Illegal mining groups using #Starlink satellite communications.
(Note: I'm not implying, and I don't think CNN is either, that the #SpaceX company has anything to do with the miners. It is more that the miners are using methods that most others have been slower to embrace.)
> The Tesla and SpaceX chief financed his $44 billion deal to take Twitter private in October by securing the huge debt from a syndicate of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and Mitsubishi. The $13 billion debt is held by Twitter at a corporate level, with no personal guarantee by Musk.
The article isn't clear about the installment terms. $1.5B/year could be in annual, semiannual, quarterly, or monthly payments.
I cannot imagine how various big banks allowed themselves to be suckered into that deal. From the outside, everything about it seemed unsound from the beginning. And as a lender, I certainly would not have allowed the loan to be collateralized by Twitter itself. It would either have been pledge your ${NASDAQ_[TSLA]} #Tesla shares and #SpaceX shares, or some other way of lending it directly to Elon Musk himself.
Maybe bank regulators need to investigate how these banks got into a clearly unsound situation ... and maybe push these banks' top management executives entirely out of the industry.
I am glad to see that the FCC is finally not just acting as a corporate rubber-stamping machine. I think that it shouldn't take 7,500 of these satellites to figure out that SpaceX's request is too many in one operator's hands, but maybe this will open their eyes.
@gnu2 This is what economists would call an externality. Some of the costs of having those satellites in LEO isn't borne by #StarLink / #SpaceX, but by competitors, by the non-profit research organizations and government agencies who conduct astronomy, and lastly by people in general around the world. By spreading those costs out that way, it makes it harder to successfully pursue an objection, but we all suffer for it.
An analogy would be putting up a giant factory with giant coal-fired boilers belching thick black smoke into the air. It costs the company nothing once the smoke is released, but the surrounding communities and those that are downwind certainly will pay for those smoke stacks.
So, no. I do not support letting anyone put whatever quantity of satellites they want into low-earth orbit. Put in something similar to the Project Loon balloons (which were able to keep themselves over an assigned area) or launch fewer satellites and put them in higher orbits where they can cover larger areas at once.
#LaunchAmerica is the hashtag they are using to celebrate again having a launch on US soil.
I don't think this is really about nationalism ... it is more about getting US citizens excited, so they can push for greater funding for NASA and space exploration.