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Elon Musk will continue to provide internet to Ukraine, after the billionaire asked the United States to bear the cost of providing connectivity to that country.
In the midst of the armed conflict in Ukraine, where Russia intervened, the internet connection has been crucial for the operation of drones.
Elon Musk has been criticized for comments in favor of Russia’s armed movements.
Elon Musk began providing internet service to Ukraine in February of this year, through SpaceX and its satellite internet company Starlink and 8 months after providing the service, Elon Musk wanted to throw in the towel, asking the United States government to take over the cost of bringing internet to that country.
KEY POINTS
Musk started giving satellite internet to Ukraine from a tweet that the deputy prime minister of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorovwho also works as Minister of Digital Transformation, made him.
The tweet was not friendly at all, as it quotes: “While you are trying to colonize Mars… Russia is trying to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets are successfully landing from space, Russian rockets are attacking the Ukrainian civilian population. We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and turn to sensible Russians to keep up.”
Let us remember that Elon Musk has been criticized on several occasions for his space project and the group of techno-billionaires in the world, such as Jeff Bezos (who has his own space company Blue Origin, the one in charge of taking the Mexican Katya Echazarreta into space) is the one who has advanced the most in the race to conquer space, specifically, Mars.
Based on figures from the OECD, since the first artificial satellite, the famous “SPUTNIK”, was launched into space in 1959, if we imagine a graph, for almost sixty years there was an almost straight line of launches that timidly was made from satellites into space, until SpaceX came along and started launching Starlink satellites, making this line go from a vertical to an amazing horizontal as of 2019.
All this has had to happen, for Musk to send to the United States Department of Defense, his request for internet financing that he has maintained in Ukraine and that he estimated in a tweet, costs him 20 million dollars a month and it is not for less, he has an impressive machinery of 2,200 satellites in orbit, which have provided internet to 150,000 ground stations in Ukraine, figures that we can conclude from the numbers that information agencies have released throughout the conflict. All this infrastructure, both stations and satellites, requires resupply, which is why it becomes a critical issue.
Musk’s final decision
After criticizing the high cost of bringing the internet to Ukraine, which has served to operate reconnaissance drones on the front lines in attacks on Russian positions, Musk assured in Twitter that will continue to pay for the internet with which Ukraine faces the armed conflict in which it finds itself.
It is important to note that the initial deployment of physical internet terminals, at least 85 percent of their cost, was or was borne by the governments of Poland and the United States, which also paid 30 percent of internet connectivity.