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I'm hopeful that people under repressive governments and censorship will be able to leverage satellite services for uncensored access. With SpaceX's scale and

I'm hopeful that people under repressive governments and censorship will be able to leverage satellite services for uncensored access. With SpaceX's scale and low cost, I suppose it's even possible they could adopt a model where China tries to shoot down their satellites when they are over China and when they're successful SpaceX just replaces them with spares. It's possible that launching satellite-killer missiles will cost China significantly more than replacing satellites will cost SpaceX which might make it a non-viable approach for the Chinese. (Note: I don't know anything about anti-satellite missiles, so just idly speculating).

gpm 7y ago
SpaceX really doesn't want to let too many of their satellites get shot "down". Shooting a satellite doesn't really make it go "down" immediately, instead it turns it into a debris field. At most of the altitudes SpaceX is planning on putting these satellites that debris would fall back to earth "quickly", but "quickly" is probably measured in months not hours. In the mean time that debris can crash into other sattelites. Shoot down enough satellites and you're going to get a chain reaction where the debris ends up taking out more satellites, generating more debris, and so on until the entire orbit is basically empty of functional satellites.