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Comment by killingtime74 | Hacker News Reader

Private companies will charge whatever they can. I never understood why people seek justification for a certain price. The bargaining power imbalance is plain to see.

When starlink charges you $100 it's because where it does so it has competitors that charge at that level. (Pendants will challenge this). In Australia where starlink is the superior satellite service there is an inferior NBN service and various mobile services if you can get signal. In Ukraine what do the alternatives charge that have consistent service?

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Satellites cost a lot to operate and UA is using significant bandwidth for these satellites. SpaceX is not a charity.

The same satellites rotate around the earth and serve other part of the world... and were otherwise unused when they were flying over Ukraine.

What is the operational cost of a satellite? It's all upfront cost, there is no operational cost other than running uplink stations/bandwidth on the ground. Is there really significant opportunity cost for Spacex here? I fucking doubt it, the starlink satellites serve relatively small geographic areas. I very much doubt that satellites over the Donbass are in a position where they are not making money because all the traffic that would otherwise be paid for by a bunch of people is being clobbered by priority UA mil packets. I also can't imagine that the entire UA military is particularly significant on the backbone end of things when you have large metros etc mixed in, it just doesn't line up for me.

“It's all upfront cost, there is no operational cost other than running uplink stations/bandwidth on the ground.”

Heh.

The thought that there is no overhead to such a complex system that is designed to continually fall out of they sky and self destruct every couple years.

They don't deploy satellites to serve Ukraine, they need those satellites anyway to run the constellation. Ukraine wartime use has no impact on this side of the equation.

It does when a nation state is trying to disrupt operations.

not really on topic but i don't think russia is a nation state

It could rephrased as there is no marginal cost per bit assuming the bandwidth isn't saturated and no additional coverage area over other business operations is being offered.

LEO sats have a lifespan (5 years IIRC), so you have to constantly refresh your constellation with new launches and sats. These launch and replacement costs will drop over time, but they aren't trivial.

Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible business, but there are real operating costs to keeping the network alive.

As mentioned in the other comment and the parent, Ukrainian wartime demand is not relevant to that side of the business, there aren't satellites that are deployed specifically to serve Ukraine and I am informed guessing that there is no aspect of the network that is actually degraded in a customer-losing sense, and while there may be greater bandwidth costs I am unconvinced that the total cost to Spacex is particularly high.

(fwiw it would be chill of the US government to pitch them some money for the actual cost imo, but i think the actual cost to spacex (real and opportunity) is likely much smaller than the numbers being bandied about here)

So war profiteering then? Since Ukraine HAD alternatives pre-war, then your model only applies because they can get away with it in a war zone.

If I own the only gas station with gas after a hurricane or earthquake, I should be able to raise my rates to whatever I want?

It's only $20 mil. If I remember correctly Raytheon was awarded a $182 mil contract to develop 2x NASAMS for Ukraine. Just ask them for a slight price cut and voila, money for SpaceX.

Is not my model it's an observation. If you don't raise prices after hurricane or earthquake you run out, which is what usually happens. This is what happened at the start of COVID with masks and hand sanitizer. It is profiteering. Read your country's local news to see if anything was done about it at the time, in mine nothing was.

What network alternatives do they have in the combat zones? My understanding was that communication infra was taken offline in the first few weeks of the war.

Pre-war there were alternatives. The only reason for scarcity is the war, hence it being war profiteering.

Not necessarily, having security resources to counter Russian attempts at civilian bombings is expensive from an opportunity cost standpoint.

Many governments (especially states in the U.S) have anti price gouging laws.

So does mine (Australian). However during covid we didn't see much actual enforcement

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