I remain convinced that the main successful business model in the satellite communications industry is to wait for the first incarnation of the satellite company to fail / go bankrupt / flounder, and then be part of the 2nd round of financing or ownership that comes in to buy it out and operate it... I don't know why this is the pattern but it seems to have played out several times over the last 2 decades that I've casually watched this syndrome.
If you haven't read Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story you should. The system was operational, but Motorola's dysfunction and impossible sales goals leading to disillusionment meant that Dan Colussy & team was able to pick it up for $25 million (development price: $5 billion)
They were about $3 billion in the hole when they went through bankruptcy in 2002 and the new owners bought it for $43 million (from Wikipedia). In 2025 they earned a return of $-8 million on that investment (plus any other money raised since then, such as $1 billion from Apple). So even the second incarnation doesn't seem to be a good business model even with free satellites.
The business model that works seems to be spectrum gambling. Do the minimum amount of satellite investment for decades until someone with a real business plan comes along and has to go through you to get it.
Or become a major investor on a largely public funded project with commitments set to start at a delayed time in order to benefit from R&D before bearing financial burden. (See [1].)
> I don't know why this is the pattern but it seems to have played out several times over the last 2 decades that I've casually watched this syndrome.
This is a pretty common pattern in capital intensive businesses. It's often the case that revenue is inline with operating costs, but revenue can't really ever pay for the start up costs. That dooms the initial business, but after bankruptcy it can be viable.
Depending on circumatances, the very visible bankruptcy also helps deter other businesses from joining the market. But if the cost was high due to technology, doing the same business 10-20 years later can work out because the start up costs may be significantly less.
The only real viable long-term business model for these constellations are for the military or other socialized use.
They are completely unprofitable otherwise. Eventually even Starlink will lose money, as more and more rural regions around the world are wired for fiber.
There really aren't that many people around the world that would make Starlink profitable in the long run. Only about 1% of the global population are farmers, so that already limits your market. And the moment a village is formed, the economics favor fiber to that village over Starlink.
I might be biased because I live in an area where it is fairly easy to find locations that don't have cellular coverage and won't have cellular coverage anytime soon.
Globally, there's a lot of places that are sparsely inhabited but too remote to warrant strong cellular connectivity. There's also a lot of "nooks and crannies" geographically that are not well served by cellular. As an example, I have a property in an area with excellent 5G coverage but my specific property is in a valley removing line of sight between me and the local tower, meaning reception is virtually nil. I can't even make a phone call. Without Starlink my only option would be to rely on a local WISP to set up some kind of repeater system that would have far lower reliability/performance and significantly higher cost.
Yes, but the question is what fraction of the population is in these niches and does that provide enough subscription revenue to fund the constellation?
If many others find a cheaper and more reliable path, the customer base collapses.
Well, my point is that these niches are probably more commonplace than people who live in areas blanketed by multiple 5G providers probably assume. I'm sure there are Starlink customers using it as an option in some interim period while they wait for fiber to be rolled out to their neighbourhood or town, but anecdotally, I don't know any Starlink customers who are in that boat. We exist in locations that will not be served by cheaper, more reliable terrestrial options anytime soon.
Even "cheaper" is quickly becoming a question mark. Starlink is offering 100mbps plans for $50-$70/mo. which in my region makes it cheaper or on par with options from cellular providers (which are capped) or options from cable/fiber providers.
>more and more rural regions around the world are wired for fiber.
Ecuador has the highest rate of cell phone ownership in the world, because they never built landlines and just went straight to wireless.
Same with electricity in many African countries -no grid, straight to local solar.
When I see comments like this it’s obvious you’re talking about West Virginia or Nevada as “rural regions around the world”
Go spend time in the Canadian arctic, the Congo, Sudan, Bolivia, Mongolia, Remote Australia and dozens and dozens more if you want to see where starlink shines and is rapidly changing the world.
This is exactly what "the Internet" said about spacex when they announced Starlink. Oh, it never worked. LEO constellations were tried in the 90s, ALL of them failed. Haha, it will never work. 14k satellites, that's insane, dreams, lies, hahaha.
... and yet, they are now at ~10k satellites launched, and are serving 9+mil customers, for some unknown billions/year in revenue (should become clear in a few months when they IPO).
Naive question - let's assume this all becomes a really competitive market and 10+ companies are pumping satellites into orbit.
Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
It would be incredibly unlikely for there to be enough competition at a grand enough scale for it to become a problem. Space is just very big. Earth's surface is ~197 million sq miles. If you move up to a LEO shell at around 550 miles up, the surface area of that sphere is 34% larger than that.
If you were to distribute 100,000 satellites across that shell, each one would have 2,600 square miles to itself. That's like having a single car in the entire state of Delaware. Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
The issue isn't space, it's traffic management. Satellites zipping around at 17,000 MPH would make one hell of a debris field if even one pair of them collide. That's the Kessler Syndrome boogie man everyone is worried about.
> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
Yes but don't forget that orbits decline and only satellites with onboard propulsion have the ability to boost them back up. Everything else like cubesats and random debris doesn't and thus doesn't "stay in their lane".
> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane.
Sure, but satellites in a higher plane will need to navigate satellites below them during de-orbit. Conversely, satellites in a lower plane will likely need to avoid non-functional satellites that are uncontrolled as their orbit decays.
How much mental bandwidth do you put into not hitting a car that's in a different city? Even if all 100 layers collapsed to one, that's still only 100 satellites in 2600 square miles. NYC is ~300 sq miles. There are about 2.2 million cars there. I feel like you still aren't grasping how much space we are talking about.
But crashing in LEO is not as disastrous as GEO or higher. It's an unstable orbit so eventually everything will deorbit, crash, and burn. May take a while though.
In a certain sense, we do. Pumping thousands satellites to LEO increases probability of triggering the Kessler syndrome. Luckily, LEO orbits are also self-cleaning on reasonable time scales (decades), so I think that some day we will trigger it (potentially, with some "help" from anti-satellite weapons) after which some kind of international regulation will be introduced to prevent repeating it in future.
I'd say there's plenty of room for competitors along multiple dimensions: Geopolitical security (this alone will probably preclude a single monopoly), price and lack of a moat (once a monopolist starts jacking up prices, there's an immediate incentive for an alternative), delivery profile (store-and-forward for IoT-like use cases vs. dumb pipe vs. in-space forwarding), frequency band (L- or S-band for direct to device vs. Ku/Ka band requiring directional terminals) etc.
The only thing that's actually scarce and that could be monopolized rather easily is frequency spectrum. In fact, I suspect this to be a frequency/operating license driven acquisition.
I disagree on some of those dimensions (esp. lack of a moat), but agree things like geopolitics and security would lead to multiple wholesale providers.
My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.
As I see it, the moat for terrestrial (and in particular wire-based) last-mile comms infrastructure is that each additional customer connected is often expensive, and if they switch to your competition, that wire is basically a sunk investment.
For wireless, the dynamics are very different (as long as spectrum isn't monopolized). As soon as you have enough satellites launched for global coverage, you can compete for all customers, and each one that switches away to the competition is more bandwidth available to you to undercut your competitor on pricing with.
On HN, the standard response is that earth-based observation is lesser than space-based.
Which boils down to "Use something incredibly expensive that we have very few of, instead of something that we have a number of that is comparatively cheaper. How dare you question the holy, sacred internet!"
During the Artemis launch it was very briefly mentioned that the launch window isn't a continuous window, but a series of windows interrupted for short times. I wondered if that was because of the thousands of satellites in orbit.
SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs. I'm betting the next acquisition target will be AST SpaceMobile. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see big telecom/ISP mergers pass regulatory approval now that they have competition from the heavens
They'll try. But they are between two forces squeezing the TAM:
The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.
The hammer: electronics get cheaper faster when they don't have to be space grade, and electronics get cheaper faster than rockets. As they get cheaper, terrestrial wireless will be deployed in more areas that are uneconomical right now.
> The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.
That's if everyone is trying to connect to the satellite. Would it be possible to have regional hubs that connect and distribute the connection via a local wireless link like 5G?
You don't need to be close to having everyone connect to cause congestion on a satellite network. That congestion is caused by the amount of data used, not by the number of connections.
Every kind of network has the potential for congestion, it's just easier and much cheaper to engineer a terrestrial network to avoid congestion. There are congestion scenarios for satellite networks that are not solvable.
You can use satellite backhaul for a 5G tower. And I'm sure there are many towers with satellite backhaul.
But, once you start having multiple towers near by, you are going to link those up terrestrially (wireless or not) and pretty soon you'll end up with terrestrial backhaul.
Satellite backhaul really only happens in mobile disaster recovery truck-mounted cell sites, and the fairly rare occasions where a rural site can't use terrestrial wireless backhaul.
> SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs.
Traditional ISPs already have a nice network of copper and fiber optic cables. I don't think satellites offer any advantage to most people here, except for those living in an area with slow wired connections.
Intercontinental latency in air/vacuum is lower than in fiber (even in total, i.e. after accounting for the extra distance from ground and the legs up and down from/space), so there’s also a market for high frequency trading.
It's all about bypassing regulations, just like Uber and AirBNB. Most US ISPs have old copper cables that only support DSL. Upgrading them means digging up the streets and that's expensive and a legal minefield. And those ISPs are local monopolies so why would they spend money just to keep the same number of customers who are locked in anyway?
I don't think that is very true in this day in age. Here in Cincinnati, the vast majority of houses now have fiber run to them. There are still some stragglers, but that's mainly because slumlord apartment owners don't feel like dealing with upgrades.
Oh, I missed the memo that Amazon Leo is the new name for Project Kuiper, rebranded in November of last year. I saw a presentation back when it was Kuiper so have still been calling it that
I wonder if there will become a point where these companies will be considered too big and will be forcibly cut up to smaller chunks... If feels like they have tentacles in everything now.
There is no such thing as a company being "too big", it's only a question of market power (eg monopolies) and abuse of that power.
For LEO data it seems that there will be plenty of competition. If you're talking about Amazon, they're in fiercely competitive markets. Them having the capital and cash flow ('size') to launch a competitor to SpazX is only a good thing.
People think that with better D2D technology, emergency and telemetry messages will still be short and to the point. These messages will not be like streaming videos.
When companies work together on things, like spectrum and constellations and handset deals it changes how people get billed.. It does not change the fact that people want to keep the messages small when millions of devices are using the same channel.
I am curious to see if people will still talk about having satellite access or if they will start talking about paying for what they use once this is up and running. D2D technology is still going to be used for these messages.
Fixed Starlink is competing with fiber/DOCSIS/DSL, though. That's orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people in areas remote enough to not warrant a terrestrial cell base station (which could itself also be backhauled over much more efficient fixed satellite).
With small enough spot beams, the difference between a large rural cell and a very narrow direct-to-device spot beam footprint is really not that big anymore. Starlink apparently already offers video calling over direct to cell in the US via T-Mobile!
Interesting, I was expecting Apple to eventually buy them.
Still, makes sense to me: The aging Globalstar satellite constellation itself is probably not very interesting to Amazon, but their global L-band and S-band spectrum is, as are their existing licenses to operate a mobile satellite service in most countries.
Post-Jobs Apple seems paralyzed and unable to commit to any big moves.
It is impossible to overstate the success of the iPhone, but there are so many recent examples where they dipped their toes in only to fail or be left behind (autos, VR, AI, etc).
What will the next 20 years of Apple look like? Just more iPhones?
I'm not surprised, but I think it's fair to find it upsetting. It's a twofold loss: A loss of competition in all markets that Apple monopolizes, and a loss of everybody working towards protecting that golden goose instead of actually improving the product.
I guess the stack should be completed with this. AWS servers, satellite communications, boxes to view content on TVs, apps on mobiles, content creation studios, advertising, product placement, product sales. Whew!
I guess they also want expertise to launch stuff into space, in case it becomes feasible to run space data centers.
They would also need to protect all this stuff spread globally and into the space. No government will be able to do that - like we've already seen with the datacenters being hit in the Gulf states. Company like AMZN will have all the components for the most modern weapon system - global autonomous drone offense and defense network with the space component (or imagine a 1 GW datacenter in space temporarily rerouting its power into a laser or a microwave effector 80-ies StarWars style :) plus de-facto global intelligence network that each of these companies have, and thus will have and will be able to better protect themselves. Those large BigTechs will unavoidably have to move into defense, for themselves and as-a-service for smaller transnationals.
I think America in general is moving to a service based economy where you don’t own anything anymore. Everything from cars (lease) to homes (rentals) to electronics to insurance etc comes at a monthly cost. This kind of model works when the central government is trusted (or at least perceived to be trusted) to keep the wheel churning. I think the current government took some of the power back from big tech and people didn’t like it. Very interesting because the whole argument was private companies having too much power. Now the argument is government having too much power.
Why space data centers? What advantage this would have? Cooling will be a big issue, while it is easily solved on the planet earth, as we have water, air that can transfer heat away.
People point to the cost of land, but if being physically inaccessible isn’t a problem, then there are lots of cheap places on Earth you can deploy data centres too at far lower cost than launching them into orbit.
Desert land is free. Floating data centres in the middle of the pacific is free.
If a state, or even rich billionaire, wanted to take out your data centre in low earth orbit, it's only a few million dollars to launch a retrograde rocket which explodes into 10 ton of shrapnel, or even less to forget the orbit and just launch it directly up.
I don't think people are looking at this the right way. They need to be inaccessible to terrestrial and air weapons, have lower latency, not be dependent on power plants, etc.
Far easier for someone like Iran or China or the US to take out an LEO satellite than an underground data centre, or even a surface on in the case of DCs in US or China.
Launching something into orbit is much harder than intercepting something because to intercept you don't need to reach orbital velocities. You can just go up and boom. The velocity of the target does the rest. Tracking it really isn't such a hard thing these days.
Are you suggesting for a fact that Iran as the guidance and targeting systems to identify specific LEO objects, and fire missiles at those targets with accuracy?
I'm saying I don't think Iran has the capability and the difference in capabilities between America and China on one hand, and Iran on the other is so different that I'm perplexed as to why they would even be mentioned in the same sentence.
I'm actually not even sure your suggestion is true. Theoretically they don't need to launch a missile and could attempt to infiltrate a data center instead. They're secure but not that secure against a determined enemy with any amount of real training.
It's also pretty easy to launch another one into orbit to replace it? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. We can have all these options simultaneously. The easiest targets are where the faster paced more offensive action is going to be.
People have been talking about waging war in space for many decades now. All the arguments for and against it were made a very long time ago, and it was decided it's a hell of a lot better that way. Even a nuclear blast in orbit is more tolerable.
Space superiority is just too damn appealing as the next frontier after land, air, and sea where we've been stuck in stalemate for a while. It's perfectly natural we go to space for this, including the datacenters.
The Utah Data Center [0] is a 200 acre plot with 35 acres of buildings.
Even prime farmland values is arround $10k an acre, or $2m, but for other land you're talking $400k for that much land [1]
It uses 65MW. The solar panels alone to generate that cost $100 per kW in bulk, or $6.5m.
That's 570GWh a year.
Mount Signal 1 Solar plant, from over a decade ago, produces about that currently. Total cost $365m [2].
Then there's the lifetime? What do you do in 36 months time when you want to replace the hardware with the latest generation? In an earthbound one you turn off the rack, remove the old kit, put the new kit in. In space, it just burns up in the atmosphere.
in space 1m2 of thin metal will radiate those 785 watt. No fan, no heatpump, nothing. Only the launch cost. Which given the projected Starship launch cost will be cheaper than installation on Earth.
If you build a pyramid with the base pointing to the sun (as solar), and a "height" about 5 times the base in constant shadow, with decent internal circulation, that will operate at sub-20C just from the two radiative sides pointing away from Earth (you make the earth pointing sides reflective)
We need to start requiring that for each batch of satellites that goes up, some piece of space junk - hell, any piece of space junk - gets brought back to Earth's surface in one piece for proper recycling.
And what's the effect on cancer rates, etc. from all that toxic pollution to both launch the satellites and then vaporize them in the atmosphere years later?
Any reasonable government regulatory agency would block this aquisition. Amazon just laid off 16,000 people. They are unworthy of further consolidation.
Space junk would come down in other countries, too. Even if there was a great conspiracy of "them" in the USA, there's plenty of others to report on it.
I remain convinced that the main successful business model in the satellite communications industry is to wait for the first incarnation of the satellite company to fail / go bankrupt / flounder, and then be part of the 2nd round of financing or ownership that comes in to buy it out and operate it... I don't know why this is the pattern but it seems to have played out several times over the last 2 decades that I've casually watched this syndrome.
If you haven't read Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story you should. The system was operational, but Motorola's dysfunction and impossible sales goals leading to disillusionment meant that Dan Colussy & team was able to pick it up for $25 million (development price: $5 billion)
They were about $3 billion in the hole when they went through bankruptcy in 2002 and the new owners bought it for $43 million (from Wikipedia). In 2025 they earned a return of $-8 million on that investment (plus any other money raised since then, such as $1 billion from Apple). So even the second incarnation doesn't seem to be a good business model even with free satellites.
The business model that works seems to be spectrum gambling. Do the minimum amount of satellite investment for decades until someone with a real business plan comes along and has to go through you to get it.
Or become a major investor on a largely public funded project with commitments set to start at a delayed time in order to benefit from R&D before bearing financial burden. (See [1].)
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8e75ed31-0c72-4160-b406-1ca6aa36a...
> I don't know why this is the pattern but it seems to have played out several times over the last 2 decades that I've casually watched this syndrome.
This is a pretty common pattern in capital intensive businesses. It's often the case that revenue is inline with operating costs, but revenue can't really ever pay for the start up costs. That dooms the initial business, but after bankruptcy it can be viable.
Depending on circumatances, the very visible bankruptcy also helps deter other businesses from joining the market. But if the cost was high due to technology, doing the same business 10-20 years later can work out because the start up costs may be significantly less.
The only real viable long-term business model for these constellations are for the military or other socialized use.
They are completely unprofitable otherwise. Eventually even Starlink will lose money, as more and more rural regions around the world are wired for fiber.
I find this hard to imagine. There are so many rural customers where it is totally uneconomical to run fiber vs. just paying for Starlink.
There really aren't that many people around the world that would make Starlink profitable in the long run. Only about 1% of the global population are farmers, so that already limits your market. And the moment a village is formed, the economics favor fiber to that village over Starlink.
5G internet seems to be a decent compromise for that -- much simpler infra at least.
I might be biased because I live in an area where it is fairly easy to find locations that don't have cellular coverage and won't have cellular coverage anytime soon.
Globally, there's a lot of places that are sparsely inhabited but too remote to warrant strong cellular connectivity. There's also a lot of "nooks and crannies" geographically that are not well served by cellular. As an example, I have a property in an area with excellent 5G coverage but my specific property is in a valley removing line of sight between me and the local tower, meaning reception is virtually nil. I can't even make a phone call. Without Starlink my only option would be to rely on a local WISP to set up some kind of repeater system that would have far lower reliability/performance and significantly higher cost.
Yes, but the question is what fraction of the population is in these niches and does that provide enough subscription revenue to fund the constellation?
If many others find a cheaper and more reliable path, the customer base collapses.
Well, my point is that these niches are probably more commonplace than people who live in areas blanketed by multiple 5G providers probably assume. I'm sure there are Starlink customers using it as an option in some interim period while they wait for fiber to be rolled out to their neighbourhood or town, but anecdotally, I don't know any Starlink customers who are in that boat. We exist in locations that will not be served by cheaper, more reliable terrestrial options anytime soon.
Even "cheaper" is quickly becoming a question mark. Starlink is offering 100mbps plans for $50-$70/mo. which in my region makes it cheaper or on par with options from cellular providers (which are capped) or options from cable/fiber providers.
>more and more rural regions around the world are wired for fiber.
Ecuador has the highest rate of cell phone ownership in the world, because they never built landlines and just went straight to wireless.
Same with electricity in many African countries -no grid, straight to local solar.
When I see comments like this it’s obvious you’re talking about West Virginia or Nevada as “rural regions around the world”
Go spend time in the Canadian arctic, the Congo, Sudan, Bolivia, Mongolia, Remote Australia and dozens and dozens more if you want to see where starlink shines and is rapidly changing the world.
ok but that just makes Starlink even more unprofitable, as now you're limited by the number of customers.
The moment these people incorporate into a village, it becomes more profitable to build a fiber connection. Fiber will eventually get to Ecuador.
A limited total addressable market doesn't necessarily have anything to do with profit potential.
Starlink was never supposed to be for anyone that can have fibre.
There are billions of potential customers.
lol no. There are probably 50-100 million potential customers. The rural farmer in India isn't going to buy Starlink.
Every analyst ever said cell phones wouldn’t take off across Africa because there isn’t enough money.
They were all completely wrong.
Iridium was first. It was a cautionary lesson. Listen to Patrick Boyle regarding Starlink. Not everyone was paying attention in class.
> to fail / go bankrupt / flounder
This is exactly what "the Internet" said about spacex when they announced Starlink. Oh, it never worked. LEO constellations were tried in the 90s, ALL of them failed. Haha, it will never work. 14k satellites, that's insane, dreams, lies, hahaha.
... and yet, they are now at ~10k satellites launched, and are serving 9+mil customers, for some unknown billions/year in revenue (should become clear in a few months when they IPO).
> for some unknown billions/year in revenue
Read here on HN yday: they’ve $20B in revenue, but xAI is a drag.
Or also owning a rocket company that launches your satellites at low cost.
It is of course what happened to Iridium. But not all of them go bankrupt.
You see the same pattern with railroads from 1860 to 1900.
Clayton M. Christensen (The innovator's dilemma) would agree.
Naive question - let's assume this all becomes a really competitive market and 10+ companies are pumping satellites into orbit.
Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
It would be incredibly unlikely for there to be enough competition at a grand enough scale for it to become a problem. Space is just very big. Earth's surface is ~197 million sq miles. If you move up to a LEO shell at around 550 miles up, the surface area of that sphere is 34% larger than that.
If you were to distribute 100,000 satellites across that shell, each one would have 2,600 square miles to itself. That's like having a single car in the entire state of Delaware. Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
The issue isn't space, it's traffic management. Satellites zipping around at 17,000 MPH would make one hell of a debris field if even one pair of them collide. That's the Kessler Syndrome boogie man everyone is worried about.
The Crash Clock is currently at 5.5 days.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock
> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
Yes but don't forget that orbits decline and only satellites with onboard propulsion have the ability to boost them back up. Everything else like cubesats and random debris doesn't and thus doesn't "stay in their lane".
> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane.
Sure, but satellites in a higher plane will need to navigate satellites below them during de-orbit. Conversely, satellites in a lower plane will likely need to avoid non-functional satellites that are uncontrolled as their orbit decays.
How much mental bandwidth do you put into not hitting a car that's in a different city? Even if all 100 layers collapsed to one, that's still only 100 satellites in 2600 square miles. NYC is ~300 sq miles. There are about 2.2 million cars there. I feel like you still aren't grasping how much space we are talking about.
But Starlink satellites are low enough that we don’t worry too much about Kessler Syndrome at that altitude, right?
Orbital collisions are very energetic and definitely do launch debris into higher orbits with much longer decay times
But crashing in LEO is not as disastrous as GEO or higher. It's an unstable orbit so eventually everything will deorbit, crash, and burn. May take a while though.
>Are we going to run out of space?
In a certain sense, we do. Pumping thousands satellites to LEO increases probability of triggering the Kessler syndrome. Luckily, LEO orbits are also self-cleaning on reasonable time scales (decades), so I think that some day we will trigger it (potentially, with some "help" from anti-satellite weapons) after which some kind of international regulation will be introduced to prevent repeating it in future.
I'd say there's plenty of room for competitors along multiple dimensions: Geopolitical security (this alone will probably preclude a single monopoly), price and lack of a moat (once a monopolist starts jacking up prices, there's an immediate incentive for an alternative), delivery profile (store-and-forward for IoT-like use cases vs. dumb pipe vs. in-space forwarding), frequency band (L- or S-band for direct to device vs. Ku/Ka band requiring directional terminals) etc.
The only thing that's actually scarce and that could be monopolized rather easily is frequency spectrum. In fact, I suspect this to be a frequency/operating license driven acquisition.
I disagree on some of those dimensions (esp. lack of a moat), but agree things like geopolitics and security would lead to multiple wholesale providers.
My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.
As I see it, the moat for terrestrial (and in particular wire-based) last-mile comms infrastructure is that each additional customer connected is often expensive, and if they switch to your competition, that wire is basically a sunk investment.
For wireless, the dynamics are very different (as long as spectrum isn't monopolized). As soon as you have enough satellites launched for global coverage, you can compete for all customers, and each one that switches away to the competition is more bandwidth available to you to undercut your competitor on pricing with.
There might be room in orbit for everyone, but not in the night sky without ruining observation, I’m afraid.
On HN, the standard response is that earth-based observation is lesser than space-based.
Which boils down to "Use something incredibly expensive that we have very few of, instead of something that we have a number of that is comparatively cheaper. How dare you question the holy, sacred internet!"
[dead]
Are we going to run out of space?
During the Artemis launch it was very briefly mentioned that the launch window isn't a continuous window, but a series of windows interrupted for short times. I wondered if that was because of the thousands of satellites in orbit.
No, it's not. Launch windows [0] are about relative position of orbital bodies which enable use of more efficient transfer orbits.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_window
SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs. I'm betting the next acquisition target will be AST SpaceMobile. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see big telecom/ISP mergers pass regulatory approval now that they have competition from the heavens
They'll try. But they are between two forces squeezing the TAM:
The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.
The hammer: electronics get cheaper faster when they don't have to be space grade, and electronics get cheaper faster than rockets. As they get cheaper, terrestrial wireless will be deployed in more areas that are uneconomical right now.
And that is how the satellite TAM gets slammed.
> The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.
That's if everyone is trying to connect to the satellite. Would it be possible to have regional hubs that connect and distribute the connection via a local wireless link like 5G?
You don't need to be close to having everyone connect to cause congestion on a satellite network. That congestion is caused by the amount of data used, not by the number of connections.
Every kind of network has the potential for congestion, it's just easier and much cheaper to engineer a terrestrial network to avoid congestion. There are congestion scenarios for satellite networks that are not solvable.
You can use satellite backhaul for a 5G tower. And I'm sure there are many towers with satellite backhaul.
But, once you start having multiple towers near by, you are going to link those up terrestrially (wireless or not) and pretty soon you'll end up with terrestrial backhaul.
Satellite backhaul really only happens in mobile disaster recovery truck-mounted cell sites, and the fairly rare occasions where a rural site can't use terrestrial wireless backhaul.
> SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs.
Traditional ISPs already have a nice network of copper and fiber optic cables. I don't think satellites offer any advantage to most people here, except for those living in an area with slow wired connections.
Intercontinental latency in air/vacuum is lower than in fiber (even in total, i.e. after accounting for the extra distance from ground and the legs up and down from/space), so there’s also a market for high frequency trading.
It's all about bypassing regulations, just like Uber and AirBNB. Most US ISPs have old copper cables that only support DSL. Upgrading them means digging up the streets and that's expensive and a legal minefield. And those ISPs are local monopolies so why would they spend money just to keep the same number of customers who are locked in anyway?
I don't think that is very true in this day in age. Here in Cincinnati, the vast majority of houses now have fiber run to them. There are still some stragglers, but that's mainly because slumlord apartment owners don't feel like dealing with upgrades.
> I'm betting the next acquisition target will be AST SpaceMobile.
Or possibly viasat.
Oh, I missed the memo that Amazon Leo is the new name for Project Kuiper, rebranded in November of last year. I saw a presentation back when it was Kuiper so have still been calling it that
Leo is a dumb name. I still call it Kuiper.
Helps to think of it less as lion and more of an orbit.
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I wonder if there will become a point where these companies will be considered too big and will be forcibly cut up to smaller chunks... If feels like they have tentacles in everything now.
There is no such thing as a company being "too big", it's only a question of market power (eg monopolies) and abuse of that power.
For LEO data it seems that there will be plenty of competition. If you're talking about Amazon, they're in fiercely competitive markets. Them having the capital and cash flow ('size') to launch a competitor to SpazX is only a good thing.
People think that with better D2D technology, emergency and telemetry messages will still be short and to the point. These messages will not be like streaming videos.
When companies work together on things, like spectrum and constellations and handset deals it changes how people get billed.. It does not change the fact that people want to keep the messages small when millions of devices are using the same channel.
I am curious to see if people will still talk about having satellite access or if they will start talking about paying for what they use once this is up and running. D2D technology is still going to be used for these messages.
Spectrum contention is going to be insane in D2D.
Starlink already has to constrain the number of broadband accounts per locale to avoid saturation.
Fixed Starlink is competing with fiber/DOCSIS/DSL, though. That's orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people in areas remote enough to not warrant a terrestrial cell base station (which could itself also be backhauled over much more efficient fixed satellite).
With small enough spot beams, the difference between a large rural cell and a very narrow direct-to-device spot beam footprint is really not that big anymore. Starlink apparently already offers video calling over direct to cell in the US via T-Mobile!
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770323 My comment from there:
Interesting, I was expecting Apple to eventually buy them.
Still, makes sense to me: The aging Globalstar satellite constellation itself is probably not very interesting to Amazon, but their global L-band and S-band spectrum is, as are their existing licenses to operate a mobile satellite service in most countries.
Post-Jobs Apple seems paralyzed and unable to commit to any big moves.
It is impossible to overstate the success of the iPhone, but there are so many recent examples where they dipped their toes in only to fail or be left behind (autos, VR, AI, etc).
What will the next 20 years of Apple look like? Just more iPhones?
Apple Watch and Airpods are two of the largest consumer product launches of the last 10 years and they're both post-Jobs.
The same as it has for about the past 20 years? Take a 30% cut of all transactions that ever happen as long as an iPhone was somewhere in the process.
Charging a high fee to be a middleman is insanely profitable. People shouldn't be surprised that companies that get there don't do anything else.
I'm not surprised, but I think it's fair to find it upsetting. It's a twofold loss: A loss of competition in all markets that Apple monopolizes, and a loss of everybody working towards protecting that golden goose instead of actually improving the product.
So, Amazon wants to own the tubes too?
I guess the stack should be completed with this. AWS servers, satellite communications, boxes to view content on TVs, apps on mobiles, content creation studios, advertising, product placement, product sales. Whew!
I guess they also want expertise to launch stuff into space, in case it becomes feasible to run space data centers.
> I guess they also want expertise to launch stuff into space
Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos' private aerospace company
They would also need to protect all this stuff spread globally and into the space. No government will be able to do that - like we've already seen with the datacenters being hit in the Gulf states. Company like AMZN will have all the components for the most modern weapon system - global autonomous drone offense and defense network with the space component (or imagine a 1 GW datacenter in space temporarily rerouting its power into a laser or a microwave effector 80-ies StarWars style :) plus de-facto global intelligence network that each of these companies have, and thus will have and will be able to better protect themselves. Those large BigTechs will unavoidably have to move into defense, for themselves and as-a-service for smaller transnationals.
There is a constant lack of acceptance of the privatisation of the world in the tech industry. Or of course people realise it but like it.
The randian matra of "Private = good, government = bad" always wins out
You end up with a private company run by the elite, not the people. One Dollar One Vote.
Amazon seems to have a service for everything, one time I saw they had satellite ground station as a service
I think America in general is moving to a service based economy where you don’t own anything anymore. Everything from cars (lease) to homes (rentals) to electronics to insurance etc comes at a monthly cost. This kind of model works when the central government is trusted (or at least perceived to be trusted) to keep the wheel churning. I think the current government took some of the power back from big tech and people didn’t like it. Very interesting because the whole argument was private companies having too much power. Now the argument is government having too much power.
You only now just think this? The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. Especially as you move down in age cohort.
Yes even the WEF has been planning for this for a decade with their "you will own nothing but you will be happy" indoctrination.
At some point government and companies will be merging into one.
https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/
Probably for their existing L/S-band spectrum and carrier licenses.
Well if they really want to be full stack, they need to also get down into pharmaceuticals and bio-engineering, right?
Why space data centers? What advantage this would have? Cooling will be a big issue, while it is easily solved on the planet earth, as we have water, air that can transfer heat away.
They don’t have any advantages at all.
People point to the cost of land, but if being physically inaccessible isn’t a problem, then there are lots of cheap places on Earth you can deploy data centres too at far lower cost than launching them into orbit.
Desert land is free. Floating data centres in the middle of the pacific is free.
If a state, or even rich billionaire, wanted to take out your data centre in low earth orbit, it's only a few million dollars to launch a retrograde rocket which explodes into 10 ton of shrapnel, or even less to forget the orbit and just launch it directly up.
You can do the same to the ones in the Pacific and desert too.
It's a declaration of war much the same.
For now there's a regulatory oversight advantage (or rather lack of same).
There’s a whole lot more oversight, from the radiocommunications and aviation safety regulators.
Defense systems in space need to be... in space.
I don't think people are looking at this the right way. They need to be inaccessible to terrestrial and air weapons, have lower latency, not be dependent on power plants, etc.
That's true, but they're also very vulnerable to ground based LASERs.
Far easier for someone like Iran or China or the US to take out an LEO satellite than an underground data centre, or even a surface on in the case of DCs in US or China.
I don’t think Iran has the capability to shoot down LEO satellites. Kind of weird to loop them in with China here other than China helping Iran.
Iran has a space program capable of launching LEO satellites.
Launching LEO satellites is a different capability than shooting down LEO satellites.
Launching something into orbit is much harder than intercepting something because to intercept you don't need to reach orbital velocities. You can just go up and boom. The velocity of the target does the rest. Tracking it really isn't such a hard thing these days.
It’s not a hard thing, but you still have to have the capability to track objects and design a rocket with the capability to hit that object.
These aren’t capabilities Iran has. Certainly not anymore.
You need about 2,500m/s delta V to reach LEO altitude. Iranian long range rockets are well in that range.
It's thus far easier for Iran to hit an LEO DC than one in Colorado
Are you suggesting for a fact that Iran as the guidance and targeting systems to identify specific LEO objects, and fire missiles at those targets with accuracy?
I'm saying that it's far easier for them to take out an LEO satellite than an underground data centre, or even a surface one, in the centre of the US.
Are you saying it's not?
I'm saying I don't think Iran has the capability and the difference in capabilities between America and China on one hand, and Iran on the other is so different that I'm perplexed as to why they would even be mentioned in the same sentence.
I'm actually not even sure your suggestion is true. Theoretically they don't need to launch a missile and could attempt to infiltrate a data center instead. They're secure but not that secure against a determined enemy with any amount of real training.
It's also pretty easy to launch another one into orbit to replace it? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. We can have all these options simultaneously. The easiest targets are where the faster paced more offensive action is going to be.
People have been talking about waging war in space for many decades now. All the arguments for and against it were made a very long time ago, and it was decided it's a hell of a lot better that way. Even a nuclear blast in orbit is more tolerable.
Space superiority is just too damn appealing as the next frontier after land, air, and sea where we've been stuck in stalemate for a while. It's perfectly natural we go to space for this, including the datacenters.
You don't have to buy real estate.
Land is pretty much irellevent in the cost.
The Utah Data Center [0] is a 200 acre plot with 35 acres of buildings.
Even prime farmland values is arround $10k an acre, or $2m, but for other land you're talking $400k for that much land [1]
It uses 65MW. The solar panels alone to generate that cost $100 per kW in bulk, or $6.5m.
That's 570GWh a year.
Mount Signal 1 Solar plant, from over a decade ago, produces about that currently. Total cost $365m [2].
Then there's the lifetime? What do you do in 36 months time when you want to replace the hardware with the latest generation? In an earthbound one you turn off the rack, remove the old kit, put the new kit in. In space, it just burns up in the atmosphere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
[1] https://www.land.com/property/201-acres-in-brown-county-nebr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar
Not for the data center, for the fiber lines.
Pretty much zero cost. Or just use your satellite capacity you'd use from your space based DC.
Zero cost to run fiber to every household on earth??
Zero cost to run fibre from a nearby IXP to your new data centre with $100m of equipment
>Cooling will be a big issue
a 1m2 at 70C radiates 785 Watt. Seems thet cooling will be more simple than on Earth.
A 1m2 heatsink/fan on earth can sink kWs. My heatpump is about 1m2 area and can sink 15kw. Seems earth is at least 20x times better.
in space 1m2 of thin metal will radiate those 785 watt. No fan, no heatpump, nothing. Only the launch cost. Which given the projected Starship launch cost will be cheaper than installation on Earth.
If you build a pyramid with the base pointing to the sun (as solar), and a "height" about 5 times the base in constant shadow, with decent internal circulation, that will operate at sub-20C just from the two radiative sides pointing away from Earth (you make the earth pointing sides reflective)
Cooling isn't an issue.
Related:
Amazon acquires Apple's satellite partner
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768723
We need to start requiring that for each batch of satellites that goes up, some piece of space junk - hell, any piece of space junk - gets brought back to Earth's surface in one piece for proper recycling.
Are we going to be able to see the night sky by the end of this decade?
https://satellitemap.space
And what's the effect on cancer rates, etc. from all that toxic pollution to both launch the satellites and then vaporize them in the atmosphere years later?
https://bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellites-p...
Sure would be nice if the answers to these questions were not guessing before we do the damage and impossible to fix after
Any reasonable government regulatory agency would block this aquisition. Amazon just laid off 16,000 people. They are unworthy of further consolidation.
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If something hits a house then you can analyze what hit it. I wouldn't make a conspiracy out of it. Meteor and space junk are quite different things.
You can, but what if they don’t want to?
Space junk would come down in other countries, too. Even if there was a great conspiracy of "them" in the USA, there's plenty of others to report on it.
Reporting on something is rather late after it’s already hit its target, don’t you think?
The key to strategic usage of deorbiting is that the mass is already in position, and only needs to be properly wielded.
No amount of “investigation” or reporting would stop that from happening.
"they"