Taking what Iridium did and scaling it up 500x does not make it novel. Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, inste

Taking what Iridium did and scaling it up 500x does not make it novel. Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths. Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining. Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper. The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.