this very day.
I hate these takes. If the goal of the EU is to make European cooperation. Why then was the attitude 'Britain wants to leave, fine fuck them'. Like just because they didn't want to be in the EU anymore, now the EU is no longer about cooperation? All of sudden the EU acted more like a geopolitical opponent of Britain.
The idea that there was not enough time to negotiate is nonsense. This was the EU punishing Britain for leaving, its as simple as that. If the EU was really about European cooperation, then they should have wanted Britain to stay in the project.
ESA existed before the EU and cooperation on space goes back way before the EU. It was short sighted politics with the goal to inflict punishment on Britain and make sure nobody else leaves.
Ah that would make sense! I wonder though, is my perception of Galileo as being less reliable accurate? Or are those issues normal for GPS too? My (probably ignorant) understanding was that the structure of the Galileo program made it inherently more brittle, considering how the first major outage went down.
The release specifically addresses commercial use:
> This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU territory, including over isolated regions where terrestrial and broadband connection remain scarce.
As does the page you linked:
> The system will also allow mass-market applications including mobile and fixed broadband satellite access, satellite trunking for B2B services, satellite access for transportation, reinforced networks by satellite and satellite broadband and cloud-based services.
All official releases only mention government use, I think the idea might be to use a government contract to help the industry develop know-how for private use later on
> All official releases only mention government use...
The second quote I pulled above is from an official source[1]. It seems pretty clear to me that it's intended as a dual-use constellation, with government services coming online first and an allotment for commercial services later. One of the two key objectives in the downloadable fact sheet[2] is:
> Allow for the provision of commercial services by the private sector, to enable the availability of high-speed broadband and seamless connectivity throughout Europe, removing dead zones.
> IRIS² will be a constellation at the cutting edge of technology, to give Europe a lead, for example in quantum encryption. It will therefore be a vector of innovation.
Quantum encryption?? Can anybody explain how this is related to satellites?
You can do QKE via sat-bounce, which is maybe what they're talking about, but this sounds more like clueless hype marketing than something written by an engineer.
I'm sure somebody is making good money with the push.
Meanwhile, previous proponents like NSA are moving to "post-quantum crypto" (as in, non-quantum crypto that resists attacks by hypothetical quantum computers):
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.
Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older. Iridium has been around for over 25 years.
If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the corner in the US.
AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for satellite based 5G that is supposed to work with any smart phone. Starlink is working on something similar with T-Mobile. G-Sat already has minimal D2D capability working with the latest iPhone generation.
Also, I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from for launching hundreds of satellites. Russia? China?
What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning here?
> it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech
If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage, reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something next gen F35 still not usable)
> I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from
> 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 a European citizen, I want the EU to stay competitive in the space tech sector.
...and that's probably with a considerable profit margin for SpaceX and at least some amount of "we're happy for any launch that keeps the wheels spinning" subsidy for ESA.
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.
At the very, very lowest prices that Ariane 5 ever offered, they were close to SpaceX in only one specific very hard to find setup. They needed 2 Geo sats that wanted to launch at the same time and likely only the cheaper of those two actually had a price comparable to SpaceX.
Ariane was lucky that space launches were contracted so many years in advanced in the past. They had many years of contracts already lined when SpaceX was only just scaling and had huge backlogs.
Even by 2014 it was totally clearly to literally everybody in space, that Ariane 5 had to go. It had no future, even with all possible help, ESA and national launches and insentient launches from EU firms it cost would wildly spiral out of control.
That said, Ariane 6 is only a slight incremental improvement (in reality its mostly upgrades that were already planned for Ariane 5 anyway). It was designed to compete with SpaceX as it was in 2014.
Hence why European space people are already planning and pushing for more money to build a next generation rocket. Despite Ariane 6 being a new rocket then Falcon 9, its already outdated.
However Europe (and everybody else) was incredibly lucky that Amazon decided to compete with Starlink and to do so they had to basically buy every single available heavy lift rocket launch for the next half decade. Lucky for them nobody everybody outside of SpaceX sucks, so nobody sucks. Ariane 6 can compete with ULA even when they can't compete with SpaceX.
> And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for Starlink.
Its kind of funny when people claim things that are so easy to verify to be false:
SpaceX has already flown 2 commercial flights to low orbit this just year and its February. And their re-usability is not just for low orbit, they reuse the rockets if the go to GEO as well.
Ariane 5 flight rate was never more then 7 a year, SpaceX is planning more then 10 purely commercial LEO, MEO and SSO missions just in the next few months.
- Transporter-6
- OneWeb Flight #16
- OneWeb #17
- O3b mPOWER
- WorldView Legion 1 & 2
- O3b mPOWER 5 & 6
- Transporter-7
- SARah 2 & 3
- Ax-2
I'm sick of doing this, you get my point. Ax-2 is planned for May. You can continue down the list for the rest of the year.
So your statement is almost hilariously wrong, and totally wrong.
The problem is just that SpaceX is launching so often and so many Starlinks that people get confused by it in comparison to what was normal the last 20 years.
Its seems you have formed your opinion based on a bunch of Arianespace propaganda. The have been focused on spreading a a bunch of false narrative the last 5-10 years.
Falcon 9 Success Rate - 173 / 184 (94%) - Most of it LEO
Falcon 9 Max Payload - 22 tons LEO, 8 tons GTO when all the conditions perfectly align and then it still kinda sucks.
Falcon Heavy Success Rate - 5 / 5 (100%) - No track record
Falcon Heavy Max Payload - 83 tons LEO, 26 tons GTO
Ariane 5 Success Rate - 110/115 (95.7%) - 7 to 10 tons GTO, Most of it GTO
Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical, when it has barely launched anything in orbit. Ariane 5 works, extremely well. Self flagellation about EU space tech serves no purpose.
What are you counting here? Booster landing success rates? Then Ariane has a Zero here.
According to Wikipedia Falcon 9 Block 5 has a success rate of 100% (149/149) for launches.
Also I don’t understand your comment when the parent talked about commercial success and that American space companies are/will be cheaper than Ariane.
That Falcon 9 success rate is for the first stage boosters landing. The current gen of Falcon 9 is 149/149 for launch success which would be comparable to the Ariane stat.
Looking at both recently they basically have a 100% success rate.
This is one of the most confused takes on EU launch that I've ever seen.
Your Falcon 9 success numbers are completely incorrect. The success rate is 100% on current models and overall having only 1 launch failure (or 2 if you count a pre-launch failure).
Falcon 9 launches primarily to LEO because that is where the market is. There are just very few satellites that want to go to GTO, but those that do generally launch on Falcon 9. It's launch costs are substantially less than Ariane 5, to the point that Arianespace is now thinking of rushing Ariane 6 to end of life sooner than planned to focus on a future reusable vehicle.
Falcon Heavy was primarily designed for the US DoD as it's primary customer.
Falcon family: 208/210 --> 99% (if you want to include AMOS its 98.57%)
> Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical
Its cost is unknown (so is that of Ariane 5), but its price is pretty well known. And costumers care about price and not cost.
> Ariane 5 works, extremely well.
Ariane 5 is end of live. It was incredibly expensive to the point where even Arianespace itself flew more missions with Russian rockets. It had a peak launch rate of 7 per year. Anybody with a brain has known Ariane 5 needs to be replaced since at least 10-12 years.
Outside of the Arianespace launched mostly Russian rockets, they just had a string of recent failures. Not to mention that they had issues with Ariane 5 that grounded the rocket for a very long time and the Swiss government had to provide emergency funding so they could make the launches leading up to Webb happen.
Arianespace will also consume more then 5 billion for the Ariane 6, a rocket that is mostly a slight upgrade over the Ariane 5 built with part that have been in development for a long time. This is more then the complete cost of the Falcon 1/Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy and reusability program have cost SpaceX.
The first step in improvement of European space is to not delude ourself of where we actually stand.
6 years ago the ESA and Arianespace were ridiculing reusable rockets, even as SpaceX was getting closer and closer to the non-RUD landing. Ariane 6 yet to launch, now trying to retrofit some level of reusability. Too slow, too stuck with their views...
From my perspective, the 40ms I get from Starlink is worlds better then the 900ms I got from my 128kb/s Iridium Pilot (now in the skip).
This direct to device tech is going to suck based on everything I’ve read so far. The radios in phones are so weak and undirected that getting 128kbps is going to be a challenge, let alone anything near what’s required to watch video.
Look at the gymnastics you have to do to use SOS on iPhone now.
Let's see. ASTS claims to have solved this problem. Apparently their satellites have 30mbit+/s throughput with regular 5G smartphones at <100ms latency. If this stuff works (big if), it's going to disrupt the cell tower industry over night and bring broadband to remote places where towers are too hard and too expensive to operate.
Also, I imagine 5G satellites will be of interest to the DoD.
Anyway, the main point I was trying to make is: EU competition is so far behind (even conceptually) that they are playing catch up with 10 year old tech instead of looking where the puck might be going.
> Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old..
If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen
Thats not their job.
Their job is to build infrastructure for Europe, Tonnels, GPS, bridges, etc, like the massive tunnels they are building through the alps.
Now they decided thay just like modern military and government needs a GPS, they need satellite based internet.
I am sure war in Ukraine has helped sharpen minds there.
Their remit is not to invest in speculative projects ala hyperloop.
How is 5G mobiles connecting to sattelites relevant to EU?
Thats 100% commercial operation, if it is relevant, it's the job of European mobile operators to fund it, not for tax payers.
So it seems that each group of nations needs/wants physical networks because it's not enough to use encrypted communication on others'. How many is enough, 3, 4, more?
Is this solvable with a single network? e.g. Is there a way of anonymizing users of a network preventing discrimination, analogous to cryptocurrency?
The point is if users are truly anonymous, you can't be selectively available as you can't discriminate. It's either entirely available or unavailable.
Except that you will have to authenticate to use any one such network. They're not going to provide free service, and they're not going to allow parties they don't want to allow or which they are told not to allow.
You might anonymize users, but for this tech you can't anonymize location, so blocking communications for certain locations is possible and governments really, really want to ensure that they have a system where nobody else can deny them ability to talk to a certain place.
Can satellites know precise location or only timings to get a ring of uncertainty? Also transmissions could be delayed/weakened to simulate being farther away. I don't know much anything about satellite communications which is why I was hoping someone who did could chime in.
Depends on the satellites (for GEO ones it's very different), but for the particular case of Starlink, there are two aspects - first, as satellites are relatively low, each satellite can only possibly "see" a ~1000km radius so disconnecting certain large regions is trivial by having the satellite not work when it's above that area; but the main issue is that an important component to ensure their bandwidth is 'beamforming', focusing the antennas to cells which IIRC are something like 50km in size, so a Starlink satellite can be physically reachable for one city and not in the neighboring one, without the ground-based receiver being able to do anything about it.
There's many organizations that have proposed Starlink competitors, but it turns out this kind of thing is hard. Starlink isn't the first to try this either, but they're the first to succeed.
There's very little hope of this getting funded or even if funded, getting developed sufficiently.
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 talking out of my ass and it looks like getting to the 12,000 satellites Starlink initially stated is approx $3.6 billion in total over the years. This is in comparison to the nearly $2 trillion annual defense budget. Or in comparison, I believe the military spent $15 billion on a software defined radio project that I believe never produced a single product.
Sure, I get it that big government isn’t synonymous with innovation. But relying on the whims of these increasingly questionable billionaires for something like global internet prob isn’t a great idea.
They mean he disagrees with them politically. By American standards, musk is still left wing and just doing what many Americans are either indifferent to (setting Twitter prices) or broadly agree with (his distaste for 'woke'ism).
What are you saying? Why make stuff up? Musk isn’t left wing any where. He’s obviously a right winger. He’s always been a right winger outside America. Now he’s finally a right winger here too.
They are gaslighting a prominent man because he is from a different political tribe to theirs and they believe that by denigrating him they are defending their own tribe from “the other”
The US already is exploring setting up its own low Earth orbit broadband constellation, upgrading its traditional satellites, and contracting with commercial entities.
The US is already doing this, and not just once. They are already working with multiple of next gen network providers. And they are also doing their own.
The DoD will have access to multiple such constellations and use all of them.
With the war, Ukraine needed satellite telecommunications, but the EU didn’t have something to offer. Ukraine should not have to rely on the whims of Elon Musk to defend their people.
What a weird reason to undertake such a project. Ukraine isn’t an EU member.
I guess this is the near term reason, but the main motive for the EU to set up their own satellite positioning system Gallileo was because GPS is under the whims of US military and may not be available to even US allies under emergency circumstances. They want critical infrastructure without relying on an external entity be it the US military or Elon Musk.
Why this infatuation with low Earth orbit? Why not put just few satelites further out, like every other satellite internet provide does except starlink?
EDIT:
To people bringing up latency. Far away satellite has them far enough that they cover large area so the signal goes to satellite and back and that's it. Distance introduces latency.
But in case of constallation packet must bounce through multiple satellites and/or ground stations to arrive at the target so that introduces latency too. So it's usually not great either.
Starlink originally planned to put their first shell at 1100 km altitude. They changed to 550km for several reasons. First, because it offered slightly reduced latency. Second, so long as you launch enough satellites, the reduced coverage region for each satellite is offset by having more satellites and hence (other things being equal) more bandwidth per area of land. Third, satellites at 550 km will naturally deorbit in a few years if something fails. So although they plan to actively deorbit the first satellites after 6 or 7 years to replace them with newer ones, if they get something wrong and have a lot of satellite failures, they really won't cause a long term problem. At 1100 km the orbit won't decay for centuries. If you have satellites fail, the rest of the constellation will be doing avoidance maneouvers for a very long time. Thus if your launch costs are low enough and you can mass-produce satellites cheap enough, you want them as low as possible. Somewhere around 500 km is about as low as you want to go, before too much of the satellite mass ends up being fuel to maintain orbit.
The van Allen radiation belt [1] starts at 650 km (and ends at 58,000 km).
The satellites would probably have a shorter lifetime if they were higher.
Since the speed of light is 300,000 km/s, adding 300 km adds one millisecond of delay, or 2 milliseconds to a roundtrip. Doesn't seem a lot for satellite internet?
Geostationary orbit is at 36,000 km, then for lag that is indeed problematic as it's then 240 ms for a round trip. Still bearable.
Starlink is available to consumers. This is not and will not be. Flagged for being super misleading.
I would love some actual Starlink competition. My parents live a 15 min drive into the mountains and due to the topography there is no cell phone service nor incentive to provide it. Starlink is the only realistic option they have for usable internet. They had viasat before and the latency is so high it was garbage to use.
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