| Proton was very unreliable and while the rocket was cheap insurance was incredibly expensive. Proton got destroyed in the market and virtual all new contracts went to SpaceX. Proton has been removed from commercial service and is now only flying for Russia. Russia is now basically out of the global launch business, there is no coming back after the shanked OneWeb (they will launch on Falcon 9 now). Even beyond that, Viasat and other will have huge issues. Amazon literally just bought up essentially the whole market of heavy lift for a long time. They essentially bought all available Ariane 6, Vulcan and New Glenn launch. There literally can not be a series competitor to Starlink outside of Amazon because there literally is not enough global launch capacity (outside of China). OneWeb Generation 2 sats are contracted to fly on Relativity Space, they have not even made it to orbit with their first rocket and OneWeb already bought flights on their second rocket. Any other competitors will need to make equally shaky deals with unproven companies, that are promising rockets around 2025 but those will likely be late and even once they fly scaling their operation will take many years after that. Expect existing companies to announce agreements to fly on RocketLab Neutron and Firefly Beta in the next 2 years. Because otherwise you are not getting a huge constellation into the sky. Except with SpaceX and then you are just funding your competitor. |