> see no evidence for that. It is a cost, but not the cost.
Because you are not looking. The fact that spacex is having to spend engineering time at all making improvements to operate in an actively jammed environment means software and possibly hardware engineering resources not being spent on scaling the network, working on their next gen constellation, etc. For a company that runs as lean as SpaceX on engineering headcount (based on reading Blind and Glassdoor reviews), that opportunity cost is easily tens of millions of dollars.
You’re also drastically misunderstanding the lifetime and duty cycles of LEO sats. Those things have to have time to dump heat and charge their batteries. Serving in Ukraine means worse coverage in America 90 mins later. It’s not just a magic mirror in the sky that costs nothing to cover the ground.
Because you are not looking. The fact that spacex is having to spend engineering time at all making improvements to operate in an actively jammed environment means software and possibly hardware engineering resources not being spent on scaling the network, working on their next gen constellation, etc. For a company that runs as lean as SpaceX on engineering headcount (based on reading Blind and Glassdoor reviews), that opportunity cost is easily tens of millions of dollars.
You’re also drastically misunderstanding the lifetime and duty cycles of LEO sats. Those things have to have time to dump heat and charge their batteries. Serving in Ukraine means worse coverage in America 90 mins later. It’s not just a magic mirror in the sky that costs nothing to cover the ground.