Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

195 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by bblcla

Item id: 47428650

251 Comments

devin

6 hours ago

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over themselves about Starlink for rural connectivity when it is an incredibly complex and expensive technology with huge ongoing costs that could have been solved once and for all by simply running some wires.

modeless

4 hours ago

You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our tax dollars to get everyone connected. Plus the benefit of mobility is enormous and shouldn't be ignored.

As solar and batteries become cheaper, eventually we can transition to most rural residences being entirely off the grid and self sufficient. This will also be cheaper and less resource intensive than maintaining the electric grid in those rural areas, let alone building it in the first place, and we can all stop paying hidden subsidies for those users.

andrewharvey

3 hours ago

this.

Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.

Affric

8 minutes ago

Grid prices are going to start coming down in some of the most expensive parts of Australia due to SAPS, home generation and storage, and microgrids.

I wouldn’t rule out the grid just yet.

markdown

2 minutes ago

If you find Starlink cheap they just haven't gotten around to the bait and switch in your locality. It'll come.

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Where are you? In the suburbs of Atlanta I paid $80 for AT&T Fiber 1Gbps u/d.

gnabgib

2 hours ago

If they're paying Australian Dollars.. probably not Atlanta

UltraSane

2 hours ago

Man, I pay $50USD/month for 1Gbps up down in Wisconsin.

sunshinekitty

3 hours ago

The HN groupthink is to hate on anything Elon adjacent, satellite internet included.

razingeden

3 hours ago

hopefully that include his business partners , airlines in this case.

platevoltage

2 hours ago

It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity. He constantly fights against the type of programs that could have possibly given us satellite internet, the same way we all get to enjoy GPS.

SV_BubbleTime

an hour ago

> It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity.

Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense.

You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.

tdeck

42 minutes ago

Before he went in for Trump he was running a factory with an alarmingly high injury rate, where employees were regularly called the N-word, and union busting. People who liked him then weren't paying attention at all.

iknowstuff

6 hours ago

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries.

It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries.

We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.

TulliusCicero

5 hours ago

Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct.

Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable.

Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas.

Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.

devin

5 hours ago

Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives. The "fix" was for some private company to launch things into orbit. It's an expensive fix to a simple problem.

TulliusCicero

5 hours ago

Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why.

I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either.

Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.

sysguest

4 hours ago

this

people here don't understand how large USA is -- connecting every corner with copper/fiber, with all the intermediary networking devices means tax money...

devin

4 hours ago

Yes, it does mean tax money. Stop corporate welfare and bump the corporate tax rate back to a reasonable value.

nradov

4 hours ago

A better option would be to eliminate corporate income tax entirely, and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Corporations waste a lot of resources on financial engineering to minimize tax liability, and that's a pure deadweight loss for the economy as a whole.

Tempest1981

4 hours ago

Savvy executives can also keep their income near 0 by borrowing against their stock holdings.

nradov

2 hours ago

So what. They pay interest on that loan, and those interest payments eventually flow to the employees and investors of the lender. Who can be taxed.

hattmall

an hour ago

Yes, but we've already done it, twice, and the benefits were quite significant.

shagie

4 hours ago

My parents have Starlink. They live in an area surrounded by dairy farms. It's half a mile between mailboxes. The nearest town is 7 miles away (though only 3 as the crow flies - lots of hills between here and there).

None of the neighbors have cable TV. You've got to either go into town or t'wards the highway 7 miles the other direction).

Three years ago, the utility ran natural gas that far out. Prior to that, it was propane tanks (for the past 50 years) for heat in the winter.

The state capital is 30 miles away... so its not that far away from civilization (this isn't Montana or the north woods of the upper midwest).

When nano-cells came out for cellphones my father and I were the first in line at the store (that was 2010 if I recall correctly). It let the house be able to use a cell phone in the yard - before that it was the landline (and it was DSL for the nano-cell backhaul).

In 2020 when school was remote, their grandkids were there. Prior to Starlink my father got a Firewalla (for network load balancing) and got a second DSL link (it was barely qualifying as high speed internet) so that it could support two zoom calls simultaneously (don't stream music or watch YouTube while the kids are on Zoom School).

5G cell coverage sounds great... but those hills I mentioned earlier? You can get cell phone coverage at the house without the nano-cell... if you get a ladder out and climb up to the top of the roof.

So yes, to support the person I'm replying to - there are a lot of people who are 30 minutes outside of a city of appreciable size and are without wired high speed internet.

In https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=... the area that they live in has 0% for 100 Mbps for the majority of the northwest part of the county.

dboreham

4 hours ago

Generally agree. I live in a location that had (still has?) PSTN service, electricity, and natural gas services, but never got any kind of broadband besides the network I paid for and deployed myself, and subsequently of course StarLink. I think the issue isn't so much that people are demanding internet service in random places, more they're expecting internet service in the places you get all the other regular services.

edgyquant

3 hours ago

I don’t think we should subsidize internet, but your framing here rubs me the wrong way. People in these rural areas usually live among family and have lived there for generations, reducing this to a choice feels very elitist. People aren’t “choosing” to not pack up their entire lives and move to a city or town.

platevoltage

2 hours ago

We shouldn't subsidize internet, it should be provided. The internet is necessary to participate in modern society, and to only provide it to people who can afford it is what's actually elitist.

iknowstuff

26 minutes ago

Last we checked we pay for water too. It’s abundant. It still makes sense to have a price on it because it’s a resource like anything else.

In the same way, we pay for the internet. Free wifi exists if you can’t afford service.

Rather than elitist, it’s just… not communist.

strbean

5 hours ago

I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"

The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

renewiltord

3 minutes ago

No, it is not at all certain that it pays for itself.

TulliusCicero

5 hours ago

> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"

Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.

> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.

strbean

4 hours ago

> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.

This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.

TulliusCicero

4 hours ago

Sure, if we restrict the subsidy to farmers and others where we need them to live in rural areas, that's fine.

strbean

4 hours ago

But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?

Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.

Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.

iknowstuff

3 hours ago

Farmers and ranches don’t need any more incentive to live there on top of the boatload of money they make selling their produce

throw__away7391

4 hours ago

The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.

jasonwatkinspdx

4 hours ago

Unironically: go move to Somalia if that's the government you want.

The rest of us understand that's utter stupidity, natural monopolies exist, and capitalism needs guard rails.

TulliusCicero

4 hours ago

I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart.

I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.

jasonwatkinspdx

2 hours ago

Having grown up in rural Kansas and now being an urban tech worker, I think you have a derogatory and ignorant view on people who live rurally.

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Yes all of the farmers should move to the cities.

poulsbohemian

4 hours ago

>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days.

Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.

hombre_fatal

4 hours ago

Decentralizing population seems at odds with goals like better public transport and infrastructure.

pbh101

3 hours ago

Who said those two were the ultimate goals to work towards?

mikkupikku

2 hours ago

You think cities exist for the sake of buses, and not the other way around?

performative

4 hours ago

other than introducing public policy to encourage building more housing, i assume?

poulsbohemian

4 hours ago

The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing.

So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.

derektank

4 hours ago

>The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises

Over three quarters of all residential land in Seattle is zoned single family and the population density of the city is less than a third that of NYC. The geography is not the hard constraint in this city.

nradov

4 hours ago

Subsidizing down payments doesn't do anything to improve housing availability or affordability in the long run. It just artificially inflates real estate values and acts as a wealth transfer from taxpayers to property owners.

hombre_fatal

4 hours ago

You offer cities with aggressive anti-development regulations, like max height restrictions, and then suggest things would be the same if they instead had endless high-rises?

Sounds like you've found an infinite-value hack: let developers build infinite housing yet prices stay the same.

How many of those "random policy ideas into the void" were to lift regulations to allow people to build housing? Which sounds a hell of a lot simpler than figuring out how to make everyone wealthier without proportional increases in market prices.

galleywest200

4 hours ago

Moving is incredibly expensive. First+Last month rent up-front, plus a deposit equal to one month rent up-front. That could total around $10,000 up-front costs if you are targeting a major city.

Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.

nailer

2 hours ago

lol I paid 17K for NYC - two months rent, extra month for being foreign, 2K since they removed blinds since they showed me the apartment and everyone in NYC could see into my house.

scubbo

6 hours ago

People can't afford to live in cities? Well, they should simply choose to live elsewhere.

People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.

TulliusCicero

5 hours ago

Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable.

Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.

kbar13

5 hours ago

that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc

TulliusCicero

5 hours ago

Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.

aaaaaaabbbbbb

5 hours ago

Ah yes, one step outside of New York City, and I'm immediately in the boondocks.

hdgvhicv

4 hours ago

If you’re on the electric grid why can’t you be on a fibre grid.

sysguest

4 hours ago

well for electric grid, you only need "local" connections -- eg. just your town and the generator...

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Who needs all of the damn farmers anyway?

platevoltage

2 hours ago

The corporations buying up all of the land formerly owned by these bankrupt farmers probably do.

jjmarr

4 hours ago

Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier.

The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies.

If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.

pibaker

4 hours ago

No country capable of landing a single troop on the lower 48 is scared of undisciplined men with AR-15s.

In fact I am not sure if any country can get a troop transport near the US coast without being nuked to the ground first.

jjmarr

3 hours ago

In the 1930s and 1940s, Mexico wanted to invade Texas and reverse the Mexican American war.

pibaker

3 hours ago

I can't find any source suggesting this was actually a thing in the 30s and 40s. All I can find is the Zimmerman telegram from a hundred years ago which the Mexicans weren't exactly enthusiastic about.

In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.

protocolture

30 minutes ago

>I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites.

Actually whats crazy is that you guys had private and public power run everywhere, and those companies had private and public fibre companies run fibre through those power lead ins almost everywhere that's practical. A feat thats honestly not been achieved anywhere else that I have seen. Lots of people in other countries stomp around wondering why private fibre doesnt just materialise in their house, when they have no access to national public utilities. The answer was local utilities. But there's not even an ounce of appreciation for it outside of the ISP space.

GMoromisato

4 hours ago

I don't think the math works.

There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house).

It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet.

By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).

devin

4 hours ago

I appreciate you actually taking a moment to think through the cost, but I think we could start with some pragmatism and look to run wires to people who are within a reasonable range of existing systems, of which there are many.

Clearly not every public road needs wiring. Then, consider that you could run wired connections to wireless access points to increase high speed wireless coverage. 1 wire to light up dozens of homes in areas which currently have no service beyond DSL.

Tempest1981

3 hours ago

Doesn't Starlink have some annual upkeep costs? Maybe $1-2 billion per year to replace aging satellites?

miki123211

5 hours ago

Internet still has a "moral vice" label associated with it that I don't think electricity ever had.

In the popular person's imagination, electricity is the revolutionary technology that enables cheap and safe lighting, as well as instant access to information (through radio). The telephone is the revolutionary technology that lets you call a doctor in an emergency or negotiate crop prices. The internet is the revolutionary technology that lets you go on dating sites and stare at pretty girls on HotOrNot, talk to fellow netizens on discussion forums, and waste hours playing Mmorpgs. It's "that weird technology that the young people use for God knows what." It's for entertainment, not serious business use, except if your business is in providing the entertainment.

Of course none of it is true, especially these days as so much non-tech-adjacent business is happening over the internet (and especially internet-enabled smartphones).

DaedalusII

an hour ago

its literally cheaper to create a low earth orbit satellite constellation than deal with bureaucracy

fy20

5 hours ago

Are there any countries that have actually done an exhaustive job of this? I'm from the UK, and I'd say they are pretty good, my parents live in a 300 person village, and they can get 50ish mbit internet through wires. But "rural" in the UK is very different from "rural" in some parts of the US. And this was done by a private company (although it was based on infrastructure built by the government).

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Blame rural America who continuously votes for politicians who oppose it.

moduspol

5 hours ago

Eh, I think we'll look back on this in 10-20 years and conclude that wireless transmission was always going to make more sense than running millions of miles of wires. Especially so for rural access.

scottyah

4 hours ago

Wired will definitely be the rich, elite way to go.

BurningFrog

4 hours ago

Satellite internet can get several orders of magnitudes more capacity.

jasonwatkinspdx

4 hours ago

The only way rural America got landline service was by the government forcing it. The market had no solution.

platevoltage

2 hours ago

Municipal internet is something the ISPs lobby against like there is no tomorrow. It is a shame, but that's how the US government works.

gowld

2 hours ago

Why is wire better than terrestrial wireless? Isn't terrestrial wireless how most of Africa caught up to more earlier-developed regions in telecom?

stevenhuang

2 hours ago

Your understanding of the history and economics of it all is very confused.

> simply running wires

Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.

Hansenq

10 hours ago

Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago.

Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!

https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-united-ceo-sc...

Nicholas_C

8 hours ago

I'm surprised he would admit that publicly on a podcast.

vl

6 hours ago

After deal is done it becomes rational to describe how good it is in comparison to completion to promote it.

moduspol

5 hours ago

It's also possible that it's a post-facto rationalization that only seems prescient in hindsight.

gpt5

10 hours ago

One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free. I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this, but it was surprising enough to me that my international WiFi was not only fast, but completely free that I researched it.

jfoster

2 hours ago

I think this approach gets the whole industry to adopt it.

Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.

By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.

stingraycharles

20 minutes ago

Correct, I’ve had Starlink in several long haul flights over the past 6 months and it’s already becoming an expectation, ie makes the flights without it noticeably worse. I’m not sure whether everyone gets it for free, though, it was my understanding that it’s complementary for business class but a paid add on for economy. But once you have it, it’s fast and stable.

SoKamil

10 hours ago

> I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this

One word: marketing.

nativeit

9 hours ago

A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.

htx80nerd

9 hours ago

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives

pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.

even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.

had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.

overfeed

9 hours ago

In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.

Wyverald

8 hours ago

Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").

mattmaroon

8 hours ago

He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.

There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.

nativeit

4 hours ago

I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.

I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.

I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).

So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.

tayo42

4 hours ago

You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?

kdkdkrjrj

7 hours ago

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

nradov

7 hours ago

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

rconti

6 hours ago

It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.

Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.

ghaff

6 hours ago

I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.

parineum

6 hours ago

> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...

You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.

You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.

You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.

Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.

Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.

There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.

rconti

4 hours ago

Profitable vs unprofitable is not black and white. No doubt there are some places where it's simply not profitable to run the fiber today.

However, there are a TON of places where the business strategy you outline is a great idea, and would be profitable.

..... until the incumbents lower their outrageous prices in the face of the competition, and bam, now your business model is no longer profitable.

nativeit

4 hours ago

We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.

nradov

4 hours ago

Sure, subsidies are potentially an option to increase broadband availability. But that's not really a regulatory capture issue.

FireBeyond

6 hours ago

Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).

mediaman

9 hours ago

It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.

I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.

And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.

And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.

mattmaroon

8 hours ago

Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.

I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it

sangel21

6 hours ago

Australia we just turned 3G off now there are large black spots everywhere for hours.

Some trades now use them in there cars, they can use it for mobile service/internet nearly anywhere

infinitewars

6 hours ago

RV is a great use case but a tiny market. For fixed broadband the others are cheaper most everywhere in the U.S. that people actually live.

uyzstvqs

5 hours ago

Residential prices:

100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.

200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.

400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.

A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.

dadoum

5 hours ago

I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.

In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).

lurkingllama

9 hours ago

In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.

lxgr

7 hours ago

> their ungodly expensive product

Do you have any idea how much other satellite operators charge per megabyte or Mbit/s?

victorbjorklund

7 hours ago

Their competitors isn’t other satellite in most cases. It’s fiber, 5G and so on.

sangel21

6 hours ago

It's cheaper then fibre here in Australia. Especially rural.

nostromo

6 hours ago

Starlink isn't expensive by those standards either.

infinitewars

6 hours ago

Starlink's main goal isn't consumer internet, it's being the backbone for Golden Dome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

DarmokJalad1701

5 hours ago

> Of course that's terrifying...

Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.

infinitewars

5 hours ago

For trillions of dollars, Golden Dome is unlikely to be effective at interception, but it destabilizes MAD and can be used as a global prompt strike offense weapon.

So, worth it?

mattmaroon

8 hours ago

They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.

Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.

wat10000

7 hours ago

$39/month for 100Mbps in the middle of nowhere is spectacularly cheap.

inemesitaffia

7 hours ago

Starlink costs around the same as business mobile Internet.

Or see T-Mobile away

bs7280

10 hours ago

United gives you free access only if you are a mileageplus member I think?

Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.

theultdev

10 hours ago

Joining United MileagePlus is completely free, you just sign up.

About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.

kevincox

9 hours ago

Completely free as in you don't have to give them money.

But you need to give personal information which also has value.

schmookeeg

9 hours ago

More personal information than you provide them to purchase the ticket to use the free starlink?

tjoff

9 hours ago

Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.

kevincox

9 hours ago

Probably, because you are now associating your internet browsing with your personal information. (I don't know if they have the sophistication to actually do this, but it is very possible.)

theultdev

9 hours ago

The people concerned with that hypothetical can use a VPN.

At most they could see domains, ip addresses, timestamps, and http-only sites (are there any left?)

But the person sitting next to you can see everything.

LoganDark

an hour ago

> But the person sitting next to you can see everything.

Privacy filters are a thing.

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

You realize you have to give them the same informaron to even step foot on the plane?

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Delta has had free high speed satellite internet for years. I’m going to start flying Southwest more this year but they also advertise free internet. I don’t know how fast it is.

ddoolin

6 hours ago

Really ironic given that they pulled the rug on general aviation usage.

briandw

5 hours ago

It’s too difficult to distinguish between a terminal in small GA aircraft and something with destructive payload. Commercial aircraft are few and controllable.

bpodgursky

10 hours ago

Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.

oceanplexian

10 hours ago

Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink.

I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.

ghaff

6 hours ago

Airplanes are one of the places I feel happily disconnected from being online. Never used in-flight WiFi even when my company would have paid for it.

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Delta has had high speed internet for years on their flights. I’m Platinum Medallion

scottyah

4 hours ago

It's probably what the UA CEO was talking about, trying to get competitors to sign contracts with other providers. Viasat was hot stuff for a long time, wouldn't be surprised if there's a noncompete preventing the change.

thinkling

8 hours ago

Delta uses Viasat and has been rolling out free wi-fi on more and more of their planes. Is it not usable?

lxgr

7 hours ago

It’s pretty good, but the latency is inherently high since Viasat is in GEO.

spullara

5 hours ago

~600ms ping times vs ~40ms on Starlink

inemesitaffia

7 hours ago

Starlink failed it's Delta Demo.

The article is online.

supertrope

9 hours ago

It could just be the ESPN/gym membership/AAA business model. $ from every single passenger is more revenue than $$ from just those who click buy.

light_hue_1

10 hours ago

> Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals

The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.

unsupp0rted

10 hours ago

Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)

SR2Z

10 hours ago

T-Mobile also offers free Wifi on airplanes.

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Only if the airplane uses much slower ground based Gogo (?). I use it every now and then when taking the 45 minute flight from ATL to my parents home in South GA

sangel21

6 hours ago

Most of the airlines I have been on charge per megabyte. Having internet for the whole trip is a huge value add for the airline.

nelox

7 hours ago

And show ads for it on the inflight entertainment

technothrasher

6 hours ago

The built in entertainment systems are so full of ads, that I much prefer the planes with no seat back screens. I've always already got my own devices which I use to entertain myself, whether the airline is providing advertainment or not.

mh-

5 hours ago

And no one interrupts the movie I fell asleep watching on my iPad in order to push a credit card application at max PA volume.

mandeepj

10 hours ago

> One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free

There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.

kotaKat

10 hours ago

On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.

There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).

https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...

ryandrake

8 hours ago

What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.

tonymet

10 hours ago

give the customers the complete experience and they will subscribe.

IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.

apitman

10 hours ago

I've only had it once, but inflight Starlink is a game changer. I was able to play a ranked AoE2 game over the Pacific Ocean.

TulliusCicero

6 hours ago

That sounds somewhat unpleasant even if the connection itself is fine. How much space did you have for a mouse?

apitman

19 minutes ago

It depends on the airline, but sometimes I can put my laptop in weird positions that aren't half bad. The main technique is fully opening the screen, balancing the laptop on its lower edge, and using a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Has the added benefit of putting the screen closer to eye level.

batshit_beaver

6 hours ago

He didn't say he won.

LightBug1

6 hours ago

Did they even enjoy it though beyond the novelty!?

darknavi

5 hours ago

Everyone wins when you can wololo with others on the internet at 30,000ft.

scottyah

4 hours ago

Hah, reminds me of learning to play Quake Live on my macbook trackpad. It was hard to go back to a mouse.

sva_

5 hours ago

I guess not everyone flies economy (I do though, and not out of choice.)

apitman

22 minutes ago

I thought this was an AoE2 eco joke for a second

throwaway132448

8 hours ago

No internet on flights is one of my favourite features.

fdghrtbrt

8 hours ago

Right. I don't know what I find more disturbing: that people are this addicted, or that they don't care. Either way, I'm with you.

AndroTux

5 hours ago

So let’s get rid of internet on the highway and in trains, too. Because it’s pretty much exactly the same thing. One just happens to be airborne.

pibaker

an hour ago

> get rid of internet on the highway

Does not sound too bad once you have seen the number of drivers scrolling their phones while driving lately.

fdghrtbrt

5 hours ago

> So let’s get rid of internet on the highway and in trains, too. Because it’s pretty much exactly the same thing. One just happens to be airborne.

Ok? You sound like you're trying to make a point. Make a point.

peab

an hour ago

his point is that it's useful, and there's nothing special about planes that make it important for them not to have internet, compared to any other mode of transportation. If you want to get away from the internet, you could have a dedicated space for that.

Also, nobody forces you to use the internet on a plane...

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Its cellphone based and has the same issues you would have just using your cellphone.

deathanatos

4 hours ago

… or maybe I have 6 hours to kill?

Would you look at someone reading a book and be like "it's so disturbing that people are this addicted"? Is something Internet connected really that different?

(That said these days I'm thrilled if there is power on a flight.)

fdghrtbrt

3 hours ago

It IS different. Because scrolling is effortless, reading a book takes effort.

Do you understand?

jryle70

an hour ago

I suppose you'd approve if I read book on the internet? What if I'd be working?

rjh29

3 hours ago

For normal people the presence of wifi on airplanes is not a problem; they can simply not use it. It's not a threat to them.

I use the internet more than I'd like, and I agree that the lack of wifi (on a long international flight) can be a really nice experience.

rayiner

10 hours ago

I tried Starlink on a United flight the other day (short hop from Hilton Head to DC) and it was amazing.

userbinator

42 minutes ago

Why the .ai domain? Are you using AI in your data pipeline somehow?

gadders

10 hours ago

I wish my bloody commuter train into London had Starlink. Even when the onboard wifi works you are limited to 100mb of traffic.

I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.

sva_

5 hours ago

Just swap mac address if you have to use such a wifi. Or set up Xray[0] with the captive portal as domain if you have a VPS and are so inclined. Can also use this on locked down airplane wifi.

0. https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core

whalesalad

6 hours ago

Just get a good 5G plan? On the ground in a busy metropolis like London, I can't imagine why or how you would need to consider using satellite communication for connectivity. Then again the last time I was in London the cellular service was by and large pretty bad.

davnicwil

3 hours ago

yeah, 5g doesn't work on trains very well once just a little bit out of zone 2/3. Actually to be honest any connectivity at all is patchy.

Bombthecat

an hour ago

My trip from USA to Amsterdam doesn't have starlink, at all. Not a single plane. No matter the company.

So sad

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Starlink is good I’m sure. But it isn’t the be all end all of high speed internet on planes. Delta doesn’t use Starlink and most of its planes have fast satellite internet except the A900s used for short hops.

Hansenq

10 hours ago

I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.

So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!

bblcla

10 hours ago

> The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.

Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?

SR2Z

10 hours ago

Regional planes are for direct routes to smaller airports, but hub-to-hub flights can be filled up and easily justify larger airplanes.

torcete

6 hours ago

People are so rude with their phones that I fear that starlink becomes popular in all flights.

peab

an hour ago

United recently started announcing at the beginning of flights that using your phone with sound on the speaker is prohibited, as a new official policy.

raw_anon_1111

2 hours ago

Talking on your phone has always been prohibited while in flight. Having high speed internet on a plane is not new.

seneca

6 hours ago

I share your concern. Airlines seem to be anticipating this. There was a recent publicized incident of American Airlines removing a woman from a flight for playing audio over her phone speakers. United has similar policies. As I understand it, both are saying they will ban passengers over it.

rootusrootus

10 hours ago

Well, hells bells, next week I'm actually going to be flying on an Alaska Airlines E175. That's quite rare for me, I can't remember the last time I've flown on one of their small planes. And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink. Sweet! I may have to try it out, even if paying for WiFi on a short flight is generally a waste of money.

Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.

bblcla

10 hours ago

> And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink

Not quite sorry, we only track the frames that do have Starlink. But if you check back a few days beforehand you can see if yours matches!

rootusrootus

8 hours ago

Took me a second to parse that. It says 28 of 28 E175s have Starlink, but what I am hearing you say is that Alaska has more than 28 E175s.

Indeed, wikipedia says their fleet includes 47 E175s. Consider my hopes dashed :(. Oh well, I don't usually bother with wifi on flights that are only a few hours anyway, but free Starlink speed wifi would be fun!

Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.

bblcla

8 hours ago

> Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.

Oh, this one is very doable and makes sense! We track this internally anyway so it's just a matter of surfacing it on the fleet information.

andrewcamel

10 hours ago

Big fan. One feature idea/request - a map showing coverage with 0-100% by route (red/yellow/green lines). I’m just curious to see where I should think to look for / expect starlink options. Probing into a few upcoming trips showed basically no coverage.

bblcla

9 hours ago

Oh that's a cool idea! We wanted to do a variant of this, will add it to the list. The tricky part for us is getting a canonical list of all flights + body types on it.

andrewcamel

7 hours ago

I’d imagine you could seed it more easily by focusing on top 50 routes by passenger count in domestic USA. Then go from flight schedules for top airlines into tail numbers into body types etc.

whalesalad

6 hours ago

Would not having starlink on the flight influence your decision to take the trip

6thbit

4 hours ago

Why does it work on the plane? are the constant handoffs between satellites not enough to break connections or cause extremely high packet loss for it to suck?

is there a speed at which it would break?

disconcision

3 hours ago

speed of plane is about 3% speed of satellite so i wouldn't expect handoffs to be much more frequent than with stationary receivers?

6thbit

2 hours ago

I see, stationary receiver already has to deal with this and plane speed doesn’t add much to the equation cause satellites already go brr.

Honestly that wasn’t intuitive in my head but makes a lot of sense, thanks!

neilsharma425

9 hours ago

Neat problem to work on. The tail number lookup is the hard part and it sounds like you solved it the right way, by finding the people who actually track this obsessively rather than trying to scrape it yourself.

Two questions: how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained? And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?

bblcla

9 hours ago

Great questions!

> how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained?

These are updated almost every day so far, so they seem very up-to-date. Internally we track all changes/removals, so I'm not that worried about spreadsheets being abandoned yet. It's a good thought though.

> And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?

Honestly our estimate right now is pretty crude. At the scale we're at right now it works, but I think you're right that we could make this more accurate by tracking equipment swaps & really drilling into the details of which aircraft get assigned to which routes.

Singlaw

an hour ago

Damn that's so cool I just checked it and it works dayum how far we have come guys

nomilk

4 hours ago

It would be great to make this data into a browser extension that overlays the info when using Google Flights

aeblyve

10 hours ago

This is awesome! In the past I would use the promise of starlink or other LEO internet as a tiebreaker for booking flights and was disappointed a few times (as clearly not all of the airframes for an airline have the capability)

dvno42

10 hours ago

United has this on some flights. It's no cost but they force you watch ads in the captive portal. I'd rather pay the $8 and be left in peace, every time.

theultdev

10 hours ago

Just an ad one time when you login? That seems fine.

I've never paid for hotel wifi and never will, but I don't mind an ad on the captive portal.

HPsquared

9 hours ago

Looking forward to Starlink on UK trains. I frequently have to go basically without internet for a couple of hours.

bspammer

6 hours ago

I’ve been frustrated by this for years, you just know that if there was a mobile data deadzone on a motorway they’d fix it immediately.

Meanwhile on the train 30 miles from London, nothing.

tombot

9 hours ago

Here’s a hack, get yourself a cheap eSIM data only plan from an alternative UK network (VOXI, Talkmobile etc) if you main network doesn’t have connectivity; they will!

Doohickey-d

7 hours ago

There's even eSIMs specifically marketed as being a "backup" esim, with coverage on _all_ UK networks.

At least on my android, you could set the second esim as a "backup" that it would switch to for data if the main one lost connection (it took a few seconds, so it wasn't an "always connected" experience, probably because the phone wants to save power)

Lots of options if you search for "esim UK all networks".

FireBeyond

2 hours ago

I used to be a first responder with a Firstnet setup (not just the plan discount, but the actual black SIM card) that could roam AT&T to Verizon to TMO as needed, so was as close to universal connectivity as feasible. Though (probably relatedly) it was always 1-2 generations behind (many areas were still ATT LTE, maybe 5GE, when they were rolling out 5G).

And the clusterfuck when I tried to transition my account back to normal, where an $8 balance that wasn't reconciled triggered the suspension of my AT&T whole family account, but when I tried to pay, no-one in FirstNet support or AT&T could tell me how much to pay or where or my account number (and this is in the store), until a poor store and a poor phone CSR spent THREE HOURS getting it resolved. "I am literally trying to give you the money to take care of this." "We don't know where to have you pay that money to fix this."

I was an early adopter, but FML.

caycep

10 hours ago

looking back at the history of starlink, when was it decided to pursue this project at SpaceX? Was it always the natural evolution, i.e. cheap launches = more communications sats? Or was there a specific communications engineer/person that brought it up to Elon or Gwynne?

bblcla

10 hours ago

I'm not actually sure myself, but I was really surprised to learn how profitable it is. SpaceX made $15b of revenue last year and $8b of profit. Starlink was 60-80% of that!

It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.

infinitewars

5 hours ago

Absolutely false.

There were article claiming "$8b profit" but relabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA only tells you that Starlink makes money on a satellite once it is already in space and connected to a user. It deletes the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing, and just about all other substantial expenses. Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

The fact a Starlink satellite only has a < 5 year lifetime and ~2 starlink sats burn up in the atmosphere every single day is entirely left out as well.

They have never been profitable in any real sense. But that's okay, because their real goal is backed by Uncle Sam: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...

infinitewars

6 hours ago

Starlink is based on the strategic defense initiative (SDI). Both reusable rockets (DC-X) and large satellite constellations (Brilliant Pebbles) were SDI inventions.

SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin who went from the CIA to become head of NASA and funded the early SpaceX (10x from what Musk himself put in!)

Now in 2026, SpaceX is the frontrunner for the Golden Dome, which is an SDI reboot.

The company was always about Wars not Mars.

caycep

5 hours ago

ah good to know....it seems this history is kinda scrubbed from at least a quick Google search of the company's history.

I do remember DC-X, mostly as when I was a kid, that program coincided with when the web became popular, and I remember (hopefully somewhat accurately) downloaded jpeg/gif files from NASA publicity releases of that rocket over my 2400 bps modem

infinitewars

5 hours ago

Elon was downloading those same images with you ;)

DarmokJalad1701

5 hours ago

> The company was always about Wars not Mars.

Such a cynical take! Starlink made Golden Dome possible. It is easy to make up conspiracies post-hoc while forgetting that they were ridiculed when they announced it and the "experts" opined that it is impossible to do.

> SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI

This is highly unfounded speculation. Griffin went to work for "In-Q-Tel" after SpaceX was already founded (as said in the link you cited). There is no evidence I could find that they ever invested in SpaceX.

The existence of cheap launch and cheap satellites allowed the (at the time new) Space Force to pivot from large, expensive monolithic satellites to a "proliferated architecture" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency#Launc...) at a much lower cost.

infinitewars

4 hours ago

It wasn't In-Q-Tel directly...

https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/11/the-pentagon-is-recruiting...

https://web.archive.org/web/20241213051851/https://historyco...

DarmokJalad1701

4 hours ago

Yea .. so new that I have only worked in the industry for 5+ years now. Your link doesn't support anything you said.

What passage in that interview says anything about "In‑Q‑Tel invested in SpaceX" or "CIA funded SpaceX"?

That interview is a NASA oral history of Mike Griffin’s career. It mentions his time at In‑Q‑Tel and later NASA, but it never says In‑Q‑Tel or the CIA funded SpaceX. You’re conflating "this guy once ran a CIA‑linked VC" with "he personally funneled CIA money into SpaceX," which simply isn't true. SpaceX’s early funding is well‑documented as Musk’s own money plus later NASA contracts as a customer, not a CIA equity round.

SpaceX (and Kistler Aerospace, Orbital Sciences etc.) was awarded contracts for commercial transportation to the ISS [1]. NASA’s role was as an anchor customer and partner under a publicly described program to get cargo (and later crew) to ISS via commercial providers. NASA’s commercial cargo program and SpaceX’s contracts are not secret. They were openly competed and publicly announced. That's the opposite of clandestine CIA startup funding.

DoD launch money for SpaceX (EELV/NSSL contracts, etc.) came much later, after Falcon 9 was flying and competing with ULA, and those are again launch service contracts, not "investment".

> Trump admin took this link down off NASA's website but it's archived just before the transition

That interview wasn't mysteriously "scrubbed". The website got updated and you found an old link that wasn't working anymore [2][3]. Not a conspiracy, just garden variety link rot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/griffinmd-1-...

[3] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...

infinitewars

3 hours ago

You just created the straw man argument about the CIA directly funding SpaceX. Not that simple. Read the articles.

hughes

6 hours ago

I would love to see this integrated into Flighty.

elAhmo

5 hours ago

It would probably be locked behind a paid upgrade. Shame that so many features are locked behind a subscription model, and super annoying that they try to force the subscription every single time you open the app, sometimes more than once.

VmakeAI66

3 hours ago

this matches my experience exactly

SilentEditor

9 hours ago

This is incredibly interesting, will follow.

ellyagg

10 hours ago

Thank you for your service. Hopefully something like this can put pressure on airlines to understand how hostile their internet services are and that it matters.

Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight.

The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier.

These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.

bblcla

10 hours ago

That's frustrating. It's possible their link was down for some reason - airline maintenance issues happen all the time. :(

adrithmetiqa

10 hours ago

Does anyone else appreciate the final space where we can be disconnected. I do, for one

sva_

5 hours ago

I love disconnecting while hiking in the forest/mountaineering or such. But being stuck in an economy seat for 8 hours as an 188cm guy while being in a low air pressure environment just isn't the place for me. I'll gladly take the distraction.

rendang

7 hours ago

Consider paying a visit to one of these if you want to immerse yourself in the world of ideas and disengage from screens:

https://labri.org/

My ~4 weeks were some of the most memorable of my life

umanwizard

10 hours ago

You can be disconnected wherever you want, with a bit of self control.

throwaway132448

8 hours ago

This misses the point. What’s nice is not that it’s just me, but that it’s everyone.

lxgr

7 hours ago

Host a “phones off” party, go to a sauna, go for a hike with friends with self control etc., but please don’t hold me hostage (connectivity wise) in a cramped metal tube for your sense of nostalgia.

Planes are just about the least pleasant space to experience involuntary offline-ness. (That said, people scrolling reels with the speaker on (or the display at brightness levels making me consider sunscreen) should immediately go on the no-fly list.)

throwaway132448

7 hours ago

Nobody is holding you hostage. Sounds like you need the timeout more than anyone.

And the assumption that this view was drawn from nostalgia is completely invalid.

lxgr

3 hours ago

> What’s nice is not that it’s just me, but that it’s everyone.

This made it sound like you enjoy me being offline, and that seems pretty selfish (as long as I don't annoy you somehow with my Internet connection, and on that, see my original comment).

I'm a big fan of offline gatherings (ideally in nature, which is pretty much the opposite of economy class on many dimensions), but I think this should be a choice.

aeblyve

10 hours ago

Not really, personally... time waits for no one.

throwaway132448

8 hours ago

And now you’ll have one less opportunity not to waste your finite time on the internet.

LightBug1

6 hours ago

Planes and underground trains are/were focus sanctuaries ...

munk-a

8 hours ago

I had access to it on a long-haul AirFrance flight. While I avoid doom-scrolling in my daily life because there's better stuff to do... on a long haul flight it's a surprisingly good way to pass time intermittently. I still just watched pre-downloaded dropout for 80% of the flight but when I was too tired to appreciate it I'd turn my brain off and watch a bit of that wonderful doom-scroll slop.

The fact that it's powered by starlink is disappointing due purely to Elon Musk's involvement - but this is one of the better use cases for satellite internet technology. I'm not going to go out of my way to book with airlines that use the service though.

kleiba

8 hours ago

Even when flying intercontinental for many hours, I usually just pull a Puddy on flights and do nothing. I have my laptop with me, of course, but I usually leave it just in the overhead compartment.

I don't even watch movies or read.