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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

If there was any doubt this was purely political, that quote erases it.

The FCC rural broadband program is an infamous boondoggle of vast overspending on bad services from third rate providers.

It's insane that they even mentioned Starship in this, when it was a test launch of the largest rocket in history, and has nothing to do with the Starlink launches.

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As much as I really despise just about everything adjacent to musk, I think you’re right. Wtf does starship have to do with starlink.

They said they'd use starship to launch and it's not yet ready

They did not say Starship was a requirement for Starlink, they said they could use it when ready to speed up the rollout. SpaceX has been launching the Gen2 satellites, originally intended to be launched on Starship, on Falcon 9 instead.

They explicitly stated in the plan they submitted to the FCC that they would use Starship, going as far as to say that they’re completely going to stop using the Falcon for Starlink in a letter to the FCC.

The letter was even picked up by media who then reported on this early last year.

https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...

Starship is the only way that Starlink could meet its targets for capacity. The performance of Starlink depends on the number of subscribers and satellites. They have been growing subscribers faster than satellites which is why the performance in the report has been dropping. The only solution is to launch more satellites.

SpaceX started launching V2 satellites on Falcon 9, but they can only fit 22 on each rocket instead of the 50 or so with previous version. Even with their increased launch rate, there is no way they can launch the tens of thousands of satellites they have planned.

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