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And they can deny service to anyone.

by dd36 8y ago

penagwin 8y ago
I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel, I'm guessing they'd be hit with anti-trust laws pretty quickly.
- MertsA 8y ago
  Yeah but with the volume we're talking about here, SpaceX is definitely going to be extremely constrained by launch capacity. I doubt they'd be hit with any antitrust lawsuit over not cancelling their own launches in order to take orders from their competitors. In any case, there's no chance that all of those companies are going to be able to launch their constellations in anywhere close to their targeted timeframes. There's just not enough launch capacity in the world to handle that in such a short amount of time.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    My impression of the Starlink project is that it's at least in part a backup project for unused launch capacity. That is, if they happen to not find paying customers for all their reusable launch fleet, this is a way for it to not stand around idle. Under this theory, paying customers will always get precedent over throwing up another 44 satellites.
- phkahler 8y ago
  >> I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel The government grants monopolies (patent) on very important things (drugs and treatments for all sorts of things) and then lets companies charge different rates to different customers - even higher prices to the uninsured. It seems unlikely they'd make SpaceX launch for a competitor at anywhere near their own cost. But then politics....
  - penagwin 8y ago
    They get to launch* their own stuff for only the rocket cost, that part is fine. I mean if they have Boeing, NASA, etc. as paying customers at a standard $X they can't just go "Well Google you're launching a competitor to us so we're gonna charge you 20 * $X instead to prevent you from launching".
shaklee3 8y ago
And Samsung can stop selling apple screens. But they don't, because they realize they need the revenue for things later on.

And they can deny service to anyone.

by dd36 8y ago

And they can deny service to anyone.

I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel, I'm guessing they'd be hit with anti-trust laws pretty quickly.

MertsA 8y ago
Yeah but with the volume we're talking about here, SpaceX is definitely going to be extremely constrained by launch capacity. I doubt they'd be hit with any antitrust lawsuit over not cancelling their own launches in order to take orders from their competitors. In any case, there's no chance that all of those companies are going to be able to launch their constellations in anywhere close to their targeted timeframes. There's just not enough launch capacity in the world to handle that in such a short amount of time.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  My impression of the Starlink project is that it's at least in part a backup project for unused launch capacity. That is, if they happen to not find paying customers for all their reusable launch fleet, this is a way for it to not stand around idle. Under this theory, paying customers will always get precedent over throwing up another 44 satellites.
phkahler 8y ago
>> I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel The government grants monopolies (patent) on very important things (drugs and treatments for all sorts of things) and then lets companies charge different rates to different customers - even higher prices to the uninsured. It seems unlikely they'd make SpaceX launch for a competitor at anywhere near their own cost. But then politics....
- penagwin 8y ago
  They get to launch* their own stuff for only the rocket cost, that part is fine. I mean if they have Boeing, NASA, etc. as paying customers at a standard $X they can't just go "Well Google you're launching a competitor to us so we're gonna charge you 20 * $X instead to prevent you from launching".

shaklee3 8y ago

And Samsung can stop selling apple screens. But they don't, because they realize they need the revenue for things later on.