| I don't know about constellation size issues wrt to customer needs. But I presume one important factor was making sure the terminal costs were lower than a mid-range phone. Especially since Kuiper claims to be focused on that. It was an issue with Teledesic. Cheap sats also mean treating them like cattle rather than pets and that the on orbit spares are one orbit away from replacement Lasers mean low bandwidth usage areas don't need ground stations. Being in VLEO means most talk about Kessler is just regurgitated claims by people who don't haven't bothered to read his papers and don't know the time taken to clear orbits by debris. Some of them don't even realize that if you change the apogee via collision the perigee changes too. I don't know if it's possible to serve with the same number at this altitude, but I can see even Kuiper is going for over 5k sats and OneWeb is selling antennas for 9k (down from 25k) and monthly service for fixed users in the US is 2500/m. I remember congestion issues with less sats (I wonder why they use nco=1 when Kuiper is 4) As for the risk, people are already claiming the (dubious) success was already self evidently inevitable even when we can't see evidence of profits and that Elon's done nothing special. Not even the struggles of Iris², Rivada, OneWeb, Kuiper, and pretty much every launch provider will convince them though. I'm looking forward to what competitors bring and I'm willing to bet I won't be able to buy a terminal for less than $0.5k (unsubsidized) and service for less than $50/m in Africa from another provider before 2028 (Artemis). But I'm hopeful I'm wrong. I was paying ~$250/m for 4G. Now lower via devaluation but Starlink is $23/m here |
Geez I forgot about Kuiper. Good god what are they doing.
If you're concerned about terminal cost, the whole point of ATC is that someone puts up a cell tower with a LEO satellite backbone, and people can use cheapo $20 mobile phones.
Anyway, developed countries' rural broadband and military contracts are where it's at. I'm sure Starlink -could- make a profit if it isn't doing so already.