How can any company be considered a competitor to Starlink while relying on SpaceX to get into LEO?
If you're relying on your competitor to enable your business model then you're not competing with them.
> In March 2022, AST SpaceMobile announced a multi-launch contract with SpaceX to launch its first BlueBird operational satellite.[35][36] AST SpaceMobile states that it will be able to produce up to six BlueBird satellites per month at two manufacturing sites in Midland, Texas.[37][38] The company has attributed delays in the deployment schedule of its operational satellites to supply chain issues and price increases.[39] In March 2023, AST SpaceMobile stated that it expects to launch the first five Block 1 BlueBird satellites in early 2024.[40]
AST SpaceMobile does not seem like they are operating a viable business model. They have been publicly traded for several years and the market seems to agree.
You make it sound as if the rocket science here is more critical than the chip science, or whatever. But it isn't really proven true.
AST also seems to be favoring a different strategy, having a smaller number of satellites each capable of serving a larger number of users vs Starlink's thousands of satellites serving a couple of users each. IMHO AST's approach sounds more sensible and manageable (albeit both approaches manage to equally annoy astronomers). Whether they will be able to really serve a large enough number of users or not also depends on the chip science (rather than the rocket one).
This is a fair point. AST SpaceMobile is shipping drastically more complicated satellite tech than Starlink and that could prove to be a competitive advantage.
I'm not sure I agree with the strategy, though. It seems really challenging and dangerous to put such huge satellites into LEO. They'll require constant maneuvering. NASA seems to think it'll require 4 maneuvers per day, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/49981/why-do-ast-s...
I will put my money on cheaper, more disposable satellites because they enable rapid iteration cycles with less risk.
4 maneuvers per day for the _entire_ planned network versus the 70+ maneuvers per day that starlink is doing right now with their network that is not yet at capacity. It does not matter how you cut it, AST's plan is _at least_ two orders of magnitude more manageable. They simply need it to survive.
So big in fact that a couple of months ago the US space agency NASA, having looked at SpaceMobile's plans, complained the "extremely large satellites when in orbit will engender an unacceptably high risk of a catastrophic debris-producing collision."
I don't know enough about this area to really comment, and they did reach an agreement with NASA the next year, but it still seems like there's something to be said about the size of the object being maneuvered.
You're right though that SpaceX has to deal with a lot more. I guess I just figured that in failure scenarios they'd deorbit a satellite, and shrug it off, where as AST SpaceMobile can't tolerate losses.
Even if Starlink's approach isn't a proven advantage yet, a competitor's ability to deploy new tech at will, at cost, when you are at their mercy to do so on their schedule and at their price, is not a great signal
How dependent are they on SpaceX, really though? There are competitors that are capable of launching satellites into LEO, some them are getting closer to SpaceX pricing. There may be some design hurdles to make everything work, but I don't think SpaceX could really completely block them.
Nobody is getting at spacex pricing any time soon. New Glenn is the only comparable vehicle and as far as we can tell it's not going to be launching in the forseeable future.
If you only consider US-allied launches, SpaceX represents a staggering 92% of market share. There are lots of space companies. They are not price competitive. At all.
It costs $2720/kg to launch payload with Falcon 9. The next closest, US-allied launch vehicle costs $9,167/kg. Falcon Heavy will extend the lead to $1500/kg.
You're not going to compete in building a constellation of satellites using launches that cost 3.5-6.1x the price (depending on when they get to launching vs readiness of Heavy)
The AST SpaceMobile BlueWalker 3 weighs 1500kg. They want to launch 243 satellites. The price difference between using Falcon 9 and Ariane 5G is $2.4B. AST SpaceMobile's market cap is $675M.
There's opportunity to differentiate on commsat technologies like switching and antennas, on offering different targets for latency/bandwidth vs price, planet-side downlink stations, and coverage at different latitudes: In particular, satellite-to-smartphone links, specifically optimized for lower-bandwidth, higher-latency, lower-power, lower-cost long-tail coverage. Fly a little higher, so you don't have to refuel as often, customers just trying to send a text can tolerate a little latency.
The Starlink terminal is great for grid-tied residential/RV/ship-sized home internet. It runs in the Ku and Ka bands at something like 65 watts. It's astonishing that they can get some functionality with their T-mobile partnership, but for the most part, it's not optimized for that.
What fraction of Starlink (or, hypothetically, AST SpaceMobile) expenditures is satellite launch cost per kg? The ATT market cap is $120B, if they can partner with/aquihire a $675M satellite company to stay competitive then even a $2.4B extra expense is not a huge deal. Sure, Starlink could do the same, but ATT has a lot of inertia. SpaceX won't knock them out of the market just by flying another set of satellites a little higher with some lower-bandwidth antennas.
If I could get voice and text anywhere on the planet (namely, in the woods in northern Michigan, population density ~1 person per square mile, or offshore on Lake Michigan, population density ~0 per square mile), that would be a game changer. Specifically, everyone knows that the cell networks lie about their coverage maps, this would let them genuinely say they have coverage everywhere. I'm currently using Garmin InReach for off-grid connectivity, not sure I'd dump that hardware and network for an esoteric feature that runs on my less-reliable glass slab, but a lot more people have glass slabs than InReach.
Given this, why doesn’t spaceX jack up its prices? I mean it could double them on these numbers and still be less than half the competition. I’m not into cult of Elon but he’s no fool. What else is going on here?
SpaceX gets to grow the industry while capturing the business of every new entrant who wouldn't have considered launching something to space at higher price points.
The goal of SpaceX/Elon has never been to make maximal profit at the expense of the market as a whole. I'm not sure why people have such a difficulty understanding this. They state it repeatedly every chance they get and have never acted against that principle either.
They want to grow the industry as a whole. Remember their real ultimate goal is going to Mars and they don't want to be the only space company in existence to want to do that.
Just like the "Paypal Mafia" of old there's starting to be a "SpaceX Mafia" of former SpaceXers rich off of SpaceX stock starting their own space companies and teaming up with SpaceX to move things forward.
> Given this, why doesn’t spaceX jack up its prices? I mean it could double them on these numbers and still be less than half the competition.
Depends on the elasticity of demand. Maybe if they doubled the price the demand would more than halve, resulting in a lower revenue. It’s hard to tell.
Sounds like the usual undercut the competition until there's nobody left, then exploit your monopoly as you wish until someone comes along and does the same thing to you.
That’s a great question. I would guess that part of the answer is that the cost is a massive differentiator for them.
If costs were higher, competitors would probably not launch on SpaceX rockets. They were also not a “safe” choice until recently. They’ve also been able to capture the market and put enormous pressure on their competitors. I’m certain there are other reasons.
I’d love to hear an actual business person weigh in on this.
Without knowing more about the market, I suspect that - other than at SpaceX - commercial customers don't pay list price.
It's pretty well known nobody pays anywhere close to list price for airplanes from Boeing and Airbus. I've heard discounts as much as 40-50% for planes but the actual numbers are pretty closely guarded. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if this were happening in the launch business.
I'm probably not an "actual business person" though, for whatever definition you're using :)
The points about antitrust and similar situations like Netflix/Amazon have already been made by others...
So it's interesting to note that other Satellite Internet companies/startups/etc are already using SpaceX to put their gear into orbit including Amazon (Project Kuiper?) and OneWeb.
But you're probably right in that anyone doing so, should consider the theoretical risk. However, a lot of what SpaceX is trying to achieve revolves around reducing the cost to lift mass into orbit. So theoretically, the more demand there is to put mass into orbit and the more SpaceX does it, the cheaper and easier it becomes.
Then again maybe Google or ATT could avoid this risk by just starting their own LEO freight companies? ;P
But seriously, if it is such a concern, perhaps they should look into funding a potential SpaceX competitor. And there are a few startups trying to be just that.
It’s exciting that there finally is demand for lifting things to orbit that outweighs the initial cost to do so, which in turn fuels innovation around the lifting, and ideally starting a virtuous cycle of innovation > cost reduction > increased demand > innovation.
This reminds me of the steam engine, which likely only became viable because its abysmal initial efficiency was outweighed by the need to pump water out of coal mines.
Okay, I see your point, but the scenario here is the inverse of Netflix/AWS, right?
Netflix takes the world by storm, grows quickly, and becomes reliant on AWS. Amazon enters the video streaming market as a much weaker competitor and builds upon their own tooling.
In this scenario, I presume Amazon is making more money from Netflix using their service than they are from running their own streaming service. Their first goal is to not disrupt the money they make from Netflix and their second goal is to create a competitor. Later, if the math says that hardening their contracts to the detriment of Netflix would allow them to capture such market share as to recoup the investment with their own streaming service, they would do so, but as they're late to the party that is not the case.
In the Starlink scenario, it's the other way around. Starlink is already dominating the market using their own, SpaceX tooling. The incumbent, AST SpaceMobile, is allowed to use SpaceX rockets. It's not hard for SpaceX to disrupt AST SpaceMobile's operations without hurting SpaceX's bottom line as there's a backlog of launch demand to replace AST SpaceMobile. If the math says that AST SpaceMobile is likely to begin encroaching on Starlink then they deny a contract, replace it with the next person in line, and don't bat an eye.
The order in which things occurred between the companies means there aren't these deeply entangled, mutual benefits that allow competitors to coexist.
> If the math says that AST SpaceMobile is likely to begin encroaching on Starlink then they deny a contract, replace it with the next person in line, and don't bat an eye.
This is where the Netflix/AWS analogy is a good one.
The critical point is: AWS makes more money from people not-Netflix than Amazon Video makes.
Consequently, AWS screwing with Netflix for the benefit of Amazon Video risks the entire not-Netflix AWS customer base, who would no longer consider Amazon as neutral of a party and thus trim their AWS spend.
And these optics last for decades.
Which is why most companies in these scenarios have serious firewalls between those parts of the conglomerate. No sense killing the golden goose because some VP wants a bonus.
If AST (or Amazon Video in the analogy) can compete with Starlink (or Netflix) on even terms, then more power to them. If not? Then that's their problem: rest of the company isn't going to bail them out.
This is inaccurate, Netflix doesn't deliver video via AWS due to the extreme cost of bandwidth on AWS compared to even paid peering, nevermind settlement free peering.
That does smell anticompetitive though, which SpaceX may strategically want to avoid. They could in the future end up being seen as a monopoly in several different areas.
SpaceX is already functionally a monopoly at 92% of Western launches with the remaining 8% being heavily subsidised holdouts or VC-subsidised challengers. I strongly, strongly doubt SpaceX will ever face any regulatory scrutiny over that monopoly status in a location where it matters (the US), because SpaceX is the entire reason that the US is currently outcompeting China in space. The US isn't going to fuck with their golden goose, and they don't care if that really sucks for Arianespace et al. The EU could go after SpaceX for antitrust reasons, but SpaceX doesn't have European offices so they can just say no and not do business with the EU. SpaceX can afford to lose European commercial launches, the EU would lose access to by far the cheapest way to get into space (which they might do, to be clear, because getting into space is great but not critical for them). SpaceX isn't a company like Microsoft where they have a lot of employees in EU jurisdiction and need to do business with the EU for their business to be healthy.
> The EU could go after SpaceX for antitrust reasons
They talked about taking SpaceX to WTO before. But that's it. Talk. The reality is that they know they would lose horrible if anybody ever analyzed how 'fair' the markets actually are.
> SpaceX is already functionally a monopoly at 92%
That's a questionable look at numbers. A lot of that is SpaceX own launches, not competitive. Different other parts are DoD and NASA that have a 2 provider minimum already.
For commercial payloads you have other companies coming online soon. Costumes have orders, currently Vulcane, New Glenn, Terran R, Ariane 6, Neutron all have a book of future orders already secured.
The only option for AST expanding isn't just competing for Starlink's customers. There's also growing the market as a whole. Satellite internet is still a tiny market so there's a lot of potential there.
It's entirely possible for there to be more money in providing launch services to AST even if it kills off Starlink, IF it grows the market enough.
Is SpaceX not a common carrier, like all of the other delivery companies?
They've got a big price advantage, but if they start pulling anti-competitive stuff like disfavoring launches by a competitor, that's going to get them a lot of attention.
They are using AWS for the cheap part, the content and rights is far more expensive. You think it costs 50M to stream a 2 hour show for millions of people, or the production of said show/movie?
> If you're relying on your competitor to enable your business model then you're not competing with them.
This is not true, and there are multitudes of counter-examples: store-brand products sharing shelves with competitors, EVs delivered by ICE vehicles, AOL CDs being sent by mail, etc.
Or more pointedly for phone service - the entire existence of MVNO carriers (though less extreme than the space launch area, where SpaceX is so much cheaper).
Yes—same way railroads were forced to carry their competitors' freight, at fair rates. (That when US railroad monopolies were acquiring the companies making use of their railways, so that they could kill off those company's competitors and leverage their rail monopolies into new monopolies, in different fields. These are old tricks).
Except railways occupy land that may physically exclude competitors from being able to build their own (mountain passes etc...). No such limitation exists for launching a rocket.
Antitrust isn't solely limited to natural monopolies. (Also most of the time, what you describe wasn't quite the case—there's many places were there's two, useless railways running parallel for each other for stretch, not for any technically useful reason—just an economic cooperation failure. You can call the monopolist's bluff and build a redundant (n+1)th rail line or an (n+1)th orbital launch company—it's just devastatingly expensive).
And it's a fair bet that SpaceX won't be the only option for putting something like Starlink into orbit over time, so SpaceX might as well take their money and keep it from funding other launch competitors (whether they eventually use Blue Origin & Co, or China, or Arianespace / EU).
> If you're relying on your competitor to enable your business model then you're not competing with them.
Brave relies on Google. DuckDuckGo relies on other search engines, etc. And they are in the same market.
Orbital launch systems and satellites are not in the same market. SpaceX would do themselves a disservice if they weren't willing to launch anything other than their own satellites.
I'm not sure I understand the downvotes, I guess it's easy to misinterpret the comment; I meant that it wouldn't be completely out of the realm of possibility if Musk sabotaged some on purpose (and I wouldn't be happy about it).
I don't know anything about orbital launch economics, but it wouldn't be ludicrous to say that SpaceX and satellite operators cannot eat the rising costs of launch insurance, if SpaceX was deemed too unreliable. In other words, it wouldn't be a good move for SpaceX to "sabotage" their own launches, because it will raise costs and undermine trust in the near future.
Starlink has this market cornered until another company develops sufficiently reusable rockets.
If AST SpaceMobile's bet is to try and work out the kinks in their hardware while waiting for an alternative launch provider to come online then OK, I can't fault that mindset.
IMO, if they get anywhere close to being competition then SpaceX will just change the contract terms going forward to neuter their viability.
And why go public so early? AST SpaceMobile has been public for 5 years and is getting destroyed by the market. They just sold off majority ownership of their satellite manufacturing capabilities.
Doesn't their strategy just invite pressure to monetize early at the cost of being able to experiment with R&D?
> IMO, if they get anywhere close to being competition then SpaceX will just change the contract terms going forward to neuter their viability.
If they were going to do this then why would they wait?
They don't need to. The launch contract is where the profit is. Starlink is already competing with AT&T's ground network and has to maintain competitive pricing there regardless of whether there is a competing satellite network.
AT&T benefits because they can stop maintaining ground infrastructure in rural locations and still compete for customers who care about it, and expand coverage to other countries, much of which will come at the expense of local carriers in those countries rather than Starlink.
Starlink themselves might lose a few customers to AT&T but not as much as the profit on the launch contract, so why do they want to stop it?
> expand coverage to other countries, much of which will come at the expense of local carriers in those countries
This would require AT&T to acquire local spectrum, since they (to my knowledge) don't any global spectrum.
And at that point, it seems to make much more sense for a local carrier to partner with AST instead, since they'd be able to serve almost everybody using their existing terrestrial coverage and would need to use the satellites only to fill in the gaps.
> Starlink themselves might lose a few customers to AT&T but not as much as the profit on the launch contract, so why do they want to stop it?
Theoretically they could try to keep competing satellite operators out of the direct-to-cell market for as long as possible. Being able to set the price for that for all operators in a country as the only seller sounds extremely beneficial in the short term.
But that would inevitably attract both space launch competitors and antitrust regulators around the globe, which might ultimately be worse for SpaceX.
> And at that point, it seems to make much more sense for a local carrier to partner with AST instead, since they'd be able to serve almost everybody using their existing terrestrial coverage and would need to use the satellites only to fill in the gaps.
Which is irrelevant to the point that if AST is competing with "Starlink" in those countries, they'll also be competing with (and presumably getting most of their users from) other local carriers.
> Being able to set the price for that for all operators in a country as the only seller sounds extremely beneficial in the short term.
Except that hardly anybody is going to be willing to pay significantly more than that than they could pay to get similar service from a terrestrial local carrier, so there was never really a monopoly rent to be had to begin with.
Starlink revenue in 2022 is reported to be $1.4B and SpaceX is $4.6B. SpaceX did 61 launches in 2022, or $75M per launch. Elon's on record saying it costs ~$65M to launch a rocket. So, assuming there wasn't another interested buyer, SpaceX is making about $10M allowing AST SpaceMobile to launch, but there's (potentially) a billion at stake if Starlink competition arises. I realize I'm mixing revenue and profits a bit. Just trying to ballpark some numbers.
A year ago I would've agreed with you, but Starlink's revenue is up 600% YoY. There's enough money in Starlink for SpaceX to not risk it.
I don't know why they allow it. Perhaps a sign of good faith to keep regulators off their backs?
The price is nominally 67 million to launch in 2022.[1]
A year ago I would've agreed with you, but Starlink's revenue is up 600% YoY. There's enough money in Starlink for SpaceX to not risk it.
The problem of using a purely profit oriented analysis is that you missed major pieces of the puzzle. Antitrust action would be one reason that you neglected. Another reason is SpaceX's mission, which is the colonization of Mars. To do that, SpaceX need to help bootstrap an entire space economy from scratch to make colonization more than a pipe dream.
AT&T doing the same number of launches would generate over $1B in profit.
And again, Starlink is already competing with land-based cellular networks, and so would AT&T. So the bulk of the AT&T satellite customers could come at the expense of other land-based cellular networks rather than Starlink -- Starlink has ~2M users compared to >140M for Verizon Wireless (much less carriers in other countries), so who are they really competing with?
Starlink has this market cornered until another company develops sufficiently reusable rockets.
That's inaccurate. SpaceX developed Starlink to take advantage of their growing launch capabilities.Other companies could launch on SpaceX's rocket, but not to the scale of Starlink.
Doesn't their strategy just invite pressure to monetize early at the cost of being able to experiment with R&D?
You have other competitors who also have a lot of money.
> If you're relying on your competitor to enable your business model then you're not competing with them.
They're not though, they're using a contracted service from a company that wholly owns a subsidiary that may have some competing business with your system.
They can switch to any other capable provider at any time and once the satellites are in orbit, there's no continuing business relationship with the launch company required to operate them.
That's close to the right question. I'd suggest "are there about to be any other capable providers in the same ballpark?" In which case, probably, in Ariane 6.
Outside of the US and EU governments this has not been a large market. The fact that another launch client is entering the space should suggest what the overall trajectory here is going to be.
Finally, with a lifetime of 5 to 10 years for each launched satellite, and SpaceX not being required for operation of the satellites, I'd suggest they're not nearly as dependent on a "competitor" as the OP implies.
>If you're relying on your competitor to enable your business model then you're not competing with them.
The 6502 was one of the two dominant 8-bit computer CPUs ... and was manufactured by Commodore, which was happy to sell CPUs to Apple, Atari, Acorn, and anyone else.
Specifically in telecom, in the US there are many MVNOs that resell mobile phone service from the big three carriers. Somehow both the MVNOs and the national carriers make money.
> Somehow both the MVNOs and the national carriers make money.
The history of MVNOs seems to indicate otherwise. Not a lot of them survive as independent entities; I think because there's not a lot of profit to be had, and most MVNOs are setup where the business is captive to a given operator. You'd need to reissue SIM cards to each customer in order to switch to a new operator, and that's expensive; not to mention some customers have operator locked phones that wouldn't be able to switch, so you've got to develop a plan for them as well.
I don't think you can change the IMSI remotely, or at least, you're not supposed to be able to. Most US MVNOs use IMSIs assigned to the operating carrier, which makes it hard to switch the operating carrier. Some do use their own IMSI, which you could then conceivably change network agreements and use a different network, but with today's networks, your users might have phones band optimized for the old carrier, and not have good reception with the new one.
That's like saying you can't build an e-commerce website on AWS because you're competing with Amazon retail. SpaceX might lose starlink customers in the near-term, but they still profit handsomely from the launch services. Hell, Tesla has supplied batteries to Mercedes and Toyota in the past. If you're a lemon farmer who makes lemonade and a lemonade company wants to buy your copious lemons, you sell them lemons.
It's worth pointing out that it may not even be feasible for AT&T/Google to pursue this venture _without SpaceX_, which means they're making money that they probably wouldn't otherwise make regardless.
>AST SpaceMobile does not seem like they are operating a viable business model. They have been publicly traded for several years and the market seems to agree.
Why would the stock price for a pre-revenue company with massive capex needs and high execution risk do great in a challenging macro environment?
"Starlink was already catching a lot of bad press for 'night glare' and you guys are launching something that is literally two decimal orders of magnitude worse?"
"243 launches @$85M each is about $20.7 billion dollars in launch costs, that's a lot of money and I wouldn't expect SpaceX to give you a discount."
"How many spares? What is your per-satellite cost? How much revenue per phone user do you need to get to even cover the cost of operating, much less the cost of operations and depreciation?"
"What is the probability that your 600+ sq foot antenna will be pierced by micrometeoroids? How many until it's no long effective?"
"What is your station keeping propellant load? How long does that last?"
So many questions.
I wish them success, yet it feels to me as if they have really chosen a very difficult path to get to where they want to get to. Success is hard already.
> "Starlink was already catching a lot of bad press for 'night glare'
I live in one of the least-light-polluted places in the lower 48 US states, and the night glare issue has improved massively.
About 12-18 months ago you could see bright dots cruising along the horizon for an hour or two after sunset and before dawn, every day. I can't remember seeing any of those in the last six months. Whatever they did, it totally worked.
Glad to see that SpaceX has lit a fire here. We'll look back and marvel at how much SpaceX accelerated our technological timeline due to aggressive optimism and engineering leadership.
Starlink was originally a google idea, originally a sister project to Loon, the founder quit and brought his team to SpaceX and then got fired by Elon. Everyone who repeats this story to me says it was because "Elon doesn't suffer fools" but YMMV.
Yeah, so much progress can be done when you can overwork your employees to unsafe levels and treat them like dirt. What a fantastic company where you are paid less if you are black or a woman.
this completely discounts dozens of startups and universities that pioneered cubesats, swarm deployments, and engineers who developed amazing RF tech, not to mention the companies that SpaceX acqui-hired to develop this technology.
it's really interesting how even here on HN there's such fanboyism. Starlink D2D isn't even a thing yet and yet D2D already exists in the world.
I've always thought that any service that gets delivered over media strung on a telephone pole aught to be regulated as a utility. There are only so many cables you can hang off a pole before it becomes a technical and aesthetic problem.
I submit that the same goes for satellites in orbit. How many 5000+ constellations will there be around the planet before we run into space congestion/traffic and aesthetic problems?
I suspect you'd run out of spectrum long before you'd run out of orbits. But we'll see. Maybe there are use-cases for megaconstelations that don't require as much spectrum as an ISP, especially once there's the ability to interface with an existing LEO-based ISP.
That's definitely the case for omnidirectional ground stations, i.e. most cell phones (beamforming/MIMO as used in 4G/5G and Wi-Fi nonwithstanding, since that mostly leverages heavy multipath propagation which is presumably not a thing for line-of-sight communication to satellites).
The only reason there is even a point for Starlink to have more than one satellite covering the same geographic footprint simultaneously is that both the satellites and the ground stations use phased array antennas and are largely stationary (or at least are moving somewhat predictably/rotating in space fairly slowly), which allows reusing the same frequency for customers in the same ground cell at the same time from two different satellites.
Highly mobile ground stations will likely continue to be served by a single satellite per ground location for the foreseeable future, which makes spectrum the scarce resource.
When company lost 50% of its market cap in the recent decades while being central to mobile/cloud and every other opportunities, when I saw the word AT&T in some thing, I don't feel any confidence that it will become anything useful.
That's a bit deceiving because a good portion of AT&T valuation came from them acquiring DirectTV and TimeWarner to create a unified TV streaming experience, but they have since divested those assets.
Said differently, AT&T is not the same company it was 10-years ago. They actually do less things now than they did in the past.
Rival is the wrong word. It's based on scarcity. Satellite-to-smartphone is a massive market, with plenty of opportunity to go around for the foreseeable future. It would be stupid to enter such a large and growing market and believe you're going to immediately punch the reigning 800 lbs gorilla straight in the mouth. That's senseless.
Most astronomers really don’t care. It’s a very specific kinds of observation that get impacted quite a bit, while
many others have minimal to zero impact.
Starlink could directly fund some projects and completely offset their impact, but that doesn’t seem likely at this point.
How can any company be a competitor to Starlink when they have to pay ~$67M per launch and SpaceX's internal price is something less than half that (likely a third or quarter).
Furthermore, how can they compete when Starlink already has 5,289 sats in orbit, and their current launch cadence is faster than anything any competitor can possibly hope to even equal in the next decade.
I simply can't see how anyone can realistically be considered anything less than a very, very distant has-run.
everyone pays something for launch, no matter who they use, and SpaceX has to build and launch the rockets themselves. Starlink may be getting some sort of deal already, but it's monopolistic to utilise your own technology (especially when it's government funded) and deny others the same right for the same price.
additionally, Starlink's D2D is like what 6 satellites? most of the existing sats cannot be used for device connection, so the playing field is very much level and open to many.
> everyone pays something for launch, no matter who they use, and SpaceX has to build and launch the rockets themselves.
Starlink and SpaceX are the same company. Of couse they're getting it at cost price.
> but it's monopolistic to utilise your own technology (especially when it's government funded) and deny others the same right for the same price
Please stop this FUD. The government did not "fund" SpaceX anymore than they "funded" Jeep when the USPS bought a bunch of jeeps for rural mail delivery.
Also are you saying Apple must sell computers to competitors for the same price they sell them to themselves to put in their own offices? Of course they "sell" themselves their own products cheaper than they sell them to other companies and competitors.
> additionally, Starlink's D2D is like what 6 satellites? most of the existing sats cannot be used for device connection, so the playing field is very much level and open to many.
And SpaceX are aiming for 144 launches this year. How about the "competition"? Five on the very high end.
Maybe they're hoping having the world's least change-prone company team up with the world's least reliable one will create an average but salable product.
I've never looked into how this particular comm tech works, but surely the phones would need to explicitly transmit to the satellites? I can't imagine these satellites being able to passively snoop on phones that aren't in the middle of attempting satellite communication.
"Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky. No changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps are required, providing seamless access to text, voice, and data." ( from https://direct.starlink.com/ )
Seems to imply it looks just like a cellular "cell" to the phone. Which would allow for some amount of snooping.
The Starlink constellation should be able to pinpoint every handset on ground because it forms a huge phased array antenna regardless if you are a customer or not.
Eavesdropping only gets you the TMSI which tells you there's a handset, but doesn't allow track it. If you want an unique identifier (eg. IMSI) you'll have to do a MITM attack.
"So far the theory. If you look at the Paging Channel (PCH) of cells in real-world networks, you see a significant (10-20%) amount of paging requests that contain paging by IMSI. This seems strange on first sight, given the theory..."[1]
So you can't spy on everyone, but you can spy on some subscribers whose phone is in that state.
I think the receiver would need some knowledge of the fact that it’s a satellite. Doppler shift is a physical phenomenon that the baseband would probably have to deal with.
I don't know how the cell phone protocols work really. But as tyingq writes I think the satellites behave like a roaming cellphone tower from the phones point of view. And with roaming the cell towers can call my phone, so I guess some sort of id are sent to them?
If you're relying on your competitor to enable your business model then you're not competing with them.
> In March 2022, AST SpaceMobile announced a multi-launch contract with SpaceX to launch its first BlueBird operational satellite.[35][36] AST SpaceMobile states that it will be able to produce up to six BlueBird satellites per month at two manufacturing sites in Midland, Texas.[37][38] The company has attributed delays in the deployment schedule of its operational satellites to supply chain issues and price increases.[39] In March 2023, AST SpaceMobile stated that it expects to launch the first five Block 1 BlueBird satellites in early 2024.[40]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AST_SpaceMobile#Deployment
AST SpaceMobile does not seem like they are operating a viable business model. They have been publicly traded for several years and the market seems to agree.