Elon Musk pushed back against former Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly after he appealed to the tech entrepreneur to keep his Starlink satellite internet service unrestricted in Ukraine after SpaceX announced last week that it would be limiting its availability in the warzone.
“Ukraine desperately needs your continued support,” Mr Kelly wrote to the Twitter boss on his own social media platform on Saturday. “Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost. You can help. Thank you.”
The request was met with a frosty response from Mr Musk, who replied: “You’re smart enough not to fall for media and other propaganda. Starlink is the main source of communication for Ukraine, especially at the front lines where almost all other internet connections have been lost. However, we will not contribute to escalation of conflict that could lead to World War 3.”
The disagreement follows Mr Musk’s declaration on 31 January that he was uncomfortable with the Ukrainian resistance using his high-speed broadband service to fly drones carrying anti-tank grenades over Russian positions, saying he would “not allow” the practice to continue.
“SpaceX Starlink has become the connectivity backbone of Ukraine all the way up to the front lines. This is the damned if you do part,” he tweeted. “However, we are not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes. This is the damned if you don’t part.”
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell duly announced that the service would be limited in the country for military purposes, but that it would remain available for communications and for use in humanitarian endeavours, such as enabling Ukraine hospitals to remain connected.
Mr Musk has previously made his personal position on the matter clear, tweeting on 16 September: “Starlink is meant for peaceful use only.”
Its terms of service even explicitly state: “Starlink is not designed or intended for use with or in offensive or defensive weaponry or other comparable end-uses.”
But with Russian missiles targeting Ukraine telecommunications infrastructure throughout the conflict, Kyiv has come to rely on Starlink as a source of uninterrupted, independent and secure internet access, enabling lines of communication to remain open with its troops on the frontline of the conflict in the south and east of the country.
Its small, portable terminals have minimal energy requirements and are difficult to hack, making them ideal for the situation in hand.
“Over 100 cruise missiles attacked energy and communications infrastructure. But with Starlink we quickly restored the connection in critical areas. Starlink continues to be an essential part of critical infrastructure,” Ukraine’s vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted in praise of the service on 12 October.
It was Mr Fedorov who initially appealed to Mr Musk for help in the earliest days of the war, inspiring him to dispatch 20,000 terminals to Ukraine. The tycoon later griped about the cost of his generosity in October, prompting him to threaten to withdraw funding from the service altogether.
“We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales, Bryon Hargis, wrote to the Pentagon at the time, asking for the US Department of Defense to pick up the bill instead, according to CNN.
The adverse public reaction to the news subsequently changed Mr Musk’s mind and he tweeted: “The hell with it… Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer dollars, we’ll just keep funding the Ukrainian government for free.”
Mykailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, responded to SpaceX’s latest decision on Starlink by issuing an ultimatum: “A year of Ukrainian resistance & companies have to decide: Either they are on the side of Ukraine & the right to freedom, and don’t seek ways to do harm. Or they are on RF’s side & its ‘right’ to kill & seize territories. SpaceX (Starlink) and Mrs Shotwell should choose a specific option.”
