The Starshield portion of Starlink is already controlled by the government. It was Starshield that restricted access to Ukraine, and the decision reportedly came from the White House.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/order-limit-starshield-...

OP's article of course is about spectrum allocation in the US and potential trade retaliation, which isn't all that related to Musk's control of Starlink.

The idea of a drug addicted undocumented immigrant being in charge of our space program and sat comms does seem incredibly unwise.

Unfortunately Trump is worse than Musk. And it's Trump who's to blame for the Ukraine speed restrictions.

You think Trump wouldn't immediately promote Musk to General?

That's brave, friend. I, living here, am annoyed of geriatrics in the wheelhouse.

That doesn't make their treatment of other countries go away.

Europe is putting economic restrictions on Starlink; the technical restrictions the US placed on Starshield are unrelated.

Even if we don't spur the development of home grown operators (and IMO launch on the scale of Starlink is somewhat unrealistic any time soon), it will at least prevent us getting get another incidental dependency on US systems which we can be threatened with loss of access to at any point.

The europeans reserve strategic resources so that they can manage supply chain risk, since they consider the US one.

The US (dependably) proves them right, by threatening their supply lines.

Of course, why wouldn't it? There's nothing unique about SpaceX's sattelites, or about putting them in orbit.

https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/these-are-the-six-european-altern...

  Vehicle                       Cost / tonne
  Falcon 9 (booster recovery)   ~$2 million
  Ariane 64                     ~$5 million
  Starship (projected)          <$500,000

Europe doesn't need the same service. A far higher percentage of homes in Europe have access true high speed internet over fiber or wires than the US does. Europe can get itself the same capability with far fewer satellites.

That's Starshield, which is not under Musk's control. Reportedly the WH did make the decision.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/order-limit-starshield-...

It's the same tech but after Musk took flack for making a decision on Ukraine's military use, they split off a portion for the US government to control.

Not a bad idea - could couple it with further reducing European tariffs on Chinese EVs, which already outsell Tesla there.

> Asked whether European companies should fear retaliation, Puzder told the FT that they “should be wary that it could happen and it would be very devastating for those companies”, given the size of the American market.

Would this even be "devastating"? Would any of them been able to sell in the US anyway, given the position Starlink is in? I see occasional headlines that Starlink is forcing out other US providers, from the US, but even without that kind of thing going on, this doesn't even feel like much of a threat.

Mein Deutsch waere viel besser gewesen...

This forum in particular, but also our society in general is tremendously influenced by Grace Hopper's "compiler" (we would not call the thing Grace came up with a "compiler" today but we'd recognise her ideas). Grace appears to be the first person who noticed that the machine could be told to do the boring part where you turn your program into machine code to run on that machine. Grace's idea is meta-applicable, it applies not only to many other things but also to itself, things get out of hand very fast and that's how less than a century later we're here.

Grace was in the US Navy in World War II. Even in our real history where Donald Trump was not President, Grace did not meet their strict requirements for women and so she was only able to get in via a special exemption. Can you imagine in the "Make sure our Warriors look good on TV" world of Pete Hegseth that they'd ever accept Grace? No, the Navy is for big strong men.

The UK would most likely be speaking German now. Possibly even the US.

The USSR would have taken over all of Europe, not just Eastern. What would have happened to the former British and French empires? Presumably they'd have been turned communist, but would their struggles for independence have gone the same way?

The Manhattan project would have been announced before it went anywhere, undermined during development and produced no real result. Japan would not have been nuked, but also would not have been invaded and the Pacific theatre would have in general developed in a completely different way. Without the American nuclear arsenal, the world may have skipped the cold war and nukes, or perhaps other states would have made them and used them in a heavy mutual bombardment without restraint.

Eventually in Europe, glasnost and perestroika would still have happened, and the USSR would still have fallen; but the geopolitical and economic importance of the USA would be little different to that of Brazil.