SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.

Here's an example in the UK: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zy61dfdyp5xrq4w1A

It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.

SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.

(I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)

Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.

1) you send a signal to the satellite

2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station

3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP

The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.

Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.

With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.

Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:

Customer - satellite - ground station - internet

The signal can go from:

customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.

This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.

the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.

what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.

their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.

There's a lot of RF emissions right there.

Macron famously said that he would "have to send troops to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has captured even more territory and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.

The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.

In fact, Russia should be investing heavily in ensuring that nobody else goes asymmetric against NATO countries.

Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.

If you know something the world doesn't know, you'd better get cracking at updating the Wikipedia article documenting the issue.

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

Also, giving up the control of when to declare war or not would be something no country would willingly give up.

Lately there’s been this push with talking points like yourself, and I’m not trying imply something about you specifically, but it is interesting with the timing and the goal of undermining NATO as a defensive military alliance.

> Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

So triggering Article 5 means reporting an armed attack to the Security Council.