Elon Musk confirms that he will continue to cover the considerably high operating expenses of the satellite internet system star link which is currently active over Ukraine.
It was February 2022 when the first stages of the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine were unfolding, but it seemed that perhaps it would be something that would not last long.
It was under this scenario that Elon Musk grabbed many headlines by deploying his Starlink satellite internet network in the invaded country.
As part of its tactics, the Russian government had disabled part of Ukraine’s telecommunications infrastructure and the millionaire stepped in almost immediately to provide support.
However, it seems that giving internet to a country at war, no matter how small, can cost a lot, really, a lot of money.
Starlink will remain active in Ukraine: Elon Musk will pay for it
It turns out that in September of this 2022, seven months after starting support for Ukraine, SpaceX sent a letter to the United States Department of Defense, asking the Pentagon to take care of paying the expenses related to the use of its satellite Internet Starlink in Ukraine.
According to the report of the CNNSpaceX reportedly disclosed to the department that continuing to provide Starlink access to the US community would cost the company more than US$120 million for the remainder of the remainder of 2022 and almost US$400 million for the next 12 months.
Starlink claimed that they were not in a position to finance the existing terminals with connection over the Ukrainian sky for an indefinite period of time. However, shortly after this document was leaked, Elon Musk himself used his Twitter account to change his mind:
The comments in this thread are a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 16, 2022
In his Twitter post, Musk confirms that SpaceX will continue to finance the Ukrainian government for free indefinitely, even if Starlink continues to lose money.
It should be noted that just after the letter was leaked, Musk defended the request on the grounds that he was asking the authorities to simply start paying them, without charging them any of the previous expenses.
Where SpaceX would be losing much more money than expected as they would be regularly shipping thousands of new Starlink terminals to replace the ones that Russian forces routinely destroy.
This situation has inflated infrastructure costs considerably and it does not seem that it will stop.