(And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are.

The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_Affiliate_Radi...

Essentially, anyone with a smart-phone will now be able to text home from anywhere without specialized equipment. Elon can take a victory lap on that product.

Competitors naive enough to underestimate what it took to build Starlink are going to find spectrum auctions already well out of their league. =3

Do governments and militaries even believe in the laws of physics? I mean that exactly this was going to happen (undisruptable radio comms + robots, on the battlefield) was perfectly predictable near ~about 1960, and it's an absolute miracle that it took so long to come to pass.

And even that is assuming you're only willing to believe in demonstrations. For physicists it must have been a theoretical certainty that this was coming before WW1 was done.

An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on platforms run by EU companies subject to EU jurisdiction. Think EU AWS. This is easier said than done.

But this is really a consequence of the current administration having absolutely no idea what they're doing and they're intentionally and unintentionally destroying American soft power.

Another way this can come to pass is that the EU decides that the US is an unreliable partner for their security needs so you will find that various weapons, vehicles, platforms, etc for EU militaries will be supplied by local companies, particularly if the US effectively abandons Ukraine.

Starlink is just another piece of that.

The current administration paints NATO as Europe taking advantage of the US. It could not be more wrong. NATO is a protection racket for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy.

We kind of saw a precursor to all this with GPS. For anyone who has been around long enough, GPS used to be less accurate, deliberately. Why? Because defence (apparently). There was a special signal, Selective Ability ("SA") [1], that military gear could decode to be more accurate.

Fun fact: one of the clues to the first Gulf War was that the military turned off SA on the commercial GPS system because they couldn't procure enough military equipment so had to use civilian gear [2].

I think Europe was slow to learn the lesson of being completely reliant on the US but we did end up with Glonass and Galileo as a result.

To exert the kind of control the US does through tech platfoorms, the US needs to be predictable and reliable can't be too overt with exerting political influence such that American imperial subjects can pretend they're still independent. This administration has shattered that illusion.

[1]: https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability

[2]: https://www.spirent.com/blogs/selective-availability-a-bad-m...

12 000 years of this shit

Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.

China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.

The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.

The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.

More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].

China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.

And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.

I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".

[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi...

[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...

suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.

So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.

And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.

The problem I have with the Canadian business culture was there is zero protection on a global scale for your company, privacy, and or personal safety. =3

But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX.

I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).

That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.

The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades, outspending the rest of NATO combined, while the majority of NATO members continuously fail to meet their monetary contributions. Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs if the majority of their military capabilities weren't directly tied to the implied threat of the US military interceding.

America's allies haven't necessarily been that reliable for us either.

During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes, and the US could barely get token naval contributions from allies. The US deployed an entire carrier strike group while Norway sent ten staff officers, the Netherlands sent two, and Finland sent two soldiers. France, Italy, and Spain refused to participate; Denmark contributed a single staff officer while being one of the primary beneficiaries of the US naval protection.

With Operation Epic Fury, the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging, and Spain banned the US and then demanded that the American tanker aircraft leave. The UK refused to provide any support until drones hit a UK base in Cyprus, and even then, their mobilization was extremely slow. They weren't even able to deploy their carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, without getting an escort from France. Canada praised the removal of Iran's nuclear capabilities, while providing no support and heavily criticizing the operation itself.

Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them. The unreliability comes from trade policy (which I think is mostly dumb, but is also very much not a one-way action), hesitancy to fund Ukraine at levels that aren't being matched by NATO allies, and Trump's blustering about "adding a 51st state" (no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada).

America will continue to act as a deterrent against military action for her allies, and said allies will still not have to commit to the spending that would be required to field a military that is actually a near-peer to China or Russia.

Having said all of that, I 100% support America's allies building out their own cloud infrastructure and bringing defense R&D and manufacturing back locally. Israel has been moving to cut direct dependency on the US and instead acts as a partner in new joint defense capabilities. I think a similar strategy for Canada and Europe would be best for all.

I'm honestly not sure how practical an EU counterpart to Starshield is, but maybe a partnership with SpaceX would allow them to more realistically diversify while the EU builds up its space capabilities.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10283270

They have been launching, continue to launch, and are planning to launch that and much more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proliferated_Warfighter_Space_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...