Elon Musk’s up-and-coming satellite company Starlink had sought federal regulators’ approval for months to try out its groundbreaking technology for beaming cell service directly from space to smartphones.
Established mobile operators AT&T and Verizon were lobbying for regulators to deny part of Starlink’s plan, saying it would interfere with their services. A decision seemed likely to drag out until next year.
Then Hurricane Helene hit.
Starlink’s team jumped into action, arriving in flood-ravaged North Carolina with mobile satellite dishes even as roads remained impassible. “We are sending them terminals right away,” Musk posted on X.
Starlink’s doggedness paid off. The Federal Communications Commission in recent days green-lit the company to work with T-Mobile to test its newfangled satellite cell service in hurricane-damaged areas. Musk hailed a breakthrough that would “save many lives” in future disasters.
“It’s the first ever — first ever of its kind,” Jon Freier, T-Mobile’s president of its U.S. consumer group, said in an interview.
Starlink has emerged as a political lightning rod in the process. Musk has publicly traded curt words with FEMA officials and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg over what he said was Starlink staff’s limited access on the ground in North Carolina. House Republicans, meanwhile, have launched a probe into why the Biden administration previously turned down Starlink for nearly a billion dollars in federal grants earmarked for extending internet service to remote parts of the United States.
Some have questioned whether Starlink’s involvement has been purely humanitarian. The company has come under criticism in recent days after users discovered that the “free” Starlink broadband service advertised for hurricane survivors only lasted a month and required them to spend several hundred dollars purchasing a terminal.
“It’s shameful that Elon Musk is callously taking advantage of a devastating hurricane,” Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said in a statement.
Following the public blowback, Starlink said Friday that it is extending the free service window from 30 days to the rest of the year.
The kerfuffles have underscored the growing importance of Musk’s satellites, even as the tech figure, the world’s richest person with a net worth of around $250 billion, remains better known to the public for his Tesla electric cars and his social media antics.
They also highlight Musk’s acrimonious relationship with the Biden administration — and one potential business upside for him if former president Donald Trump wins another term. Musk has been vocally advocating for Trump’s victory in recent months, and the pro-Trump Super PAC that he helped create has splashed out nearly $33 million since August.
Starlink, a division of Musk’s space-faring company SpaceX, launched its first satellite in 2019, and it is already the largest satellite system in history — by a long shot. The 6,400-satellite network dwarfs its nearest rival by a factor of 10.
The sheer number of satellites gives Starlink capabilities previously unheard of, an exhilarating prospect for militaries. The Pentagon now calls Starlink a key tool for its international reconnaissance. Ukrainian troops say it is playing a vital role in their resistance against Russia’s invasion.
But in the consumer internet sector, Starlink is still struggling to earn its place alongside Verizon, AT&T and Comcast in the big leagues. Part of this is simply because the service is new: Starlink’s beta launch was in October 2020. And no satellite operator has previously sought to be taken seriously as a broadband provider.
Musk and Republican lawmakers are now blaming the Biden administration for holding the company back. The House oversight committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), announced Monday that his committee is probing whether the FCC’s 2022 block of nearly a billion dollars in federal grants to Starlink for rural internet provision was driven by politics, calling Starlink an “asset” to hurricane relief.
The FCC said at the time that Starlink’s technology was promising but did not meet the required “broadband” internet speeds, which satellite operators generally fall short of as the signals have to travel to space and back. Republicans have charged the FCC, without producing much evidence, of just discriminating against Starlink because they didn’t like Musk.
“We’re alarmed that the FCC may have improperly revoked Starlink’s deployment subsidies, which have been vital for communities in Western North Carolina,” Comer said. “The FCC must ensure its decisions are based on law, not politics.”
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Musk publicly griped about the issue this month, posting on X: “Had the FCC not illegally revoked the SpaceX Starlink award, it would probably have saved lives in North Carolina.”
The FCC has said it stands by its decision to deny public funds to more than a dozen companies, including Starlink, which did not meet the program’s requirements.
“The FCC is an independent agency. Any notion that its decisions are politically motivated and not fact-based is false,” FCC spokesperson Jonathan Uriarte said.
Kimberly Burke, director of government affairs at the research firm Quilty Space, called the allegations of Starlink being boxed out of federal grants “mostly a fictional, highly polarizing political trope” that demonstrates “a fundamental misunderstanding” of how the grants worked.
Burke said Starlink was still in beta testing when the grant program in question was set out. She also pointed out that Starlink and its parent company, SpaceX, have been winning sizable contracts from the Pentagon and NASA.
“The suggestion that there is a government-wide, anti-SpaceX slant just doesn’t square with the reality of $11.8 billion in government contracts,” she said.
There has, however, been open tension between Musk and the Biden administration. The White House publicly upbraided Musk last year for amplifying antisemitic content on X, for which Musk later apologized. President Joe Biden has said Musk’s overseas connections were “worthy of being looked at,” when asked if Musk may be a national security threat. The White House omitted Tesla from an electric vehicle summit in 2021, which Musk viewed as a snub.
Concerns about Musk have not come only from the left. There’s been bipartisan unease in Washington over whether an unpredictable tycoon could sway the fate of nations. These concerns intensified after Musk declined in 2022 to switch on Starlink in Crimea to power a Ukrainian offensive against Russia, saying the company did not want to engage in a direct act of war. Musk has since come around to supporting the Ukrainian military more robustly through a multimillion-dollar contract paid out by the Pentagon.
After Hurricane Helene wiped out cell signal, power and internet across western North Carolina late last month, SpaceX engineers raced to the scene to deliver more than a thousand Starlink terminals, some of them paired with small gas-powered generators. Musk said on X that they made some of the efforts at the urging of Trump, whom he has been supporting on the campaign trail.
FEMA said in a statement that it has purchased and deployed 86 Starlink terminals as part of relief efforts for Hurricane Helene through Department of Homeland Security funding. The agency said the reports that it was seizing goods in the disaster zone, as circulated by Musk, were “false.”
The satellite cell service is a separate test program that allows T-Mobile customers to receive emergency alerts on their smartphones, send text messages and make phone calls via Starlink without charge, T-Mobile’s Freier said. T-Mobile said more than 100,000 text messages have already been sent over the test service, which was also made available in Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton.
They would not have been able to do a large-scale test of the technology so quickly, Freier said, had Hurricane Helene not hit, as Starlink was still building out its satellite system and navigating regulatory red tape.
“We would have not ordinarily done a beta [test] until next year, no doubt,” Freier said. “But now you’re faced with a situation of a potential disruption of the terrestrial ground network. … It’s going to be imperfect, but it could help.”