[ironyman]

LEO mega constellations are the future of space militarization. NRO + Space Development Agency is relentlessly moving ahead here with Starshield, next gen recon programs and missile tracking layers. Anyone who isn’t aggressively building production facilities to churn out tens of thousands of LEO satellites and the rockets necessary to launch them (ideally reusable rockets), and developing civilian commercial use cases from telecommunications to ADAS to spread some of the costs, might as well by living in the 2010s still.

[audunw]

Ideally reusable? I think given that SpaceX are now basically guaranteed to provide 100% reusability for the US, anyone trying to keep up, to even remotely match their capabilities, without reusability, will basically bankrupt themselves. I.e. falling in the same trap the Soviet Union did vs USA during the Cold War.

In other words: if a country wants to play this game, reusability is a hard requirement.