On the morning of February the 24th Russian troops began the invasion of Ukraine which was stated by the Russians as a special mission for the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine. This has been a horrible war and is still raging on. Technology plays a crucial role in modern warfare (not Call of Duty).
Communication is one of the five categories of the technology of war (Guilmartin, 2020). Elon Musk is the owner of SpaceX next to his most known company Tesla. SpaceX is aimed at designing, building, and launching (non-military) rockets and spacecrafts. Since this Spring Elon Musk and SpaceX have been helping Ukraine in their war against Russia. They have been donating and shipping around 20,000 Starlink satellites to Ukraine (Marquardt, 2022). Starlink satellites offers high-speed internet in rural and remote locations across the world. This has helped Ukraine keep up their military network of communications, which was previously destroyed by Russian forces.
But with these generous donations from SpaceX came financial problems. Elon musk ‘threatened’ to stop donating Starlink satellites to Ukraine (McIntyre, 2022). A statement was made from SpaceX that unless the United States government would help SpaceX financially they would stop delivering Starlink to Ukraine. The Pentagon has been considering aiding SpaceX but Elon musk has already withdrawn his request for financial aid (Theguardian.com, 2022).
It was recently shown how important the Starlink satellites are when Ukraine launched its counterattack and reclaimed some parts of Eastern Ukraine. There were multiple reports of outages of the satellites which were said to have affected the whole frontline in Ukraine (Marquardt, 2022). Elon Musk has a lot of power and responsibility as they are such a crucial provider for Ukrainian forces. Therefore, the EU is looking at a way of financing Starlink activities to make Ukraine less dependent on one supplier (Hofmans, 2022).
Bibliography
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Hofmans, T. (2022, October 18). Europese Unie onderzoekt mogelijke financiering van
Starlink in Oekraïne. HLN. Retrieved October 18, 2022, from
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Marquardt, A. (2022, October 15). Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for
critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab. CNN. Retrieved
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