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This is the best summary I could come up with:
SpaceX began launching operational Starlink satellites five years ago this month.
SpaceX has now launched about 6,000 satellites with its Falcon 9 rocket and has delivered on its promise to provide fast Internet around the world.
In addition to rapidly growing its subscriber base of about 3 million, SpaceX has also managed to control costs.
Based upon its model, therefore, Quilty estimates that Starlink’s free cash flow from the business will be about $600 million this year.
Are there credible competitors to Starlink in OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, or other planned megaconstellations?
During these discussions, reporters and editors at Ars Technica speak with industry leaders about the most important technology and science news of the day.
The original article contains 324 words, the summary contains 116 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Well no, at least not in the megaconstellations class as literally NO ONE has access to the same low launch cost or high volume launch capacity without paying for trips on SpaceX.
There was a lot of talk about how Amazon’s Project Kuiper was going to catch up but it is physically and financially impossible at the moment due to launch capacity of Amazon’s launch partners and even with Kuiper requiring few sat launches. I would have to go back and do the math again but they had like 3 partners that are currently CAPABLE (BlueOrigan is still sub orbital and waiting on New Glenn to work) and even if they use ALL theoretical launch’s at MAX capacity I think it was going to take them something like 3 years to launch the complete Kuiper constellation…
SpaceX effectively has a monopoly on high speed / low latency satellite internet for the next 5+ years
New Glenn might actually launch this year, which would be amazing. We’re starting to see a lot of flight hardware… Not holding my breath though.
✅Vulcan
🔜Ariane 6
🔜New Glenn
The Kuiper fleet is starting to come together, but getting to an operational cadence is another question.
Amazon also has to actually build satellites at some point. They could have already been launching on the Atlas Vs they bought. And having Kuiper sats ready would mean ULA doesn’t have to launch the 2nd Vulcan with a mass sim.
They did do a launch last
DecemberOctober. They need to pick up the pace a bit.I guess that delay from the Kuiper test sats in Oct '23 to the first operational launch soon™ isn’t really different from SpaceX going from the Tintin test sats in Feb '18 to operational sats in May '19. I’m just impatient.