I have a genuine question, are we handing SpaceX a monopoly by allowing them to launch these satellites, or will competing companies be able to launch similar services?
Will space be too cluttered for competition? (I'm guessing space is really big and that we can have _a lot_ of small satellites up there.)
We didn't hand them anything. SpaceX took the risk of being a first mover in a very difficult field and looks to have had their bet pay off.
There's room for more satellites. Space is pretty big, and with some careful automated coordination we can avoid collisions. But someone else needs to first figure out how to cheaply launch a competing fleet, and I doubt anyone will come close for years.
I think its a fair question. Handing out unlimited well water rights in the 1860s was also probably seen as not giving away anything. There's plenty of water.
The difference is SpaceX don’t have these orbits forever. The satellites will fall back to earth and congress can enact regulations that limit the number of them launched in the future.
Right now they have 9 launches planned using Atlas 5. That's not going to get them a usable fleet of satellites. If they want to launch anything beyond that, Blue Origin must finish the BE-4: a rocket engine years behind schedule. (Either using them for Vulcan rockets or for the New Glenn).
From Amazon's perspective, those 9 launches are money wasted if BO doesn't come through. I'd be ecstatic if they did, but my money is on yet another delay from them.
If I had to guess, by the time Kuiper is launching enough satellites to matter, SpaceX will be doing the same thing using Starship at an order of magnitude lower cost. And I don't even think Starship will be doing real launches for years.
Sure, but who has capacity to take on any serious number of launches? And who can do it at a competitive price to make Kuiper anything but a financial disaster?
The answer is: nobody.
What made Starlink financially possible was SpaceX's lower launch costs and high capacity.
I agree that space can accommodate these satellites, but what about the used up resources required to build the satellites? The shortage of natural resources, as of now, will only worsen and the losses are more costly than the price - its always possible to print more money but its not possible to print more resources.
Competitors were actively licensed at the same time as SpaceX, the British government (and probably some other governments) is also actively funding competitors, and the US military has made statements that leads me believe that they plan to as well. Rather than handing them a monopoly, it seems like the governments of the world are doing everything reasonably possible to create a competitive market.
I'm not sure it will succeed, it's a "natural monopoly" type of market (high fixed cost, low marginal cost), and SpaceX has an incredible advantage in being really frickin good at launching rockets (though they do offer to sell those services).
SpaceX granted themselves the monopoly on these large scale constellations by being the first (and so far only) organization to develop (mostly from scratch!) reusable orbital rocket stages. Anyone else (without Falcon 9) launching the same number of launches/satellites would spend several large multiples of the amount SpaceX did, which makes it economically infeasible.
There will be other reusable orbital launch systems (although it looks like #2 will also probably be SpaceX, heh) but until that time everyone else is priced out of doing what SpaceX is doing.
It's got some analogs with TSMC and the latest process size microprocessors. Nobody else is prevented from doing it as well... it's just that they figured it out first and nobody else has developed equivalent technology yet.
There is plenty of room for additional constellations.
The fact that "near misses" are too frequent is largely a result of inaccurate tracking and poor communication. (Next gen space traffic control will allow vastly higher densities.) And the fact that actual collisions are occuring too frequently is due to old uncontrolled junk, not a literal lack of room or inability to maneuver by modern sats.
It's still up in the air right now. There is a Space Force squadron that does one-way tracking and issues collision alerts, but no transponder standard or centralized traffic control. Companies, once alerted, coordinate individual collision avoidance maneuvers over email. It's ludicrous.
The govt still hasn't decided what agency will take the helm or what the system will look like. It hasn't been worth it to invest more until recently.
What was the non-proprietary charging option circa 2012 when they started building the charging network?
Also, who else were denied license to build the charging stations at that time to allow for Tesla monopoly? Or was it that everyone else amusingly laughed at the cute effort by an electric mobility upstart who didn’t know better?
There are a bunch of small companies building demonstrators right now. Even before SpaceX started Starlink, there were companies trying to do the same thing. SpaceX seems to be the most successful so far but there is still a lot of work to do to build out a network as reliable as GEO comms or something like Iridium.
There are a bunch of different kinds of services offered or soon to be offered by other companies. Some only handle small text messages at like 4800 baud (like Orbcomm) and some others are planning commercial cell towers in space (like AST). Everyone has different needs so not everyone is going to require a blistering fast, low latency, high availability link. So while I applaud SpaceX going for the gold to deliver such service, it's not for most people and is overkill for most applications required a satellite uplink.
There is plenty of room for active satellites, if we manage to clean up defunct satellites and space debris some time in the next decade. The more constrained resource is frequency spectrum.
I think SpaceX might run into trouble if they would refuse to launch sats from a competitor, given their dominant position in space launch. But they would happily launch sats for e.g. Project Kuiper by Amazon/Bezos or OneWeb.
StarLink is probably a failed financial model before it is even completed. They aren't the first-mover, either. HughesNet provides better service at a lower price, and they only have to keep 3 satellites operating at outer orbit.
StarLink is trying to reduce ping by flying thousands of satellites at low orbit. The problem? No matter what you do, the ping will be worse, and cost more money, than broadband.
The developing world will never be able to pay for StarLink at a price high enough to replace thousands of satellites every 5 years. SpaceX will depend on users from rich countries to pay exorbitant fees, and users in those countries already have access to cheaper, faster broadband.
So, it may be that StarLink will go the way of SolarCity and need to be bailed out by another Musk company.
> HughesNet provides better service at a lower price
You're either a troll or you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. As a former Hughesnet customer, now on Starlink I can tell you first hand that literal 56k dialup would have been better than Hughes on many days. Starlink on the other hand is basically indistinguishable from the cable internet I had when I lived in what might be called civilization.
Better service?!?! HugesNet geostationary satellite internet has 600-800ms ping, and maybe 20mbps down; it's barely usable. And it only works in lower latitudes.
Cheaper, faster broadband is only available if Comcast and the other loathsome telecoms can get their acts together, and they have been failing to do so for 30 years.
A constellation of 4,400 satellites, every 5 years, each costing $250k in parts and $50k in launch costs, totals to $264,000,000 per year of opex dedicated to keep the constellation in orbit. A poor country with about ten million subscribers would have to charge roughly $2/month to keep up with satellite replacement costs, but unlike terrestrial utilities, the satellites conveniently circle the whole globe.
I don't think there will be a monopoly for SpaceX, at least not a global one.
It's a matter of nation sovereignty / media control: governments need local service providers that they can controlled. There's no way China will allow its citizens to freely use SpaceX, just like how Americans probably won't use satellite internet from a Chinese company.
Will space be too cluttered for competition? (I'm guessing space is really big and that we can have _a lot_ of small satellites up there.)