Donald Trump And Joe Rogan Think Elon Musk’s Starlink Is Akin To Magic Pixie Dust

To be very clear: SpaceX’s Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription and up front hardware costs.

But contrary to what many press outlets imply, it’s not magic. And it comes with a growing list of caveats.

The technology has been criticized for harming astronomical research via light pollution. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to meet real-world demand will be impossible. And Starlink was caught abusing taxpayer subsidies to get money it didn’t deserve.

In addition to screwing up research of the night sky, scientists warn that the steady parade of thousands of disposable, smaller low-Earth orbit satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. To be clear this isn’t just a “Starlink problem.” There’s a bunch of companies, including Amazon, rushing into this space ass first.

So this week, a coalition over more than 100 space researchers signed a letter urging the FCC to perform an environmental review before allowing SpaceX to continue launching thousands of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites:

“The environmental harms of launching and burning up so many satellites aren’t clear. That’s because the federal government hasn’t conducted an environmental review to understand the impacts. What we do know is that more satellites and more launches lead to more damaging gasses and metals in our atmosphere. We shouldn’t rush forward with launching satellites at this scale without making sure the benefits justify the potential consequences of these new mega-constellations being launched, and then re-entering our atmosphere to burn up and or create debris This is a new frontier, and we should save ourselves a lot of trouble by making sure we move forward in a way that doesn’t cause major problems for our future.”

“Hey, maybe you should think before you act,” is not a particularly lofty request, and I’m sure it will met with the usual nuanced understanding Musk fans (and his assorted Republican cheerleaders like the FCC’s Brendan Carr) are known for.

Musk has recently been leveraging Starlink as an election season wedge issue, falsely claiming that the Biden FCC’s refusal to slather him with unwarranted subsidies put Hurricane Helene victims at risk. Folks in the Elon Musk fan fiction universe see Starlink as some kind of pixie dust you can just sprinkle across the entirety of rural America to immediately solve the entirety of U.S. connectivity woes.

Exhibit A, from Joe Rogan’s recent interview with Trump:

JOE ROGAN: I used it recently in Utah in the mountains. It’s good.

DONALD TRUMP: Did you find it good?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s phenomenal. It’s the size of an iPad. You just set it down on the ground, you get high speed internet. It’s incredible. It’s outstanding.

DONALD TRUMP: Just to show you. We’re spending a trillion dollars to get cables all over the country, right? Up to upstate areas where you have, like, two farms and they’re spending millions of dollars to advocate.

JOE ROGAN: Well, talk about the $42 billion that was wasted on this internet access program. They didn’t get anybody. They haven’t hooked up. Not one person. They spent $42 billion. They could have gotten Starlinks to everybody with that kind of money

DONALD TRUMP: For almost nothing. For a monthly charge.

JOE ROGAN: And it would have been incredible. And it’s high speed internet everywhere you want to go.

DONALD TRUMP: And he wanted to do that.

They’re talking about the $45+ billion in telecom subsidies headed to the states courtesy of the 2021 Covid relief and infrastructure bill bills (that Republicans voted against, but still somehow take credit for among their constituents). Some of that money is going to be wasted, but a lot of it is going to be building some incredible, ultra-fast fiber networks at speeds upwards of 10 Gbps, including community-owned and operated broadband networks taking direct aim at shitty, giant telecom monopolies.

Trump pulled the “$1 trillion” number out of his ass. And the “cables” he complains about funding “upstate” are billions of dollars of essential, high-capacity next-generation fiber connectivity that’s going to bring significantly faster speeds to countless schools, farms, businesses, libraries, community centers, and rural and suburban residents in red and blue states all over the country.

States are finalizing their plans now, and the reason it’s taking a little longer than usual is because state and federal governments, to their credit, actually tried to map broadband access this time before throwing billions of dollars at the problem. The NTIA is also, shockingly enough, trying to make sure that the companies taking taxpayer infrastructure bill money can actually deliver the speeds they promise (something the Trump FCC didn’t do, resulting in a bunch of legal chaos as companies defaulted on bids).

The NTIA correctly decided to prioritize this taxpayer money on funding more affordable, faster, and reliable fiber connections, filling in the gaps with stuff like 5G and fixed wireless. From there, it makes sense to fill in the remaining gaps with LEO satellite connectivity. But that involves also being realistic about the potential harms to the environment and research posed by these newer satellites.

So far, regulators haven’t even done that. As the scientists note, the FCC hasn’t even considered the environmental impact of tens of thousands of disposable LEO satellites constantly burning up in orbit year after year. Asking the FCC to do its job and do that shouldn’t be viewed as that big of a deal, but I’m sure that even this minimalistic ask will be treated like “government regulation run amok.”

Again, Starlink is a great tech if you can afford it (affordability is arguably now the primary obstacle for access for many), but when it comes to fixing the digital divide, it’s more of a niche solution than some kind of magical cure all. It’s nothing personal about Starlink or Musk, it’s simply physics. It simply can’t scale up to fully meet demand anytime soon. Musk himself has made this clear for years.

Only recently, once he realized he could leverage Starlink as a political prop to aid Trumpism, has Musk started acting like it’s some unlimited-capacity magic technology that the mean old liberal government is somehow trying to undermine.