> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?
I like to remind people that it’s actually SpaceX who is still catching up to legacy providers of space-based connectivity. As I mention in the footnotes, my wife’s grandfather was working on commercial comms satellites in the 60s! Starlink will probably become the biggest provider of space-based internet connnectivity soon, but I think when HughesNet still has more subscribers today (Hugheswho?).
And their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon. Famous pushovers.
I don’t think there will be one winner, just as the history of comms in space has shown there likely won’t be. But by owning launch, SpaceX has a large advantage. Thing is…Amazon has its own infrastructure advantage (AWS). Will be fun to watch it play out.
> And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?
Space is not that congested, imo. A huge satellite is the size of a Cessna. LEO is hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Even if it were only a few thousand feet above the surface, if you imagine 10,000 Cessnas flying around the surface of the Earth, they aren’t super likely to run into each other. But I’m no expert.
What I do know is the current procedures for handling conjunction events are scarily shoddy and there’s a lot of room to improve (fear not, a ton of people are working on it).
> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?
Not the author, but Starlink’s parallel competitive threats are usually exaggerated. They have cheap capital and they own their own trucks. That helps. But it’s not a blocking advantage. Their existing fleet is only a marginal competitive advantage to a new sensor suite; there is little evidence they build better birds than anyone else (versus their rockets, which are in a class of their own).
An order of magnitude lower launch costs to LEO (about $1K/kg now for Falcon 9) and another two magnitudes with Starship.. is a blocking advantage. Constellations don't make sense otherwise, see history: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Background
Keep in mind lasers don't work to the ground unless there are no clouds and stable atmosphere. RF 10-30 GHz work fine to ground and are directional enough that spectrum can be reused and multiple beams formed with one phased array. The real limitation is ITU regulation on total power flux density on the ground for all constellations in these frequencies.
Lasers work to the ground better than your implying. ,
Modern laser communication ground stations are designed or bring designed incorporating adaptive optics to significantly improve their resilience to atmospheric turbulence. Clouds remain an issue but most laser communications networks are designed with multiple ground stations to ensure sufficient good weather to provide continuous communications. Also several laser communications providers are designing their systems using relay satellites either MEO or GEO to serve as the space to ground really, centralising the higher power space to ground laser link and more expensive optics, and simultaneously placing them higher up enabling better ability to switch between multiple ground stations in the event of cloud disruption.
The laser communication industry is very small still but it’s growing as ground stations get more standard and economical, with commercial units available for both space and ground sides, for a couple of years now.
> If they used it to block, sure. Starlink’s advantage is SpaceX’s margin.
As long as Starlink competitors use SpaceX to reach orbit, the advantage is realized on both Starlink launches (as savings) AND on competitors’ launches (as profit). Doesn’t that make SpaceX’s advantage 2x their margin?
> the advantage is realized on both Starlink launches (as savings) AND on competitors’ launches (as profit). Doesn’t that make SpaceX’s advantage 2x their margin?
Sort of. Every dollar of competitors’ launch margin doesn’t go to Starlink. SpaceX’s near-infinite fundraising capacity, and thus low cost of capital, is far more significant. (There are also orbital trade-offs between imaging and comms.)
I have to wonder how sustainable this is. From the perspective of an investor, I would not be excited by Tesla being down 70% off peak and Twitter becoming the most notable corporate clusterfuck of the year. Investing in SpaceX these days seems like a bet that the CEO will be so distracted by his other problems that he won't have time to mess with the people actually running it.
What I actually said is "most notable corporate clusterfuck of the year".
We don't know how it's actually going. Musk is a notorious BSer, and as a privately held company, they don't have to release actual numbers.
But Musk took a company that was doing just fine, made a weed-joke-priced offer, changed his mind, tried to BS and wriggle his way out of the deal, and grudgingly went through it when it became obvious a chancery court judge was likely to force him to buy it anyhow. With that alone it was probably the most notable corporate clusterfuck of the year.
And that's before the actual takeover, where he loaded it up with so much debt that -- and this is according to him -- it could very well be bankrupt in short order. He then flailed around with his amateur-league management dramatics for months in ways that if you somehow missed, you can Google. All while ignoring a much more valuable company that's the source of his wealth as its stock price plummeted by 70%.
If you think there's a more notable corporate clusterfuck in 2022, please do name it.
If not, how narrow can be made a beam by using a beam-forming phased array 10-20 m wide? The diffraction limit at 30 GHz (10 cm) should be reasonably small.
Unfortunately not ready for prime time yet, optical beamforming today is only a few degrees steerable angle and single beam. Also low power and poorly focused.
Totally agree. But the frontier is advancing thanks to LiDAR. And in the meantime, the advantages of laser relay and downlink are vast enough to make mechanical actuation worth it. Particularly for unboosted birds in LEO.
> Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication?
Lasers don’t care if they’re carrying data out or on return. The same optics being pursued for LiDAR have applications in communications. Solid-state waveguides and MEMS being examples.
When Mike Griffin started the Space Development Agency under Trump in 2019, he said we need LEO constellations to track hypersonic missiles and be proliferated to be robust against anti-satellite tech.
However, existing MEO satellites have proven capable of tracking hypersonics just fine. Meanwhile LEO satellites are way more vulnerable to ASAT, they can be directly hit. No... LEO only makes sense when you look at Mike Griffin's history working on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He sees LEO constellations of sensors as the first step to including space-based kinetic interceptors (hypersonic reentry vehicles, aka space weapons) which need to be close to Earth in LEO to work. He is part of the hawks in Washington trying to build a space-based power projection system for boost-phase interception and prompt global strike.
Not invalidating the rest of your chain of reasoning, since I agree with the idea this is likely to lead to eventual space based mid course interception….
While MEO satellites are able to do the job, they pose a greater “systemic risk” than LEO satellites do.
If a war goes hot with long range use of prompt global strike style hypersonic weapons against the USA or its closely allied military alliance partners like UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc… we’re talking about a scenario where the potential adversaries are going to be precipitously close to the use of anti satellite weapons, and potentially even nukes but let’s ignore them and focus on the satellites.
If you have a smaller number of larger MEO platforms (and they need to be larger to accommodate instruments that can to do their job from further away) your much more vulnerable to having large parts of your system knocked out. These larger platforms will also cost more, so you have less redundancy, higher costs, and are more vulnerable when your system will be needed most. The final systemic risk element is the post action debris risk… if a war goes hot and someone starts chucking ASAT weapons around, then we’re going to have a pile of debris, the sort of debris left behind by a kinetic kill ASAT in medium earth orbit is easily an order of magnitude more of an issue to other satellites for decades to centuries, it’s further away from all the existing space surveillance radar and optical systems on the ground making it harder to track the kind of small high velocity shrapnel that will have spread furthest away from the original orbit, which complicates the replacement of any destroyed space based assets as it will take longer to work out new safe orbits. LEO assets on the other hand have much shorter debris risk lifetimes, decades is usually the case as opposed to centuries, and LEO is much easier to track higher risk shrapnel debris down below 10cm, leading to better operational safety before and after a potentially satellite destroying hot war, meaning they are more likely to have a working system when needed and be able to replace it faster when damaged.
It’s a logical and reasonable argument on several fronts. However I do still agree with the assessment that eventually if the military has a sophistication LEO fleet of hundreds or thousands of Starlink style satellites, they are basically half way to the Star Wars “Brilliant Pebbles” architecture and it won’t be long until someone tries to build the other half of the architecture assuming they aren’t already planning this.
Unless you have a plan that involves using violence at a time of your choosing, the temporary advantage you get from deploying a new solution is mostly just peace of mind for a very small group of space force nerds until the adversary adapts.
And the sort of "worst case" imaging we're talking about here, the kind that makes you think the MEO sats that are part of the nuclear early warning system will be attacked in the first place, _absolutely_ compels you to assume the adversary will adapt in time.
Another important point here is that "systemic risk" here really only means "risk to US space systems of dubious utility", and nothing so grand as international deterrence or even international stability: jamming can a perfectly fine solution to ensuring the space based information is not timely available to US forces, and it's not like the timelines SIBRIS gives you are competitive with what good humint around intentions can give you.
Fun fast: the largest US satellite imagery provider, Maxar, was founded by the technical program lead for Brilliant Pebbles. It’s a small world and history rhymes.
I can’t comment on Griffin or the history of SDA, but proliferated LEO targets are much harder to take out with an ASAT than a small number of MEO or GEO satellites that are practically sitting ducks. If it costs ~$10M to take out a ~$1B asset, it’s gonna be the first thing to go in an apocalyptic scenario.
A LEO satellite can be hit directly with relatively cheap surface to air missiles in a matter of minutes (e.g., RIM-161). Getting to space for the ASAT takes much less energy than putting something into orbit. On the other hand, MEO and GEO satellites take a long time, many orbits, to interact with.. would even have enough time to summon ambassadors and ask questions.
For these "proliferated LEO constellations" an adversary just needs to punch a hole in the mesh immediately before launching an attack.
The fact is, putting HAWC-style interceptors in space (that could also of course be used offensively) hovering over every country on Earth, is incredibly aggressive and provocative. Everything is accelerated and mistakes will be made on both sides. It's fundamentally destabilizing (as the link above concludes). We've been down this road before and collectively decided its a terrible idea (Brilliant Pebbles). Helping SDA means furthering a dangerous future.
With what sounds like the industry moving to something more like high throughput real time mapping, does that mean that there's a chance we'll see an open source imagery dataset/tile server sometime afterwards, when the current dated offerings become less competitive?
I’d love to see someone step up and try to improve this, there’s programs in place at both NASA and ESA for making access to their own archives of satellite imagery and other data, but there’s a lot more imagery out there. It would be good to have some kind of internet archive style depository run by an organisation dedicated to preserving the data.
So that satellite imagery providers could chuck them a copy with contractual guarantees about how and when the information can become public access, that satisfy the imagery providers and make the process streamlined enough to keep up with the increasingly volume of imagery being produced.
It would be a shame to see valuable archives of imagery that catalogs the history of our planet, lost due to someone losing track of the either the data itself or the copyright ownership (and thus are legally unable to keep the data) between now and the absurdly long time in the future that such images become public domain over a hundred years from now. Most companies don’t last a hundred years so this kind if stewardship feels like an important thing to start working on now rather than later.
Hi Joe, thanks for the article. I am thinking of getting into satellite data science (from a data science/ software eng background). If you can recommend any datasets that are open to the public that can be fun to play around with or any other advice I'd be happy to hear it.
There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down.
But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name but I feel like there were some command protocols starting to emerge into semi-standard form as well.
See Phi-Sat 1 and to a lesser extent EO-1 as someone else mentioned. Phi-Sat 2 is going up at some point. I'm on a team of researchers working on this. We looked at flood detection as a case study, but as you say, almost all the demonstrators at the moment focus on reducing unnecessary data transfer. Happy to answer questions about the state of the industry/research.
But there are undoubtedly lots of other people/companies/militaries exploring. We didn't build the hardware for example, and we weren't the only experiment onboard our flight. The main differentiator is how many have actually deployed in space. It's very easy to show that you can run a model on an accelerator, but getting it in-orbit somehow, testing it on real imagery from new sensors, etc. The challenge is that most people will have to train a model on simulated data, fly a cubesat or another small platform and then re-train their model to adapt to images from orbital images. Aerial imagery models don't always transfer well to satellite images.
My take having been to conferences, and speaking to others in the field, is that there are a lot more researchers interested (as of 2022) and we'll start to see more publicly deployed experiments in the next year or two.
The European Space Agency has already demonstrated on-the-edge processing with Phi-Sat-1. They use AI to detect clouds and only downlink images below a certain cloud cover threshold.
This is one of those ideas that continuously sounds new, but is very much already in the works. I've had run ins with NASA folks, startups, and DoD partners that are pushing on this problem.
The problem with this is the energy required and then the heat you have to dump. I haven't penciled out the numbers but feels like at least a decade or two of model & gpu improvements to get anywhere close.
Can GPUs run reliably in an orbital radiation environment at all? The combination of extreme transistor density and zero error checking seems like the opposite of what you'd want in a space processor.
This is just a vague intuition, but I feel like space hardening typically is done to insure very very high levels of reliability in all conditions. Im not sure how much easier the job might be if you could accept a sizable amount of transient failures. For many of these infernce systems, it feels like some "bad" processing might not really be a problem.
As others have said though, and as your "extreme transistor density" points to, high heat dissipation & energy usage are absolutely very real factors here. Still, Coral, back in 2017, was a half watt 2tflops inference engine, on a non-cutting-edge (at the time) process.
Faster degradation means quicker rejuvenation requirements. If you’re replacing your birds every five years in any case, the net benefit of rad hardening is diminished.
The bottleneck for orbital edge isn't software, it's hardware that can tack into an optical terminal and tolerate radiation. The edge analogy breaks down because the consumer isn't on the edge, the sensor is, and it's just a problem of doing heavy compute next to the sensor, then sending back a summary data product.
IoT sensor aggregation is already a major edge-compute use-case, it's not just for reducing latency for end-users. In this analogy you're just co-locating the edge compute on the same LAN as the sensor. All of the orchestration, runtime, and framework concerns from existing edge compute systems still apply.
Edge compute isn't solved; it's an area under active and aggressive development. The Cloudflare Workers wasm runtime for example. And if you're selling satelite edge compute, what's your control plane? You need a config store etc.
Put differently; if I'm a satelite operator writing first-party software to run on my satelites, sure, there's no framework code to write, and I can just tailor the software to my satelite platform's hardware. However, if I'm selling colocated compute with ultra-low latency to third parties, then I need to build something that (IMO) looks very close, if not identical, to a current-generation edge-compute platform.
Why are we selling colocated processing on a piece of mass-constricted ultra-expensive hardware we have to launch into orbit again? That seems like a solution in search of a problem.
This makes me imagine a space station like data center in orbit that acts like a public cloud on earth, communicating directly with satellites and renting out processing time. I'm not sure how well economies of scale work when you have to pay for every kg you send up there, but it would be an interesting business model.
Is is cheaper for a satelite to transfer data to a space based datacenter than to a ground based one? If not, what's the benefit of locating the data center in orbit?
(Except, of course, that it's awesome.)
Stop imagining, in 2021 a cluster of computers were sent up to test this, and since then several instruments are in the works to make use of similar (but not same) CPU clusters.
As always, finding a system that is affordable and radiation tolerant is the problem.
I figure the market for "low" resolution imagery will be destroyed when Starlink decides to add something like a fixed wide angle 100 megapixel cameras to every satellite. There are a lot of options for what to do from there, but getting continuous global imagery would suddenly be possible.
Planet Labs captures ~30 megapixel images (usually though, these are quoted in terms of pixel size, eg. 5 meters per pixel) and has hundreds of satellites on orbit.
I don't know about Digital Globe's capabilities, but they are also in this business as are others.
Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability?
> Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability
No. Everyone talks a big game about SAR and resolution because it’s easier than latency. People don’t pay for resolution, they pay for immediacy. (The folks who do pay for resolution typically have their own birds. There simply aren’t many use cases for occasionally needing hyper-resolution photos of what something looked like a few days or even hours ago.)
I can think of a non-military use case: Tracking fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Access to an EEZ is sold in “fishing days”. Vessels are required to have VMS, and there’s been work done on correlating VMS data with fishing, but it’s not a slam dunk. Immediate, high resolution photos would provide evidence of IUU such that the vessel could be intercepted and boarded while still within the EEZ.
Even if the vessel can’t be boarded, high-res photographic evidence could be used to pursue legal action against the vessel’s owners.
This is the dorm delivery idea for space businesses. Everyone is working on it, including folks with no commercial ambitions, and the number of people willing to pay for it is small, and they’re cheap.
Yes and no. These island nations are pretty small and poor, so obviously Fiji or Vanuatu aren't going to be paying for it. Instead, what I would expect is that the US, Australia, and New Zealand would pay for it to maintain good graces with these nations. WRT geopolitics, this is a good stick for beating up on China as they're one of the main offenders in IUU.
> what I would expect is that the US, Australia, and New Zealand would pay for it to maintain good graces with these nations
Right. The business model is sympathy money from big governments. Practically, that means re-selling to a government contractor. A contractor for whom this is an afterthought, and who has a million other providers to choose from, some of whom don’t need to make money.
> a good stick for beating up on China as they're one of the main offenders in IUU
The countries being harmed by this are in no position to beat up on China. The ones who can don’t care about it enough to make it a diplomatic priority.
RPi+ Yolo can do real time object recognition of cluster Tank, Trucks, BMP from orbit.
A service with real time streams of those objects + GPS data info directly from starlink for a select sets locations should worth a lot for DOD, NATO, Ukraine. DOD and NATO would likely flip the bill for everything need to build such system.
You are vastly oversimplifying the problem here. One of the most obvious being, cameras don't really work without light on the subject being captured, and currently Starlink doesn't have a sun synchronous orbit like most (non-SAR) remote sensing birds do. Starlink would need to be completely reengineered from scratch to add even mediocre remote sensing capabilities without degrading the original mission of the Starlink platform (something akin to space mesh networking).
Put simply, it's MUCH easier and cheaper to build one type of satellite that does one task very well than it is to do two tasks poorly.
SAR typically are in sun-synchronous orbits too, but mostly for power management reasons. difference is, of course, that they do not need to have their ascending node in daylight.
the only SAR constellations I know aren't in SSO are Israeli (due to launch geometry constraints) and NRO's birds (LACROS/ONYX/TOPAZ, whatever their names are) [1]. some of them have exotic retrograde orbits [2].
Why is it a problem that it's not in sun-synchronous orbit? That just means that only a fraction will be usable at any given time? It seems like they have massive redundancy to make up for the lack of specialization?
Could be. I still think the juice won’t be worth the squeeze (is there an example in the history of comms satellites where they felt it was worth going after the much smaller EO market?). But the rumor in the industry is that they’re comin for everything. And they did just announce a new satellite platform for hosting payloads (including optical).
If there are significant delays in Starship and getting gen 2 satellites up in economically viable ways, you can bet Starlink will be looking for adjacent markets as a way to boost revenue. Currently, satellite imaging is about a $5B market. Nice, but telecom is, without exaggeration, 300X larger. Starlink being a global internet connectivity provider with 10s of millions of subscribers is really the only goal that matters for SpaceX.
not exactly how it works. as others have said, the orbit is incorrect for proper radiometric usage, and it would eat into their bandwidth and downlink constraints. doesn't make much sense
he's at least very communicative and pedagogical, and has a refreshing view of EO. reading him, Aravind, and Payload (thanks for it) is a good way to set you up on what's going on in the space-based EO industry.
Had a dinner conversation with a person who had worked for military intelligence back in the day. At one time a receiving station was located in Antartica. For Polar orbit satellites this insured reception once per orbit. Since it was so cold the only reliable media for storage they could use was paper tape.
I've had a thought, why isn't there a "Blue Marble Livestream"? Like actual image of the entire Earth, from like 20000 km orbit. Is there one actually? Will there be one in near future?
So sat-to-sat connectivity will enable 1) software updates on the sats so that you can do your post processing in space, 2) you can rapidly downlink in a parallel manner. Seems like a big step forward for the defense industry.
I was just guessing at what he would write in part 2: if you can disseminate the data rapidly to a network of adjacent satellites, eventually one of those will be in view of the ground station, and if those satellites also have the high-throughput laser capability, then you can really downlink faster.
Remote sensing is severely limited by latency and throughput of the downlink, as it needs to push mountains of data in a tiny window when the satellite is passing over the ground station once in a while. "Internet in Space" will help to remove (or reduce) this limitation.
In a conflict with a near-peer adversary, the attrition rate on reconnaissance satellites in LEO is going to be high. So, it will also be important for satellites to downlink their data quickly before they get knocked out.
This guy is really drinking the space militarization Kool aid that the SDA is churning out. It's sad to see another young generation getting sucked into the military industrial complex
It’s a dual-use technology, and while my job is to focus the commercial half of the equation, I’m not ashamed to support the US military and intelligence communities, either.
I think we should all be concerned about the fact that the invasion of Iraq was justified using false intelligence, mostly from using areal photography which were grossly—and probably purposefully—misinterpreted to show weapon systems that simply weren’t there.
With greater network of more powerful imaging systems and an even greater computational power and statistical methods which can interpret this massive data in any way you want, this indeed becomes really dangerous. We have seen that states are still willing to lie grossly in order to justify terrible human tragedies (e.g. the Russian invasion into Ukraine had an equally false premise). So we should probably be increasingly wary of how governments use these systems.
In contrast when space infrastructure first became viable, one of the first thing the international community did was to sign an agreement promising not to use it to carry weapons[1]. I would like us to do something similar now as we enter this new era of space communication and unmanned semi-autonomous weapons systems.
Engineers play one of the most pivotal roles in war and loss of human life, and many don't even realize it. Something that needs to be reflected on more.
On reflection, if my side doesn't militarize space then another side will dominate and make the rules. Might as well work with my side on it and also get scientific advancements out of it. Even in the advanced age of Star Trek we needed defensive capabilities.
Before you do that, you might want to understand the other side, and how ignorance contributes to an unnecessary arms race.
We in the US have driven most provocation in space. The military budget is more than the next nine countries combined (including China). Whether it be the Strategic Defense Initiative, unilaterally leaving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Prompt Global Strike, hypersonic missiles, the US is developing escalatory weapons tech then justifying it with delusions that the same exists in other countries, like those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In an age of nuclear weapons, new "disruptive" strategic technology development can be extremely dangerous and destablizing.. this is not a game humanity can afford to play.
> The military budget is more than the next nine countries combined
That's because it's more expensive to pay people in a wealthy nation than a poor one. 25% of the budget just goes to paying salaries. You are totally uninformed about what you're talking about, and beyond naïve to think that the US can just stop investing in defense and somehow end up in a more peaceful world. Please stop stoking ideological arguments, we are in a forum about technology.
> That's because it's more expensive to pay people in a wealthy nation than a poor one. 25% of the budget just goes to paying salaries.
It's uncool to accuse people of stoking ideological arguments because they stated a relevant fact.
And can you please use better reasoning? How, in your view, does spending 25% of a budget on salaries explain a budget that's higher than the next nine countries combined?
On the contrary: how does spending more than the next nine countries, all of which have totally unique geopolitical positions and defense needs, have anything whatsoever to do with what we need to spend to achieve our goals? It's like saying Walmart spends more on inventory than the next 9 retailers combined: Walmart has a totally different business than Nike and GAP. In fact it's even more asinine than that: it's like saying that Walmart spends more than the biggest retailers in India and China, countries with different currencies, where quality differs, and where things cost different amounts.
But anyway. Suppose we spent only as much as China does, the #2 defense spender. They spent $229 billion. They also don't really value human life, soldiers are expendable in vast quantities if it advances the aim of the state--loss of life is much less tolerable in America. Do you think that would be sufficient for the US defense goals? We currently spent $173B just on salaries for servicemen, and then another $286 billion on operations, followed by $141 billion for procurement and $106 billion for research and development. Yes there is waste in the military, but is there $450 billion worth of waste and cruft? Are we to believe that are leaders and generals have miscalculated by more than 50%? Should we fire half our soldiers, scuttle our carrier strike groups, and abandon efforts to modernize the air force?
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
- Eisenhower
You really ought to read the original comment you replied to again - their point about unnecessary arms races seems to have triggered some kind of automatic defense in your brain.
Yes, it is an unfortunate reality of the world we live in, which some people choose to blissfully ignore. Go ahead and ask the Ukrainians how their hospitals and children are doing these days. Since we're playing recite-quotes, here's one: To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace. - George Washington
> How, in your view, does spending 25% of a budget on salaries explain a budget that's higher than the next nine countries combined?
America’s win two-theatre war doctrine [1] absolutely mandates the largest military in the world. Not sure how the comment you’re replying to even contemplates challenging that. But if America paid Chinese wages, its budget at all levels would be smaller. We pay more for every soldier, bullet and missile because Americans are better paid.
You are offering a pretty narrow worldview here, and a blatant simplification of geopolitics. Ignoring the elephant USA in the room here who’s militarization dwarfs any competition, then escalation (or even answers in kind) is not the only option on the table. There is also international agreements.
International agreements has proven much more effective as a grand strategy then escalation. The nuclear non-proliferation is a good example, but so is the Iran nuclear deal (which even gives us an AB testing scenario since Iran’s nuclear armament became much closer to reality after the USA withdrew).
Now if USA was really concerned about militarization of space, then they would have pushed for international agreements long ago.
Exactly. We haven’t seen weapons in space, and I think this treaty is partially to thank for that. International agreements is usually a pretty solid strategy for de-escalation.
If the USA would be concerned about foreign powers using satellites to spy about their military activity, or otherwise plot and command an invading armies and weapon systems, they wouldn’t try to one-up these foreign powers with their own spying and communications infrastructure, they would push for strict international regulation for what you can do with data collected from space, as well as for what kind of information and commands you can upload to which kind of vehicles on or near the ground.
If you know the history China/Russia are doing smaller-scale R&D type development mainly to respond to to US ditching arms control treaties and building offensive tech first (usually happening when Republicans in power).
This is non-sense, unless you are in the know about the Russia’s and China’s space programs. Their space technologies are generally behind the US (although China is working hard to catch up), and are less transparent, so we’ve heard more about initiatives such as SDA. That doesn’t mean their military space R&D are purely in response to US’s programs. Russia intended to use space for reconnaissance very early on after Sputnik [0]. They didn’t wait for the US to make a move first.
So we waste money on space missiles that we probably never use except as a deterrent, and in the process some science comes out of it. It's not optimal but it's probably the best we can do in political reality.
> Can we maybe focus on the technology and not ideology?
It's not ideology to see that applying certain inventions in particular domains will bring more negative consequences than in the others. Even if former are more lucrative than later. It's ideology to follow hyper-capitalistic approach and pretend that only profit matters.
This debate is as old as technology itself, and yet the naïve persist. Technological progress is inevitable and its application to war is also inevitable. All the amazing AI innovations, developed under the guise of AI-safety, are being used in surveillance cameras and weapons. And if the West doesn't develop the capability, then someone else will.
> now more ideological similarity between NYC and Shanghai than there is between NYC and rural America
What are you basing this on? I live in New York and Wyoming (both the more urban part and deep, red and ranching rural). I’ve been to Shanghai, and work with folks there. American culture is adversarial, but it runs deep in unsaid ways.
That's one hell of a stretch, you're essentially suggesting that the average New Yorker wouldn't be just as up in arms as much of rural America if a Chinese style sham democracy was instituted in the US.
Willingness to get vaccines and wear masks made New Yorkers look Chinese. Honestly I think when human population centers get dense and connected enough they are essentially the same. Economic ties and shared needs and values are ultimately more significant than the 6% of the population in government (e.g., Chinese CCP). The CCP is on their way out anyway and not a true threat.
Don’t know what you think Chinese people do, but their vaccine compliance isn’t very good (and neither is their vaccine) which is currently causing them problems.
