Nah we're going to the moon and mars. Have fun throwing your tantrum.

Good questions! @grok what presidential administration was in power when the Starshield contracts and terms were established and implemented?

The combination of Ukraine politics, Elon politics, and SPCX being a public stock has resulted in massive volumes of the dumbest space takes you'll ever see.

The ability to scale is a skill.

The thing you're missing is that you're assuming these countries can just "choose" to have their own version of Starlink. As if previously they just chose not to do it, but now they've chosen to do it. The reality is they've been trying as hard as they can the whole time, and they just can't do it. The fact that they're huffing and puffing now doesn't change that. They can't simply "choose" to do this, anymore than you or I could "choose" to play in the NBA. In other words, this is a skill issue.

"Millions of people living and working in space, as long as we don't have to internally fund the initial crew vehicle."

I do think this might be the most important philosophical question to be discussing though. The idea that the purpose of humanity is to be a biological bootloader is a philosophy with a similar range of implications as the beliefs of any other religion. I.e. coming to this belief is not unlike a Christian "finding God" or "being saved."

What happens to The Great Launch Supply Crunch™️ when Google buys Rocket Lab or Relativity and takes all that future launch supply off the market for internal use?

🚨 BREAKING 🚨: Starship would have to be the best rocket ever built in order to achieve its goal of being the best rocket ever built.

Within the past year, we've gone from "there might be data centers in space" to "there will be data centers in space" to "basically everything we send to space will be a data center".

Well, I'd like to see ol Elon Musk wriggle his way out of THIS jam! *Elon wriggles his way out of the jam easily Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

Can tiny China rock SpaceX?

Doubtful. They will simply move the goalpost or deny that it's really happening / deny that it's practically useful. They'll claim that the satellites being launched are not actually functioning as a data center to a meaningful degree. They'll argue that it's all for show, that it's performative to pump the stock price. If you're waiting for these doubters to finally "see the light", you're going to be waiting a very long time. How long? Well, I think we can look to Starlink as an example. IMO the legitimacy of Starlink in the eyes of the broader public (and including skeptics) changed when Starlink was brought into Ukraine at the start of their war with Russia. Prior to that, I think most people still weren't seeing the value. Then all of a sudden, it goes from "Better than Nothing Beta" to "literally altered the geopolitical landscape". I suspect it will take something like that for orbital data centers to finally break through the stubborn viewpoint of the skeptics. At that point they will switch to arguing regulatory or monopoly-based concerns. Flipping from "this isn't really happening/working" to "this is too much power and we need to regulate it".

Satellite communication itself was available in some form or another for decades prior to Starlink. People thought they understood it and its limitations. Some of the people who understood satellites the best were the most skeptical of Starlink. They made seemingly valid arguments like "LEO satellites will be over the oceans for ~70% of the time, so they'll never be profitable because most of the time they won't be serving paying customers." Or "LEO satellites will deorbit within less than 5 - 10 years, so the system will never be profitable because you keep having to replenish it." In both of those examples, the initial premise is correct! The physics argument was technically correct! The Starlink satellites really *are* over oceans most of the time. And LEO satellites really *do* need to be replenished frequently. And yet the conclusions from those arguments were totally incorrect. Despite the physics objections being correct, the overall argument was incorrect! Is it possible that SpaceX's use of femtocells may differ from the use you've seen over the past decades? Perhaps drastically different, in the same way that Starlink is drastically different than, for example, DirectTV or other older satellite systems? Is it possible that the "physics" statements being made by you and the T-Mobile / AT&T execs are completely correct, while their overall conclusion about Starlink is incorrect?