this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
36 points (90.9% liked)

SpaceX

2028 readers
16 users here now

A community for discussing SpaceX.

Related space communities:

Memes:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
threelonmusketeers
few
36
Ars Live: How profitable is Starlink? We dig into the details of satellite Internet. (arstechnica.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/spacex
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This will be the first Ars Live event we've done in a few years. During these discussions, reporters and editors at Ars Technica speak with industry leaders about the most important technology and science news of the day. So please join us at 2 pm ET (18:00 UTC) on June 11 on our YouTube livestream.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Are there credible competitors to Starlink in OneWeb, Amazon's Project Kuiper, or other planned megaconstellations?

Well no, at least not in the megaconstellations class as literally NO ONE has access to the same low launch cost or high volume launch capacity without paying for trips on SpaceX.

There was a lot of talk about how Amazon's Project Kuiper was going to catch up but it is physically and financially impossible at the moment due to launch capacity of Amazon's launch partners and even with Kuiper requiring few sat launches. I would have to go back and do the math again but they had like 3 partners that are currently CAPABLE (BlueOrigan is still sub orbital and waiting on New Glenn to work) and even if they use ALL theoretical launch's at MAX capacity I think it was going to take them something like 3 years to launch the complete Kuiper constellation..

SpaceX effectively has a monopoly on high speed / low latency satellite internet for the next 5+ years

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

New Glenn might actually launch this year, which would be amazing. We’re starting to see a lot of flight hardware… Not holding my breath though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

✅Vulcan

🔜Ariane 6

🔜New Glenn

The Kuiper fleet is starting to come together, but getting to an operational cadence is another question.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Amazon also has to actually build satellites at some point. They could have already been launching on the Atlas Vs they bought. And having Kuiper sats ready would mean ULA doesn't have to launch the 2nd Vulcan with a mass sim.

[–] threelonmusketeers 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

They could have already been launching on the Atlas Vs they bought

They did do a launch last ~~December~~ October. They need to pick up the pace a bit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I guess that delay from the Kuiper test sats in Oct '23 to the first operational launch soon™ isn't really different from SpaceX going from the Tintin test sats in Feb '18 to operational sats in May '19. I'm just impatient.