A Wall Street Journal report said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine's air assault forces last week, despite Musk's claim that all decisions on the military version of Starlink are made by the US military and President Trump.

Trump denied ordering the restrictions. While Musk may have spoken to Trump and administration officials before the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Musk made the final call. The decision came after both Musk and Trump criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries.

"Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration," the WSJ wrote, citing unnamed US officials and people familiar with the matter. The report said that "Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network... rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless."

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In its current iteration, SpaceX is largely a data company seeking to provide enormous amounts of compute for artificial intelligence. During an earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, company officials spent much of their time discussing ambitious plans to roll out up to 10 GW of compute in 2027—on the ground.

Gone are the days of aspirational talk about sending humans to Mars and settling the red planet. Now it is almost all about artificial intelligence and the data needed to support its expansion. However, the company's long-term ambitions to provide data services from space, initially with the Starlink Internet constellation and eventually through the "Starmind" data center constellation, still rely on an actual rocket.

That would be the Starship vehicle, and during the earnings call, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle.

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In its current iteration, SpaceX is largely a data company seeking to provide enormous amounts of compute for artificial intelligence. During an earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, company officials spent much of their time discussing ambitious plans to roll out up to 10 GW of compute in 2027—on the ground.

Gone are the days of aspirational talk about sending humans to Mars and settling the red planet. Now it is almost all about artificial intelligence and the data needed to support its expansion. However, the company's long-term ambitions to provide data services from space, initially with the Starlink Internet constellation and eventually through the "Starmind" data center constellation, still rely on an actual rocket.

That would be the Starship vehicle, and during the earnings call, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle.

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An uninvited encounter in orbit exposes a new vulnerability in the war over satellite intelligence.

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SpaceX plans to turn on its direct-to-device (D2D) service in early 2028 after launching the second generation Starlink Mobile constellation during 2027 and integrating spectrum it is acquiring.

On its Q3 earnings call, president Gwynne Shotwell said the low-band spectrum SpaceX agreed to buy earlier this month and the Federal Communications Commission’s approval to launch 15,000 next generation V2 birds “pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US”.

On 8 October, SpaceX struck a deal to buy up to 14MHz of paired spectrum in the 800MHz band to support its plans. The agreement with Grain Management is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

Shotwell indicated comments on the previous quarter’s call covered smaller radios for the D2D service, which she described as not quite tower capable, that SpaceX could place on homes and businesses where Starlink is already installed.

“So, it’s not just the spectrum that we’ve talked about with the S-band,” she said on yesterday’s (20 October) earnings call. “We will basically leverage the real estate from Starlink installs and other towers.”

SpaceX plans to pair its satellites with ground-based radios to provide 5G mobile coverage, a plan many executives in the industry consider far-fetched.

When asked about the roles the satellite and terrestrial networks will play for the D2D service, CEO Elon Musk said a more detailed presentation may be needed to explain Starlink’s connectivity strategy and why the company believes it could eventually generate several hundred billion dollars in annual revenue.

“You are missing some of the pieces that we know about internally,” he said. “I can say we do see a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year in connectivity revenue, but I think we should probably describe that in more detail in a forum that’s not limited to a few minutes at an earnings call.”

Q3 numbers
SpaceX reported net income of $4.4 billion for Q3 (ending 30 September), compared with a $1.1 billion loss a year earlier, as revenue more than doubled to $14.6 billion, driven largely by its AI business.

It was the company’s second earnings report since its June stock market listing. Revenue was up 161% year-on-year.

The Super Intelligence segment, previously reported as AI, accounted for around $6.7 billion of the roughly $9 billion increase, with revenue rising to $7.6 billion from $813 million. SpaceX attributed the segment’s growth to new cloud services agreements, the Cursor acquisition and growing use of Grok.

Income from operations was $2.8 billion, compared with a $273 million loss a year ago, and adjusted EBITDA was $8.8 billion, up 306%.

Connectivity revenue rose 69% to $5.2 billion and operating income climbed 99% to $2.4 billion.

Starlink had 13.6 million consumer broadband subscribers, up 1.6 million in the quarter and from 7.2 million in Q3 2025.

For its direct-to-device service, Shotwell said Starlink Mobile surpassed 22 million monthly users at the end of the quarter, up 37% from the previous quarter.

SpaceX remains loss-making for the year to date, with a nine-month net loss of $413 million.

The post SpaceX targets early 2028 for own D2D service launch appeared first on Mobile World Live.

Quatro das maiores operadoras europeias querem unir forças para desenvolver uma alternativa à Starlink nas comunicações diretas entre satélites e telemóveis. A iniciativa surge num momento de crescente disputa pelo espectro destinado a serviços de satélite e de novas tensões entre a Europa e os Estados Unidos.

The post Operadoras europeias juntam forças para fazer frente à Starlink de Elon Musk nas comunicações por satélite appeared first on Tek Notícias.

Ukrainian troops have been caught off guard by restrictions on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet systems that disrupted frontline operations, while Kyiv received no warning from its partners of a Russian missile attack on its energy facilities for the second day running, according to Ukrainian officials.

Starlink terminals used by Ukrainian drone units began experiencing signal failures at speeds above 160 km/h, disrupting several missions early on Wednesday morning, according to military personnel and senior Ukrainian officials.

“Logistics at the frontline and middle strikes are badly limited,” one senior official familiar with the situation on the front told the FT. Ukraine’s middle strikes target Russian military supply lines and logistics. The limitations came with “no warning, just in the middle of the night,” the official said.

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Space has plenty of room for more megaconstellations, but only if all operators are willing to share information about where their satellites are and where they're going, a top executive at SpaceX and its AI subsidiary said this week.

Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, used a presentation Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey as a clarion call for improved data-sharing among satellite operators.

SpaceX's Starlink constellation now has more than 11,000 satellites, about two-thirds of all active spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Radars and telescopes routinely track thousands more pieces of space junk.

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The world's largest retailer wants to sell you something else—Internet from space.

Amazon has been developing a constellation of satellites to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit for the better part of a decade, and the company is just about ready to pull back the curtain. It is entering a market that SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet, has dominated for the last half-decade. Amazon's debut into satellite Internet is being closely watched, not just by some consumers, but by businesses ranging from airlines to shipping companies to governments. Broadband Internet from orbit has proven broadly useful for a lot of purposes, from video games to commerce to warfighting.

But until now, most people had to buy it from Elon Musk and SpaceX. OneWeb has only offered limited services, leaving Amazon as the only real competitor to deliver high-speed Internet globally. Moreover, at the head of the company's broadband efforts is Rajeev Badyal, who led Starlink during its early years, but whom Musk fired eight years ago for moving too cautiously on Starlink.

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