I worked on technology for years that the FCC effectively killed for stupid reasons. So it’s heartening to me that someone can still just do stuff and build things. It’s amazing. If you asked me 10 years ago I would have thought that getting something like Starlink off the ground would’ve been impossible due to red tape.
And because it's so flexible, in states like California where we have aggressive environmental laws, it's leveraged as the NIMBY trump card. When it can't block a project, the process is used to make it inordinately expensive and take decades. One example would be the environmental studies for the CA High Speed Rail.[1]
[1] - https://ifp.org/fast-track-democratically-approved-transit-p...
I live in upstate NY, the rebuild of the GOP here is around hyper local issues, mostly apartments and solar. MAGA changed the discourse and allows the rabble rousers to say the quiet part out loud. (Ie bike infrastructure and apartments will bring poor black people to rape and pillage)
How can the solution to burdensome regulations be MORE regulation?
That's why the cost estimates for CA HSR jump a bunch every time an administration hostile to it enters the white house.
A very good point.
I don't agree we can blame Trump for HSR though. 2/3 of the time that has passed have had Democrats in the white house. HSR is nearly all pure-California-style self-inflicted wound. And honestly it's just the most visible project California has failed with, there are many others. The one I'm personally angry about is Prop 1. We're now 12 years after, and have no additional water resources even broken ground. It's shameful.
I know, that's why we've developed all of these systems of representation to discuss and come to reasonable regulatory standards.
But that's neither here nor there in regards to the point being made that people can still build things in a regulated environment.
Yes, having a data center that raises your utilities costs by 300% jammed down your throat because the local mayor got blatantly bribed shouldn’t be a thing, especially when it’s powered by mobile gas turbines that stink up the entire area (note: I’m not against data centers on principle, but there are many ways for ultra-wealthy interests to leave people hosed). But things like faintly visible mini-sats don’t seem like a big deal, subjectively, unless you work at an observatory.
And by the way this guy is responsible for the death of multiple hundred thousands deaths according to estimates. Because he championed removal of Red tape and shutdown of that allegedly "criminal organization" (his words), USAID. Tell that your children.
Even the President of Mexico, who hates Trump, agreed on that one: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-musk-unexpected-ally-push-shu...
“This agency has funded everything from research projects to groups that oppose the government. In Mexico, 'Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción' has received proven support from this agency. So how is it that these so-called 'aid' agencies get involved in politics?" Sheinbaum questioned.
Likewise The Nation, which hates Trump and Musk: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/usaid-trump-musk-... (“Trump and Musk’s war against the agency should be opposed on principle. But we can’t overlook that USAID has been a destructive arm of American imperialism for decades.”).
There’s lots of rich countries to do this aid. China is investing in infrastructure without interfering with local politics. The world’s military hegemon has too much of a conflict of interest to do this job.
Wow it’s like when I move some pieces of wood or other items near my shed outdoors and I see a bunch of activity that I never knew existed.
Me, I just do what I can and at least trash the ones covering the windows on public transport here.
Don't want to doxx myself but no outdoor ads on the main street here.
Maybe Stockholm has some.
Elon doesn't own space, he just happens to be the one who is currently best at making it reachable. There is plenty of space for everyone else, and others will get there, eventually.
I could eat myself up with envy over the money he's making from it... or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward (while also being an asshole), rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...
Why do we need to let this be a monopoly controlled by one person. A king in a board room is still a king.
You get what you pay for and the service got paid for ultimately.
If it was important enough, it would have been paid for.
Please just stop this thing you're doing. It's nakedly markedly dishonest
The problem is not 'space' - it's getting ourselves sufficiently organized.
It's the same neo-liberal aggression couched in rhetorical trickery.
If technological progress requires monopolies and the road toward serfdom is that really a path we want?
It's just the money.
If we were actually going to Mars, then yes, but somehow he made himself the 'First Trillionaire' - without even so much as getting out of Earth's orbit.
This is NFT progress, in that, there is some plausible economic value in NFTs, but in reality, it's just a hustle.
We will be investigating him for decades and he deserves every second of it.
Forward back to fascism. No thanks. He already caused astonishing harm.
Kind of fucked up lol
> rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...
Your moral and ethical bar is Trump?
I do like big cities and their skylines though, sure.
It feels like there's no feasible solution here that would please you guys.
Should we all democratically vote on every satellite launched into space individually? It's already our elected representatives that approve it.
Earth orbit is more constrained, but it's very far from full. Geostationary orbits are about 20% full, but the rest is practically empty still.
The problem is that nobody asked the other 8.3 billions people what they think about seeing stuff in the sky. For the benefit of 1/1000th of humanity (~10 million starlink users).
Starlink’s total addressable market is only so large because of these monopolies. As sad as it is that astronomy will never be the same, it is a strong net positive for the world that fast internet be available at an affordable price.
The 1 I suspect is some other satellite
Starlink have already put a lot of effort into their satellites being much less bright than most satellites, including tilting their PV away from earth during the terminator crossing, so from what I've read you'll mainly see them while they're being deployed and while de-orbiting.
(Part of my still-expanding draft blog post about space data centres is to work out how bright a million much larger objects would look. If they were in the orbit with the most sun, that's a terminator-following sun-synchronous orbit, which is maximum brightness).
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The compute part may be a rack or a cabinet worth of GPUs (though TBH the public designs are currently vague to the point of being artistic impressions), but they also need to come with a PV array big enough to power that, plus a cooling array that's going to be close to 25% as big as the PV array regardless of what unit size they go for in the end.
If they settle on making e.g. 120 kW satellites, that would be about 400 m^2 for the PV and another 100 m^2 for the radiator.
I still cannot believe it's economical to have "data centers in orbit" but I guess the truth will be seen in whether or not it actually happens.
The FCC has regulatory jurisdiction for communications on US objects in space, regardless of distance from earth.
Even very optimistic estimates (by people who aren't Elon Musk) say it will take a decade to get the costs low enough to be worthwhile for LEO; higher orbits are much more expensive.
You can see that SpaceX (and probably other LEO operators as well) are already doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJWli7YKPw
This video is a good visual illustration of that effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw
Maybe we could just blast Anish Kapoor into space on a one-man prison vessel instead?
SpaceX has many owners, especially post-IPO. You, too, can buy the sky and sell the sky.
Perfect, how can this not be a win win for anyone not involved?
An opportunity for everyone to become wealthy and scale our riches together.
Without Elon, how would so many of us .. “ever have made it”?
SpaceX utilizes a dual-class share structure where CEO Elon Musk retains between 82.4% and 85% of the total voting power, despite only owning roughly 42% of the company's actual equity.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/gx04-who-owns-the-most-s...
* Most satellites were private owned, for communications or resource.
* Most government owned satellites have military use, the people that is trying to spy or nuke you or your neighbor.
* A small part is used for science and altruistic activities.
They're such an enormous part of the problem that it does a disservice to the problem to not metaphorically shine a spotlight on them.
I had trouble finding another source that summed up the data so nicely, but other sources did corroborate these figures: https://satfleetlive.com/blogs/how-many-satellites-in-orbit/
>They're such an enormous part of the problem
What an incredible life of privilege you must live to perceive a few glints in the sky as a huge problem.
But really, what point are you trying to make? I don't need to think that satellites glinting in the night sky are the literal worst problem facing humanity for that to be a valid topic of discussion.
You’re also ignoring that a government is accountable to people. A corporation is not.
I thought a good example of the pinnacle of government bureaucracy in action acting undemocratically both undermines your position and, secondly, might have you alter your opinion a bit.
You've, essentially, just appealed to authority to justify your position.
Actually many forms of government mandate and authority are generated by marketplace mechanisms, many of which are actually more true to desirable marketplace dynamics than those we see in private marketplaces, due to concentration of power, which is a known failure mode of marketplaces in general.
The idea that “government” is some mysterious mythical entity that just exists outside of people’s input and outside of marketplace forces is juvenile.
Neither government nor private market outcomes are intrinsically more legitimate than the other.
Isn't government the highest concentration of power? They, typically, hold a monopoly on taking money with the threat of violence. Seems ripe for market failure.
This has been approved:
* https://ca.pcmag.com/networking/16760/fcc-approves-reflect-o...
Edit: A 5km diameter spot illuminated from 600km altitude.
Plants can absorb some more CO2 and it improves their growth slightly but saying they LOVE CO2 is an exaggeration.
IMO it’s a marvel to look up at the sky and see man made objects flying through the sky, it’s incredibly inspiring to see the great feats of engineering that humans are capable of.
Also if you look up at the night sky you can still see ALL the stars, it’s just that you can now see a few extra tiny dots flying by, it subtracts nothing from the average stargazer’s view.
Your children will get much more amazing and inspiring sights from space telescopes and spacecraft that this new space industry will enable. They will benefit from new science and manufacturing techniques that are enabled by cheap access to space.
>when it’s the government
The government had a monopoly on space access for the past half century and barely managed to put a handful of extremely expensive objects in space. They were never capable of creating reusable rockets or lowering the cost of access to space in a meaningful way. Maybe it feels nicer when governments do it, but cheap access to space will never happen if they are the ones running the show.
We shouldn’t allow monopolies in the name of progress or the monopolistic rent seeking will stifle progress.
The government could have absolutely done all of this and more if there was any commitment to the investment. Instead nasa had its budget gutted.
My kids won’t have a future with any opportunity if resources are so concentrated that their bargaining power can’t have any effect in the world.
What we're seeing is humanity managing to become a space faring civilization. I look up and yearn to be up there as well. I'll never make it to space, but it would give me such joy if my children's children had the opportunity to.
Can the government shut off your access to GPS? No. Can spaceX shut off your access to their network? Yes.
Do you have rights to judicial review if government harms you? Yes. If spaceX does? Probably not because their terms of service create a contract not a legal right.
Or basic locations in Europe, that can be as close to 20km from a big city. There are a ton of spots where you have at best spotty 4G coverage or no coverage at all.
Used to live where we had 1Mbit ADSL, and no cell ... Trust me, you feel the limitations of that. Keeping your PC running 24/7 to download/buffer, so you can use your day traffic for more important stuff.
Starlink is a insane deal in my eyes. Sure, it uses a lot of power but your paying the same as typical vDSL in Germany. And ironically, ... Starlink is faster then the fixed lines we have here in the "3th" biggest city in Germany.
People really underestimate how much underinvestment there has been in Internet connectivity even in rich countries.
Maybe some day we'll be mining asteroids near Earth or something. Maybe we'll mine the moon. Going to/living on different planets is pretty much science fiction though. It's hard enough to live on the earth, it's gonna be 1000 times harder to live anywhere else.
Did you actually check with a satellite tracker, maybe show your kids and inspire them with what humanity can accomplish?
A trillion dollars will accumulate $100 billion in passive wealth simply by existing
The US has tons of spy satellites, why not make some for the folks paying taxes? Why do we have to sell our firstborns (data) to Google for maps etc?
Social welfare is the top local spending category in many local/state governments
I believe some functions are simply best performed by non-profit-motivated government agencies. However, I would usually prefer an actual unregulated or black market over the corrupt frankenstein of private-public partnerships
Disinformation on the Internet? Never seen it before.
The contracts are not just publicly bid but paired.
Come off this nonsense.
Space is the sphere of government and the launchers and satellites have always been built by companies and SpaceX is very visibly cheaper.
There are plenty of solid reasons to despise Elon - no need for counterfactuals.
There really aren't that many. He's kinda a dick and briefly supported the president very publicly.
Most of the other reasons are just as fatuous as this.
As a broad generality, governments are utter crap at inventing/building/operating bleeding-edge technologies at giga-scale. Exceptions are generally narrow-focus military hardware, plus flood control, aqueducts, and other "obviously needed for the nation's welfare" stuff.
It is harder to break satellite constellation in a concealed way.
Come off this nonsense.
The alternative is some company charging the government for the same exact thing.
It disgusts me that now, at all times, I can see strings of man made objects polluting the skies.
Starlink satellites have low orbits and only reflect sunlight around sunrise and sunset.
They are not overwhelming, mind you, but I did notice them immediately. They stood out enough that I wondered what they were and started researching, that alone says something about the prevalence.
Edit: An LLM tells me that this is partly unique to how far South Australia is and the positioning of the sun in Australia's Summer. But I lack the physics knowledge to confirm that.
Unfortunately you need a government that cares for the whole; in the USA oligarchs rule, so the general public are treated as paying slaves.
You are emotionally disregulated and unable to think critically.
This is such a weird framing, as if Starlink was a frivolous project for some rich person's fun.
There is genuine demand for orbital ISP from people, including people in poorer countries whom a better connectivity may help improve their incomes and lives, where an alternative is basically impossible (you won't get optic fibre in the Himalayas or Papua or the Andes anytime soon, if ever).
20 million people are now using Starlink and that number will almost certainly grow to maybe ten times as many, eventually. Ukraine uses Starlink to defend itself from being devoured by an aggressor. Sailors and other people in far away places use Starlink to keep in touch with their families.
Did you know that before Starlink, the South Pole Base had just 2x256 kB connection for everyone?
I get the "pollution" angle, but not the "hey, one guy is ruining the planet" angle. At the very least, all the customers are complicit, and I would add all the governments that don't seem to be able to build terrestrial connections for their own population.
I’m an occasional astrophotographer, and the baseline of photos you can took are absolutely breathtaking now. Seeing this destroyed in real time is depressing.
I used to see a rare flyby of a satellite in the complete dark, but now it’s much more, and besides my personal annoyance, many people much more serious about sky and space are rightfully angry. Maybe you can ask them to grow up, too.
Not every progress is good progress. We should understand that by now. You should understand that better than all of us combined, since you’re apparently grown up, way more than us.
And you're the judge of this based on your likes and hobbies?
Anyway, I agree. Just ask the people blocking the HS2 or CaHSR about how sad the train plowing through their communities makes them feel. We need to tear down all trains, not every progress is good progress
The top comment here is someone lamenting how depressing it is that supposedly a single person owns the night sky.
Another one is asking if we will be the last generation to see the night sky.
Yet with how political and dramatized the discussion around this is even on this website here, I fear that any opportunity to block or delay more SpaceX satellites will be used to the fullest.
I am concerned that this might hinder innovation. If you involve other countries, would this not be likely to become an extremely hard and slow regulatory process?
I understand that SpaceX's mitigation methods have been effective, and that the current satellites are on average around the limit of being visible to the naked eye under a very dark sky.
Personally I am eager to see more of these satellites enable 5G like cellular coverage outdoors in rural areas.
Perhaps I am more open to change in the appearance of nature than others. Some oppose also wind turbines in our mountains, where I usually think that they look cool and typically make the landscape more interesting.
With that said, I think we should have honest conversations about the benefits vs. the impacts, but also realize nothing is stagnant, not even nature.
The impartiality of those processes is a bit in question when the prime mover here is so far in bed with the executive that he gets to go up on stage during inauguration to sieg a few heils.
(And is then given a free hand to fire whomever he wants from the federal government.)
The ITU has also approved SpaceX actions.
And yes progress is good progress.
Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.
Haber, on chemical warfare: “The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing.”
Do you think the world would be better off if we still killed ourselves with swords instead of drones? The result is the same. A death is a death. The real cause of wars is not "better weapons".
https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
Was it not a big issue for you that aeroplanes were flying overhead?
Whos responsibility was it that you were living were you lived?
I guess there is a small difference between being able to choose or parents have choosen for you vs. everyone on the whole planet needs to endure it.
A lot to unpack
/s - obviously
A lot of people get upset about such things, even those are rather more important than just adding to the world's existing widespread internet access.
Starlink is cool, and has some niches, but this is a fairly limited argument in its favour.
The level of servility of some people never ceases to amaze me. This sentence is viscerally repulsive to me.
People can acknowledge a difference of values and recognize what they consider a destruction of the commons without their stance being distilled to simply being a hater.
Would you also considering people who bemoan the degradation of Lake Erie by industrialists of the last century as “crab mentality”?
Similarly, people at the time took what may be closer to the opposite stance: “Fundamentally this level of environmental degradation was accepted as a sign of success.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
Mostly, Kessler syndrome isn’t something to worry about at all; there are just a lot of orbital planes available. But in LEO, the mechanics don’t even apply.
First graph is a list of deorbit times: https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/deorbit-syst...
As expected, higher altitudes, higher mass, and lower surface areas correlate to longer deorbit times. It looks like altitude has an extreme effect on deorbit times, as you can see the 100 KG satellite (solar min) deorbits in a little under 2 years at 400 KM, but over 15 years at 500 KM. So 1.25x the altitude results in 7.5x the deorbit time.
Stuff at 800-1000 KM can take centuries to deorbit, and that's within both NASA's (under 2000 KM) and the ESA's (under 1000 KM) definitions of LEO. There is a definition for VLEO of under 450 KM, which would have fairly short deorbit times, and therefore a relatively mild Kessler Syndrome.
For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change?
I look up at the night sky and i want to see stars and the endlessness of the universe and don't want to be reminded that Elon Musk will poisen our atmosphere.
Yes. The only way to truly solve these issues is technological progress.
It's not technological progress we need; it's cultural progress.
IIRC no place in the world which has hard-paved highways has ever seen a peacetime famine. That's almost exclusively the domain of mud road territories. Of course, this is partly a correlation (mud road territories have worse governance and more banditry), but there is causality as well.
So clearly you are in favor of starvation and human suffering due to climate change because of your irrational distaste for seeing satellites in orbit.
I suspect the root cause is you've overdosed on propaganda on the internet.
life for our kin will only be better.
we will have space stations where you can visit and see all the stars you want.
there will be space tourism and that will be pretty cool.
that’s what i wanted as a kid and its cool to see it play out irl.
edit: dang didn't expect so many negative people
Not only you didn’t get the point, but you still hold on to your delusions:
> life for our kin will only be better.
Right? In this subscription economy? Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved? You can’t afford to rent the house you loved let alone buy it? (previous generations could afford) the list goes on and on.
Maybe stop spreading lies and see things more objectively?
> Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved?
You know how many movies the average peasant watched in the 1800s? 0. The closest equivalent was live theatre and that was an expensive luxury. You'd also likely get see one or more of your children die to diseases that are trivially treatable or preventable today.
this is why it is important to give toys and distractions to the masses and meaningless grind so they can stay busy and happy.
while other people actually build the world for them.
edit: not LCD the screen… if you thought thats what i meant then… nvm… not even gonna say it lol iykyk
EDIT: You edited your comment after I submit my response. You cannot put arbitrary abbreviations and expect people to read your mind. Anyway, there is no point in arguing with you.
services meant for the LCD. and those people pay for them.
all the context was there. you failed.
lol at you
For a planet which gets warmer and warmer.
When did you became that compliant?
A lot of progress has externalities and the benefits and downsides of progress are rarely equally distributed.
> A lot of progress has externalities and the benefits and downsides of progress are rarely equally distributed.
The vast majority of humanity has benefited from progress, compared to most decades and certainly centuries in the past. So I don't really know what your point is here?
But do you really think life has been getting better in the last 10 years say?
Do you think trickle down economics works?
Are you happy with the way things are going under this administration, which favours those BILLIONAIRES you mentioned, but couldn’t really give a damn about the rest of us or the commons?
Are you OK living in a future where there are zero checks and balances and the .1% fully controlling and owning the political and policy space, i.e. the return to the Robber Barons era?
Uh, yeah. My TV's much better, my video games are better, programming is easier and more fun with these new AI options added on top of better frameworks than we had in the past, there are way more restaurants serving better food, way more great shows and movies, there's mainstream awareness of the ills of social media, I can take driverless taxis around my city, I can tap to pay pretty much everywhere, wayyyyyy more of my friends work remotely. I'm 40 now, and myself + most of my friends + family are making more money now than we were at 30.
> Are you OK living in a future where there are zero checks and balances and the .1% fully controlling and owning the political and policy space, i.e. the return to the Robber Barons era?
You sound like you've been reading a bunch of gloom and doom scenarios. Get offline. Go outside. Touch grass. Breathe. People are still going out to eat at restaurants, they're still playing intramural sports, they're still going to the beach with their friends, they're still watching plays, they're still visiting family and hosting movie nights. Stop reading so much negative news that's telling you the sky is falling and that everything is going to shit.
Of course there are massive problems and inequities we're solving, of course! But that's always been the case. Relax. Breathe. Put it in perspective.
Your response is basically 'Works on my machine!'.
And speaking of touching grass; what do you think the recent change of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) under this administration will mean to our commons?
I'll tell you, it means the new rule will make it easier to legally destroy wildlife habitats. And this on top of all the climate protection policies this administration is eagerly rolling back, because solar is woke or something. I guess you're OK with that too, since it doesn't impact you (yet).
Even though living standards have improved in the last 100 years overall, it's not a guarantee it will continue like that, if we let the Robber Barons take full control again.
You're just not someone who has to deal with these problems. Are we solving them? Not sure what you're being that of.
> Get offline. Go outside. Touch grass. Breathe. People are still going out to eat at restaurants, they're still playing intramural sports, they're still going to the beach with their friends, they're still watching plays, they're still visiting family and hosting movie nights.
I suggest you stop touching grass and go and talk to a few less fortunate people. Maybe that can broaden your perspective
Almost every major measure of human progress and prosperity over time?
What are you basing your doom and gloom beliefs on?
> I suggest you stop touching grass and go and talk to a few less fortunate people. Maybe that can broaden your perspective
I would wager my perspective is much broader than yours. Being so anxious and pessimistic that you only focus on the negative, to such a degree where when people point out real positive progress you feel COMPELLED to say something negative, doesn't mean you have a broad perspective. It just means you're miserable.
But I'm not talking about luxuries like super cars that most people couldn't afford.
I'm talking about the necessities of life. Food, shelter and energy have become more expensive and under this administration's policies it's not getting any better.
Poverty rates have barely improved and under this administration desire to reduce SNAP budget heavily, what do you think this will do to child poverty rates?
A significant portion of the human populace still lives like this in various degrees today. You are just blind to it because you'd rather live in your delusion for comfort.
I believe it should’ve been possible to not leave so much people behind and so much behind. Requiring those at the front to not leave people so far behind (and forcefully funneling away their riches if they do) would’ve been enough.
I don't think this is true. Of course, rich people will always benefit the most from any technological advances. But there is no indication that the average Joe will be worse off in say, 20 years, compared to today. Medical advances alone coming down the pipeline will likely tip the scales towards future average Joe being better off compared to today. If I have to make a choice, for example: do I want to cut the deaths from diseases by half and fill the sky with Starlink satellites, or do nothing? I am picking the better medicice and Starlink-filled sky.
I don't need a space station with space tourism only the richest can afford and will be still very dangerous to see the stars right now.
What you will see is how Starlink satelites will poisen our atmosphere at re-entry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s...
This vision is absolutely horryfying, yet at same time incredibly interesting.
You are seeing this in this thread. I doubt anyone likes to be described as contra-progress. But nevertheless people would rather conserve the current night sky than see it transmute into a shimmering sea of a million artificial satellites. It's not really obvious to me why one state should be preferable to the other.
Also let me guess, you have high speed internet avaiable at your house so starlink isn't your only high-speed option right now?
I’m not against advancing in this area, but there is nuance. Progress can be short sighted.
We need to ensure our progress is balanced taking into account the whole system instead of just one part.
For what it's worth, this also happens with printed books.
I wasted the latter half of my teens taking New Age occultism and magical powers as a profound topic rather than a literature and culture topic, thanks to a combination of a bookstore chain near where I grew up and a mother who also took this all very seriously.
i feel like all these problems people come up with stem from the fact they suck at parenting and have to project.
i and most people i know don’t have these problems. we actually care, and our parents cared about us.
when i was growing up it was kids who drank or smoked (we didn’t have smartphones).
just avoid them.
these days if kids are glued to the phone that’s the parents fault. bad parenting.
take kids to the museum or get them to a classical show or something.
if parents make excuses why they can’t, again L parents.
Starlink is a global phenomenon, good ISPs were at best a local phenomenon.
and they would have been 100x more brutal.
The US spends up to $4 billion a year just to keep a few people alive on the ISS. And they can’t stay there too long because it’s too dangerous to their health. The idea that we’re going to “colonize space” in the foreseeable future is laughable.
I have no love for SpaceX but at least I can take a subscription or invest and the stock and pretend that those satellites are beneficial to me.
There isn’t a single US government owned satellite that is not actively harmful to me at the moment.