[telmnstr]

The origin of OneWeb was that the founder approached Elon Musk with the OneWeb idea and an agreement was signed. Not sure what role SpaceX was supposed to take, but at some later point Elon bailed and started a competing service called Starlink.

The OneWeb founder posted a photo of the signed agreement on Twitter some years ago, dumping on Elon Musk.

The original OneWeb founder is no longer involved and has some other space startup now.

Originally Blue Origin and Virgin were supposed to be the launch capability but neither can put anything in space.

Here is the tweet. OneWeb was originally called WorldVu

https://twitter.com/greg_wyler/status/1116101020675977218?la...

[iso1631]

Virgin Orbit can put things into space, although very low payload - you might have enough capacity to put one oneweb satelite into orbit at a time -- wikipedia says 500kg to 500km, Oneweb are 150kg at 1200km.

If 1 Satellite per launch, that would be 220 launched on LauncherOne at a cost of $2.6b (wikipedia costs), if Virgin Orbital could scale quickly enough (and if it can get 150kg to 1200km)

[indolering]

I view OneWeb as a holding company for spectrum. These sorts of companies have to have some viable operations in place to hold that spectrum, but the incentive is to build a monopoly and milk it. Good on SpaceX for iterating and building something better instead of settling for OneWeb's initial design.

[mlindner]

OneWeb's idea wasn't original in the first place. This has been tried many times in the fast.