chrisl

Stupid... The Russians learned nothing from the bombings of Germany, the Blitz or the Vergeltungswaffen.... It has no impact on the population other than increasing the nation's resolve to go all the way. You could say it's for internal opinion but there would be no need to send such intensive attacks (they waste their weapons).

Our best thoughts to our Ukrainian friends Haiduk, Kraze, Zeleban and all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCcph9srHSw&t=4333s

There is an interesting interview with Polish volunteer sergeant fighting in Ukraine. It is one and a half month old and unfortunatelly no ENG subtitles are available, but there are interesting tactical and organizational details from the ground that are nevertheless relevant and worth to share here. Some are already known, but since he is unusually vocal (within Opsec) plus has a lot of practice it may be worth to bring them on this board:
1.The guy serves as platoon commander (practically down to 12 men + 5 absent) from April. His men are in Separate Special Battalion serving as "Battle Detachment" (re: all kind of missions including SF ones) subordinated to one of the regular brigades, probably mainly at Kharkiv front (undisclosed).

2. Those multinational experienced guys (US, Frenchmen, Poles, Ukrainians and several others) have clearly very different tasks than most common infantry fighting in the trenches- they serve as "fire brigade" in case Russians attacks will brake through. They see periods of very intense fighting, much more than most common soldiers. Interestingly, he claims it is common practice to form such ad hoc local QRF at the brigade and sometimes battalion level. After some time such units are treated as "specialists", taken out of regular order of battle and if having good reputation may be "borrowed" to other brigades for special tasks. Thus they are almost constantly in fight, experiencing problems with fatigue and lack of sleep.

3. Their equipment reflects that- he started with AK 74, but know uses Grot rifle and M14 for sniper tasks, good quality vests and uniforms. He claims many soldiers he served with, including Americans, will prefer those weapons to M4's that are also in use but have reputation of being too fragile in frontline conditions, difficult to keep clean and prone to jamming. He says US M67 granades are also used, but have 5-sec. delay that is way too long in battlefield conditions (mind- probably assaults), so most soldiers in line prefer old F1. It is interesting that he participated in some "water-environment" sabotage missions deep behind enemy lines (planting explosives) armed chiefly with his 9mm pistol.
Entire platoon also have two sets of NVG's for entire unit, which they found very lucky to have- common soldiers rarely have such items.

4. Battlefield effectiveness of AT weapons is also widely different from theoretical. AT-4's serve at max. 150 m but usually closer, NLAW's 6-800 m (platoon get a lot of NLAW's but they had no spare batteries, which shocked soldiers who considered it a sabotage on behalf of "unmentioned" provider state; it almost get them killed). Team's sole Javelin set is effective up to 1500m in practice, but only if line of vision is unobstructed, and similarly they have great problem possessing only pair of batteries- thus they need to allow armour get closer than theoretical range. Infantry is rather vulnarable to RU tanks, since they improved tactics to "shoot and scoot" from 2kms afar, behind practical range of a Javelin: "Unlike at early campaigns, they rarely go into open and creatively use cover and concealment now, preferring their famous carrousel tactics."

5. His and other platoons often do infiltration tactics; it is also visibly different between regular Ukrainians units and Territorial Defence that former prefer aggresive forms of defences- active patrolling, inflitrations, ambushes etc. while latter stick to their trenches, which they nonetheless hold valiantly. His platoon would penetrate several kms deep inside enemy lines on fairly regular basis. They usually move by pickups and technicals- after engagement they instantly mount them and drive at very high speeds, which is dangerous by itself [I also heard from several other accounts that number of common driving accidents due to enforced speed is very high in this war, especially directly behind the front]. Also despite many people demanding Ukrainians getting on the offensive (material was recorded before it) he says this small tactic is exteremely costly for Russians, so we should not expect in this war "massess of armour that will break the front, which will lead to nothing, them being sorrounded and suffering extra casualties". Instead they kill Russians at very high rate every day, devastate their logistics and only later will be able to penetrate the front [Nice practical translation of @TheCaptain theories about "attrition to manouvre" and internal fractures that lead to RU collapse].

6. As a rule they were often outnumbered and almost always outgunned; it stand out that front is often very thinly manned and soldiers dispersed, like a weak team solely holding even large village. Russians also visibly improved their tactic over time- they tried night infiltration, learned how to sneak over the minefields and tried to lure his team in the open. Still, his opinion on them as soldiers is low. There are very detailed desciptions of small unit actions, for example when his platoon defended a village against Russian assault for two sleepless nights, resulting only in 29 eliminated Russians and BMP.

7. Very high regard for Ukrainian determination- especially in June, he says army was basically holding only on its morale and sheer middle finger energy. Even "QRF" elite units in his sector lacked any heavy weapons except several rusty RPG's, they were constantly observed by several drones at once and subjected to constant artillery barrage. Still, they usually defeated muscovite assaults. In one such actions they were aided on flank with 7-man Ukrainian recon team from HQ, armed only with small weapons that successfully stand against armoured assault. Visible recogntition of morale as deciding factor here; for example cases of wounded soldiers leaving hospitals to join collegues at the front are common.

8.Very often they participated in "emergency" missions to plug the whole or counterattack; in one of such they have 17 men to stop expected massive assault of entire BTG and were suddenly joined by colonel, who took rifle and manned the trench with them (attack didn't came in the end). High opinion of Ukrainian officers, who usually share the same burden as common soldiers, in contrast to Russian practices. Also international troops who get this far are only crack volunteers with right psyche determined to stay in the fight- despite witnessing fires no NATO soldier ever ecnountered they get used to this situation and learned how to behave. He notes that other volunteers, not less professional, brave or skilled in direct combat, simply did not have nerves to be in this kind of war and left [another common thrope- even long wartime service in NATO armies did not provide them with adequate experience against heavy fires].

9. This soldier, just as many other volunteers and Ukrainians, is visibly shocked by bestiality of Russian way of war- it is beyond just Bucha and Irpien, but in every village and town atrocities are common, there are also often civilians lying dead in countryside or murdered on roads. He descibes a situation when Russians purposfully shoot passing cars but initially targeting only backseats. Drivers speed up to escape, they take the turn and meet a hidden defence point when they are frontally gunned down in group. This way many cars created a barricade from vehicles and dead civilians that blocked the road in case of Ukrainian advance. Such behaviour of course only stiffened Ukrainian morale.

Ok, sorry for long post. There is another interview with sgt. Krzysztof X that came out several days ago when he give details of offensive in Kharkiv, if you will be interested I may sum up his experiences.

Nothing in my post was intended to attack you, but I don't think the numbers that Musk kicks around are correct.  Or likely even close to correct.  And the only number I picked out was the $4500, not the 85%, because either Musk or the press like to keep saying "our most expensive service is $4500/mo" without detailing how many terminals in Ukraine are getting that service vs the $100/mo service.
If you give someone something that you charge for that *they* otherwise would pay for, then you're reducing your income by that much.  But what it costs you is only what it costs you, especially if it doesn't use enough of your capacity to limit your sales to other people.  When the USG is buying something in bulk (like internet service from a satellite provider, for example), they often negotiate prices that are based on actual cost+reasonable profit rather than some published retail price.  Retail prices are often structured in funny ways, like printers below cost and overpriced ink, cell phones sold below cost with high priced service, or Starlink terminals below cost+overpriced service, where the price structure is designed to make the barrier to entry low and then make up the loss on the high priced service.  The government might reasonably choose to pay full cost for the terminals and then pay cost+agreed profit for the service.
All I was trying to do in my post is point out that Musk is likely *way* overplaying how much the service to Ukraine is costing Starlink, that there are a lot of people and organizations paying for Starlink service in Ukraine, and that it's very possible that they'll be made whole in the end anyway.
 

Ref steel pan, my posted pictures earlier corroborate that:

The poured concrete must have rebar in it otherwise it would rapidly  (ie just months) crumble apart under the pressure,  expansion contraction and vibrations (the photos so far do indicate its in fine condition other that the struck areas). 
Im not saying its a wasted attack as such, it obviously had a great effect and the political timing was just *MWAH!*. 
I just want to see more than a one off strike. 
 
 

$4500 is the most expensive service they offer.  There's nothing that says there are 25K devices getting that service.
And that's retail price, not cost.  Actual cost of providing the service could be a small fraction of that.
I was just reading an article in WaPo a few minutes ago that USAID paid $1500/ea for a bunch of "standard terminals and service".
There are also bunches of Ukrainians posting their monthly invoices for the standard service they're paying for.  Many people are paying for service on multiple terminals.
When I was looking up the cost of a satellite, some of the articles showed SpaceX's own projections of revenue from Starlink.  
My guess would be that a substantial fraction of the service being provided in Ukraine is paid for by a variety of sources: US gov't, other gov'ts, individuals, and SpaceX.  If SpaceX is demanding payment for service that wasn't contracted, they're also asking for DCMA to visit and see how much service they've actually been providing that isn't paid for by some other source, and it will probably turn out that it's not costing them all that much, and the bad press that Musk is trying to get will cost them more just providing the service, which is in some sense some of the lowest cost advertising they can get "hey, you think your application is demanding?  Ukraine used our stuff in a war zone to defeat Russia" (and they don't even have to say it).  Someone inside SpaceX knows the numbers and from some recent tweets it sounds like they got through to him and told him to shut up.  
And its entirely possible that in parallel there are contract negotiations going on that will fully cover the costs.  But whoever gets that taken care of won't go advertising it on twitter, and the USG will probably keep it quiet as well, possibly even as part of the deal.

Nothing in my post was intended to attack you, but I don't think the numbers that Musk kicks around are correct.  Or likely even close to correct.  And the only number I picked out was the $4500, not the 85%, because either Musk or the press like to keep saying "our most expensive service is $4500/mo" without detailing how many terminals in Ukraine are getting that service vs the $100/mo service.
If you give someone something that you charge for that *they* otherwise would pay for, then you're reducing your income by that much.  But what it costs you is only what it costs you, especially if it doesn't use enough of your capacity to limit your sales to other people.  When the USG is buying something in bulk (like internet service from a satellite provider, for example), they often negotiate prices that are based on actual cost+reasonable profit rather than some published retail price.  Retail prices are often structured in funny ways, like printers below cost and overpriced ink, cell phones sold below cost with high priced service, or Starlink terminals below cost+overpriced service, where the price structure is designed to make the barrier to entry low and then make up the loss on the high priced service.  The government might reasonably choose to pay full cost for the terminals and then pay cost+agreed profit for the service.
All I was trying to do in my post is point out that Musk is likely *way* overplaying how much the service to Ukraine is costing Starlink, that there are a lot of people and organizations paying for Starlink service in Ukraine, and that it's very possible that they'll be made whole in the end anyway.
 

Nothing in my post was intended to attack you, but I don't think the numbers that Musk kicks around are correct.  Or likely even close to correct.  And the only number I picked out was the $4500, not the 85%, because either Musk or the press like to keep saying "our most expensive service is $4500/mo" without detailing how many terminals in Ukraine are getting that service vs the $100/mo service.
If you give someone something that you charge for that *they* otherwise would pay for, then you're reducing your income by that much.  But what it costs you is only what it costs you, especially if it doesn't use enough of your capacity to limit your sales to other people.  When the USG is buying something in bulk (like internet service from a satellite provider, for example), they often negotiate prices that are based on actual cost+reasonable profit rather than some published retail price.  Retail prices are often structured in funny ways, like printers below cost and overpriced ink, cell phones sold below cost with high priced service, or Starlink terminals below cost+overpriced service, where the price structure is designed to make the barrier to entry low and then make up the loss on the high priced service.  The government might reasonably choose to pay full cost for the terminals and then pay cost+agreed profit for the service.
All I was trying to do in my post is point out that Musk is likely *way* overplaying how much the service to Ukraine is costing Starlink, that there are a lot of people and organizations paying for Starlink service in Ukraine, and that it's very possible that they'll be made whole in the end anyway.
 

$4500 is the most expensive service they offer.  There's nothing that says there are 25K devices getting that service.
And that's retail price, not cost.  Actual cost of providing the service could be a small fraction of that.
I was just reading an article in WaPo a few minutes ago that USAID paid $1500/ea for a bunch of "standard terminals and service".
There are also bunches of Ukrainians posting their monthly invoices for the standard service they're paying for.  Many people are paying for service on multiple terminals.
When I was looking up the cost of a satellite, some of the articles showed SpaceX's own projections of revenue from Starlink.  
My guess would be that a substantial fraction of the service being provided in Ukraine is paid for by a variety of sources: US gov't, other gov'ts, individuals, and SpaceX.  If SpaceX is demanding payment for service that wasn't contracted, they're also asking for DCMA to visit and see how much service they've actually been providing that isn't paid for by some other source, and it will probably turn out that it's not costing them all that much, and the bad press that Musk is trying to get will cost them more just providing the service, which is in some sense some of the lowest cost advertising they can get "hey, you think your application is demanding?  Ukraine used our stuff in a war zone to defeat Russia" (and they don't even have to say it).  Someone inside SpaceX knows the numbers and from some recent tweets it sounds like they got through to him and told him to shut up.  
And its entirely possible that in parallel there are contract negotiations going on that will fully cover the costs.  But whoever gets that taken care of won't go advertising it on twitter, and the USG will probably keep it quiet as well, possibly even as part of the deal.

Repairing the bridge is not a binary thing.
On the first day it was one lain for small vehicles and a lone train locomotive. 
From a year or two from now it could be "good as new" including from full load capacity to new coating on the all the structures.
In between of those two are many many other states. Including "shut down for further repairs", even if it was close to full capacity before that.

Regarding bridge damage and repair: wasn't it the Kremlin (or maybe Crimea Central) who set a deadline for repair of the Kerch bridge for July next year? Given that's the Russians setting a deadline, does it seem likely it'll be done sooner?

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

Not just technically - also economically.  The USG already could put whatever performance they wanted into space for vast amounts of money.  Starlink is very commercially viable.  The government basically already did what you suggested - Iridium cost about $5B to put into space and there wasn't enough market to pay to operate it and pay whatever debt service they had.  It got picked up at a fire sale price of tens of millions, like a space version of the Pontiac Silverdome, by a company that was at least initially basically reselling service to the DOD.  It was a bargain for DOD - the hardware was already in space, so all the cost and technical risks were gone, and they just had to put enough money in that the buyers could continue to operate it while they looked for other customers.
Starlink really needs to stay private because there are a ton of non-DOD applications for it, and it looks like it works economically. The only real issue is that Musk is a nutcase.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

Not just technically - also economically.  The USG already could put whatever performance they wanted into space for vast amounts of money.  Starlink is very commercially viable.  The government basically already did what you suggested - Iridium cost about $5B to put into space and there wasn't enough market to pay to operate it and pay whatever debt service they had.  It got picked up at a fire sale price of tens of millions, like a space version of the Pontiac Silverdome, by a company that was at least initially basically reselling service to the DOD.  It was a bargain for DOD - the hardware was already in space, so all the cost and technical risks were gone, and they just had to put enough money in that the buyers could continue to operate it while they looked for other customers.
Starlink really needs to stay private because there are a ton of non-DOD applications for it, and it looks like it works economically. The only real issue is that Musk is a nutcase.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

There are almost certainly a bunch of program managers at SpaceX/Starlink who aren't absolute nutters who have been on the phone with their DOD contracting, launch-approving, and export reviewing counterparts doing whatever damage control needs to be done (probably not all that much).  Musk can say whatever random stuff he wants to say on twitter, but the people in the background actually do all the contracting and government interaction and both sides know how things work.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
I suspect a few things:
1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.

According to the SpaceX figures shared with the Pentagon, about 85% of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine were paid – or partially paid – for by countries like the US and Poland or other entities. Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs $4,500 each month per unit for the most advanced service. (Over the weekend, Musk tweeted there are around 25,000 terminals in Ukraine.) — CNN, October/14/2022.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine/#paragraph-4de74b4a-e6fa-5ddd-937e-d10fb1ae88bd
I don't think starlink is losing money because of what it is providing to Ukraine - that mostly seems to be paid for. I suspect its more that Starlink's business model is losing money, because satellites are expensive and they haven't got enough uptake to cover the initial costs incurred.

Well that's a super confusing colour palette - green for ocean, blue for land. Good work, edgy graphic designer guy.

And it’s molten pieces of ice from the bridge hitting the water and splashing all that molten ice from under the bridge into the air.