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by harrall
487 days ago
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Iridium and other satellite companies also went bankrupt and their satellites were going to be de-orbited until the US Government bailed them out in the 2000s. They couldn’t get enough customers to support enough launches. Terrestrial networks in the meantime have only gotten better and improved coverage. Not that many customers, relatively, need satellite comms. Now SpaceX is eating their lunch. I don’t think the market for satellite comms has ever been big enough for a pure-satellite company to get enough money to do something cool. SpaceX can afford the R&D because they are a little more diversified. |
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No surprise, the only usecases back then for the price that Iridium and others commanded were SAR, a few military/secret service style use cases and execs who deem themselves to be of such importance that they need to be reachable on the globe 24/7 even if they are just taking a flight over the Atlantic or on a cruise ship, and Iridium can't be reasonably used for much more than that.
> Now SpaceX is eating their lunch.
Partially due to physics. Latency on Starlink is reportedly low enough to run online games or telephony and the bandwidth high enough to allow for video streaming in the outback, which makes the potential market size muuuuch bigger so the price point can be lowered enough to be competitive with landline DSL of all things.
The problem is, SpaceX isn't something that the US government can rely on forever. For now, its leader is in good standing with the 47th, but that may change overnight (it has happened with either of these characters before and both have quite the large egos that will collide rather sooner than later). And what to do then?