[luke5441]

And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.

To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.

[drysine]

>And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.

I don't know about the rest, but Russia started working on its own Starlink well before the war. We have the North and Siberia where satellite internet is the only option. Another target market is Russian Railways which would love to have internet in the trains not only when they pass areas with mobile coverage.

[numpad0]

The problem with LEO constellation is wasted airtime outside of the country that owns it. Starlink just let anyone pay for the service irrespective of legality and let the leftovers go to waste, but most sane people can't accept that model.

They just launch those sats, and straight up serve Internet illegally. Those are the bonkers parts.

[ianm218]

India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.

[wolvoleo]

They have nukes and are always on the verge of war with Pakistan (who also have nukes). I'm sure they have money for war, everyone always does.

[triceratops]

They have an actual space program that launches actual satellites. They have also been in several actual, non-hypothetical wars.

[tw1984]

To launch a starlink style system, you need to be able to rapidly design and produce hundreds of thousands satellites and launch them within relatively short period of time with extremely high success rate. only the largest industrialized nation on earth can do that. india is 30-50 years away from such achievement.

To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.

[overfeed]

India was the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt. ISRO is a highly capable org, and cost effective. India also was #4 to land on the moon after the USSR, USA and China - beating Japan to the punch. SpaceX is yet to deliver a payload to the moon or Mars - orbit or lander.

[wqaatwt]

> the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt

Well doing it decades later than others did help with that.

[overfeed]

How many[1] others? Not many countries can claim that achievement, industrialized or not, which is telling.

1. The answer is 3.: USA, USSR, and the European Space Agency

[triceratops]

How did that help them?

And how does it matter why they succeeded when the question is "are they capable of doing a Starlink?"?

[adityamwagh]

What makes you think india is "super super" poor? India's GDP is humongous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...).

[eldaisfish]

India's total exports are in the same ballpark as the Netherlands, a country with half the population of the city of Bombay.

India may not be a poor country, but GDP doesn't capture the real state of india's wealth.

[adityamwagh]

Yes, GDP doesn't say anything about the individual wealth. But we are talking about the whole country here.

[kortilla]

The denominator

[antonvs]

The page you need to look at is GDP per capita:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

…which lists India as #148, below countries like Zimbabwe, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Palestine.

[triceratops]

That only matters if you want to know how much an average individual can spend. Gross GDP is more relevant when you're discussing how much the state could spend on defence programs.

[luke5441]

Same as Russia, yeah. But Reliance Jio seems to have announced something. Don't know if it'll actually happen.

[ianm218]

Yeah who knows poor infrastructure might let India skip fiber in some areas entirely. Maybe it’s not that hard to launch a domestic Starlink if Blue Origin/ SpaceX will bring your satellites up cheaply .