Senators demand answers on throttled soldiers' Starlink; Musk answers with a flying car.

…(cont) The day before, in Washington, a harder question was already sitting unanswered. Ukraine's access to Starshield, the military-grade branch of SpaceX's Starlink network, had been throttled, and President Zelenskyy said the slowdown disrupted drone operations and put lives at risk. The Hill reported that same day that a bipartisan group of senators — four Republicans standing with their Democratic colleagues — had written the Pentagon demanding to know which official gave the order. By Thursday, ABC News was reporting the same bipartisan demand, unanswered still. Two days earlier, Common Dreams had already named the deeper problem: a government that leans this hard on one man's satellites has no strong position left when his satellites misbehave.

The planner points out that the government is not actually out of position — it has simply not used the position it holds. The administration can summon Musk for an honor one week and claim it cannot summon an answer from him the next; the Pentagon is Starshield's buyer, and a buyer's unused leverage is still leverage.

The tinkerer's assembly needs no new statute. Part one: the Department of Transportation puts its jurisdiction, or the lack of it, on the record before the next thruster-car livestream, not after. Part two: the Pentagon spends the leverage it already owns as the customer and gets a written answer from its own satellite contractor about who ordered the throttling. Both parts were sitting in the shop before Thursday's unveiling. The muscle just has to swing the tool already on the bench, and the pilot flies the answer back to the senators still waiting for one.