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I'm dubious that Starlink will really be all that great once it really scales up to tons of users. It's not surprising that it's great for a limited beta run.

I'm dubious that Starlink will really be all that great once it really scales up to tons of users. It's not surprising that it's great for a limited beta run. Driving on a highway is an amazing experience when it's mostly empty, and a nightmare in rush hour traffic. Has there been any good write up about how well Starlink (or any other satellite internet) could feasibly scale? Even if SpaceX can start dumping tons of satellites for dirt cheap with Starship's economy of scale, surely there's a limit where the risk of a Kessler syndrome event makes further expansion impractical.

krisroadruck 6y ago
Space is really big. As a simple thought experiment, let's say each satellite is the size of a car (they are actually smaller but let's pretend). There are currently about 1.5 billion cars on the planet. They are confined to land which only makes up 29% of the earths surface. If evenly distributed on that 29% (~57m sq miles) of earths surface (196m sq miles) there are about 25 cars per square mile. The orbital shell in which SpaceX is flying satellites starts 550 miles up. If you confine yourself to a 2D spherical plane, this shell already has 30% more surface area than the earth, and you can use all of it, not just the 29% that is over land. If we "packed" orbit at the same density as cars across that 2D spherical plane we could fit 6.3 Billion satellites with a separation of 1000 feet minimum between any two satellites. Of course we aren't limited to a 2D plane in space. You can fit millions of satellites in orbit with miles of separation between any 2 without issue. The bigger problem would be signal interference.