Musk's Starlink, Space X arms of US empire & war machine: MintPress

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An article written by Alan Macleod in MintPress News explores, extensively, the very warm relationship Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has with the US military and Defense Department. 

While many thought that Musk would be great for free speech on Twitter, hailing him as some "renegade outsider on a mission to save the internet from authoritarian elite control," the fact at hand is that he is borrowing from Saudi and Qatari governments to buy Twitter off. Musk has branded himself as a 'Tony Stark', who is not part of the established order. 

However, behind this facade, Musk has close ties to the US national security state - in fact, he serves as a prominent business partner. Elon is no threat to the elite, but rather, he is one of them. 

The article brings up one scenario, where Musk donated thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine after the war downed the internet connection in the country. Starlink is a company that belongs to Musk's SpaceX. However, there is more to the initiative than it being a simple donation. 

Read more: Roscosmos Chief denounces Musk for giving comms equipment to Ukraine

According to MacLeod, the "humanitarian" wing of the US State Department - USAID - quietly paid SpaceX top dollar for the donation, delivering 1,330 of the terminals. 

Each terminal, a tiny, portable satellite dish, has a limited range, and it is only useful in hyper-local situations. The Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, revealed that the 10,000 Starlink terminals were allowing only 150,000 to use the internet. 

In a matter of weeks, Starlink became an important aid and component of the Ukrainian military - one could deduce that only spies, high-value individuals, and military operatives are using the internet. Starlink allowed the Ukrainian forces to target the Russian military by drones and other high-tech machinery that need an internet connection.

One Ukrainian soldier told journalist David Patrikarakos, "Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favor. Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol."

Mariupol is where a heated war took place between the Russian forces and neo-Nazi Azov militants - the Azovs have used Starlink to target Russin forces, even in subterranean areas under the steel factory, Azovstal. No-thanks to Starlink, video interviews and internet operations were conducted beneath the ground. 

Dave Tremper, Director of Electronic Warfare at the Pentagon, sang SpaceX’s praises. “How they did that [keeping Ukrainian forces online] was eye-watering to me,” he said, adding that in the future the US military “needs to be able to have that agility.”

SpaceX, furthermore, relies largely on governmental contracts, entailing that executives and chiefs profit from the US military - there are almost no civilian demands for their products, especially rocket launchers.

Espionage tech embedded in satellites and drones, all used for military purposes, are also a specialty for Musk's companies. In 2018, SpaceX was nominated to launch a $500 million Lockheed Martin GPS system into space, which gives the US military further privileges of global surveillance for drone wars, according to MacLeod. 

SpaceX, furthermore, has also contracted with the US Air Force, to deliver command satellites into orbit in addition to contracts with the Space Development Agency to send tracking devices into space. The CIA, NSA, and other US military espionage bodies use these state-of-the-art devices.

SpaceX, as it has come to prove, is an essential asset to the US war machine. In fact, it is just as important as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing. 

China, on the other end, is becoming increasingly aware that it needs to develop tech to counter SpaceX's "all-seeing eye."

Musk's big break 

Michael Griffin, vouched for Musk in his early days, calling him a potential "Henry Ford" for the rocket industry. Eventually becoming the head of NASA and later on, assuming a high position in the Department of Defense, Griffin enabled NASA to award Musk's company $396 million for a development contract for rockets. National Geographic once wrote that SpaceX “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.” In 2008, SpaceX was awarded, again, a $1.6 billion NASA contract, showing SpaceX's backing by arms of the empire.

Overthrowing Evo Morales

In 2019, Musk admitted to having a hand in overthrowing the Bolivian democratically-elected president, Evo Morales - that meant working directly with the US government to do so. The politics behind this is that Bolivia has some of the world's largest concentrations of lithium, easily extractable, being a cornerstone element that fuels Musk's technologies, particularly electric-vehicle batteries.

Because Morales refused to open Bolivia up to corporate exploitation, he was overthrown by a US-led far-right coup in November 2019. When the new government was "born," it immediately invited Musk for talks. 

“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it," Musk wrote on Twitter. 

Elon Musk: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Let’s deal with it now, by stopping Musk’s deal because we don’t like coups. pic.twitter.com/UsQsQVZ4yV

— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) May 23, 2022

All in all, Musk's close ties with Washington may not have been too obvious, but a bit of reading into how Musk came to success would reveal that he is an essential arm of the empire, fueling the war machine and bloodshed around the world.