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I don't think this was an unexpected result of the situation with Russia, there wasn't really any other options, but interesting to see SpaceX launching a direc

I don't think this was an unexpected result of the situation with Russia, there wasn't really any other options, but interesting to see SpaceX launching a direct competitor to Starlink. I suppose they always made it clear that they were not going to let their investment in Starlink stop them launching competitors constellations. I am still somewhat surprised by the UK governments investment in OneWeb, I hope the strategy pays off and it becomes an important national infrastructure project. My thoughts where that it may be about providing a future proof network for the remote areas of the UK but we aren't exactly a big country so I'm not convinced that's the case. The rubbish that was written about it being a route to our own GPS system after Brexit forced us to leave the Galileo program was clearly all fluff to make it sound more impressive and tie it to a post Brexit strategy in some way.

eganist 5y ago
> interesting to see SpaceX launching a direct competitor to Starlink. Interesting, but entirely expected. They'd be investigated in a heartbeat if they didn't.
- NotEvil 5y ago
  I don't think so. That's not anti-competive. Its like intel refusing to make amd chips on intel fabs. Perfectly logical
  - bpye 5y ago
    I think that only works when there is other capacity available. If Intel was suddenly the only fab available to western companies but they refused to fab AMD chips I suspect that would result in intervention.
    - j_walter 5y ago
      Not so sure. AMD is always free to build a fab to make their own chips. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to serve a direct competitor...or offer the service at a huge expense that would make it unreasonable for the competitor.
      - simonh 5y ago
        There is extensive legal precedent, and numerous outright laws in many jurisdictions restraining anticompetitive practices such as this.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        'AMD is always free to build a fab to make their own chips.' By that logic there us no limits on a monopoly abusing its power, after all you are always free to create your own water supply company, electric distribution company, etc.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    I get what you're saying, but SpaceX is a bit more public/private than Intel, and likely the government would be upset and better fund competitors if SpaceX was monopolizing launch capabilities. Their strategy (at least for now, as I would understand it) is to be neutral for launching cargo/services/etc. - likely OneWeb is paying more to deploy than SpaceX pays itself internally for Starlink deployments as well.
    - Teever 5y ago
      You're saying that SpaceX, a privately owned company that has some contracts with different parts of the US gov't would find themselves in trouble with the government if they refused to launch satellites from a foreign owned company? And you're saying that the government would go out of their way to fund alternatives to SpaceX because of this? That seems a bit implausible.
      - eganist 5y ago
        "foreign-owned" in this case is still the UK i.e the closest ally we have today. So I don't think you'll see the same sort of American protectionism you might see with e.g a Chinese competitor. Therefore... yeah, nothing's stopping the DoJ (guessing the FTC would make the referral?) from pushing an antitrust matter. But I certainly can't say for sure; I'm not a lawyer.
        Teever 5y ago
        Where's the law that says that an American business must sell their product or service to a foreign company?
        eganist 5y ago
        > Where's the law that says that an American business must sell their product or service to a foreign company? As I understand it, it's covered by the various antitrust laws in the United States. And it's not so much a "foreign company" thing so much as it's an unfair advantage for any one company thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law Again, not a lawyer. But my lay reading would say that it would feel comparable to the action the feds took against Microsoft for trying to stifle Netscape. But I'm sure there are far better analogues.
  - cromka 5y ago
    Is SpaceX a subsidiary of Starlink? Cause if not then it's not that logical to me...
    - detaro 5y ago
      Starlink is not a separate company, it's a product of SpaceX.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Intel doesn’t sell fab services, so it’s not an issue. However if you offer and advertise a service at a listed price (as SpaceX does), you can’t always refuse to provide that service to specific potential clients just because it serves your commercial interests. It very much depends on the specifics of the service and market competitive situation.
    - bcrl 5y ago
      This is factually incorrect. Intel has in the past and is currently trying to sell and expand their foundry services. They just happen to have done a horrible job of it so far and have repeatedly lost foundry customers (like Achronix) as a result.
- manholio 5y ago
  SpaceX is an american company that is subject to the Sherman act, which deals with domestic and interstate commerce. OneWeb is an international competitor based in UK that has no standing to make a complaint under the Sherman act. No similar antitrust provision or treaty exists in international commerce; charges against a monopoly must be brought within a certain national jurisdiction, SpaceX does not have partners or subsidiaries that offer launch services outside the US.
  - simonh 5y ago
    I’m sure Oneweb will have a US subsidiary and offer service to US customers through it. They manufacture their satellites in the US. There’s no way they wouldn’t have standing.
    - manholio 5y ago
      But that subsidiary would need to build and operate a satellite constellation, not simply distribute internet services or act as a purchasing agent of a foreign competitor.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  US DoD and NASA now have effectively SPOF reliance on SpaceX...they aren't going to be "investigated" for anything
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    I don't see why the government contracts would act as a shield for SpaceX. It's not like being forced to carry a competitor is going to make them unable to carry the government's rockets.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Stone Brewing does distribution for a lot of smaller local breweries I'd like to think that cutthroat competition is not the only way of doing business
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    In the beer space, Sam Adams used both their massive purchasing power and stockpile to provide hops to small brewers during a shortage.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      Funny, I think I recall someone at Stone citing that story, specifically as a model for their own corporate behavior, when I was on a tour of one of their breweries.
paxys 5y ago
AWS hosts a huge amount of direct Amazon competitors. Explicitly banning certain competitors in an unrelated business would be pretty damaging to the credibility of a platform.
- duxup 5y ago
  Yeah someone else is going to take that money. Another competitor taking it would potentially be more damaging.
  - fffernan 5y ago
    not to mention you can use that as a way to spy and choke your competition out when they rely on you
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Avoids accusations of anti-trust.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  Basically this, for SpaceX it is all win, they get to say "see? We are agnostic and will launch competitors." And at the same time the profit they make from launching OneWeb satellites can be invested in growing their own business. I tried to explain this sort of thing to Intel once about opening up their fabs (before Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO). Selling access to your infrastructure for profit lets you invest in better infrastructure without using profits from the things you sell using that infrastructure internally.
  - heavenlyblue 5y ago
    Yeah especially if you know that the competitor’s product is inherently worse than yours (OneWeb vs Starlink).
- mmaunder 5y ago
  Good analogy. As long as oneweb can differentiate they’ll be fine. And as long as Starlink has vertically integrated launch, they’ll always have price as a differentiator. I would say that aws is a rich substrate upon which many businesses can be built - many of which Amazon simply arent interested in getting into. Space ISP is one business and the price/bandwidth ratio is one of the few differentiators and that alone may decide the winner. So oneweb better get creative about what they’re layering on top of their pipes.
walrus01 5y ago
> interesting to see SpaceX launching a direct competitor to Starlink It isn't, exactly, a oneweb terminal is MUCH too big and expensive for an ordinary residential consumer or small business. It's two active tracking parabolic antennas with their own RF chains in radomes, takes up about a 2.5 meter long x 1 meter wide space on a roof or similar. More than 1.5 years ago oneweb pivoted to a plan to sell high capacity uplink services for regional ISPs and telecoms on a business to business basis only. The oneweb terminal is still much larger and more costly than the recently announced starlink premium. oneweb in its current plan to sell services to ISPs currently dependent on geostationary is more like a cheaper/slightly smaller o3b terminal.
- Stevvo 5y ago
  I had been talking with AST Group about getting OneWeb set up on my boat and the size of the terminals was a blocking issue; only place I could put them would be shading solar panels much of the day.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    Unless you have a gargantuan yacht the monthly recurring cost is going to be prohibitive anyways, I'd be shocked if it's less than $1200/mo to start.
    - Stevvo 5y ago
      Right, but that is cost I could potentially swallow; worth it work from paradise anchorages with little other connectivity. You don't pay rent at anchor. What I will probably end up doing this summer is a stern-to mooring to some trees with a Starlink terminal sitting on the beach with an Ethernet cable running out to the boat.
      - FDSGSG 5y ago
        > stern-to mooring to some trees with a Starlink terminal sitting on the beach with an Ethernet cable running out to the boat. How come? What's the problem with having the Starlink terminal on the boat?
tobylane 5y ago
Perhaps the government are using it as a cheaper way to provide super fast internet (flexibly defined) to the last 1% or so who can’t be affordably reached by standard exchange - green cabinet - premises measures.
lobocinza 5y ago
It's a positive outcome for SpaceX/Starlink. The former will increase revenue while the latter will have a cost advantage regarding their main competitor. There's no need for then to draw bad publicity.
InTheArena 5y ago
I thin Ukraine is proving to national governments exactly how important LEO constellations are. I was pretty critical of the decision of the UK gov't to bail out OneWeb, I think we may look back and say that it was a dramatically fore-sighted decision by the government. The UK still has a insane amount of geographical dispersion, even in their post-empire state. Having the ability to ensure that no one can turn off the lights on their communications is important.
GuB-42 5y ago
For me, I consider the main reason for Starlink to exist is to make use of SpaceX launch capacity. SpaceX focus on assembly line production techniques and reusable rockets to bring down costs per launch only make sense if you have a lot of stuff to launch. With Starlink, they create their own demand. SpaceX is probably very happy to have a "competitor" paying for launches. By itself, I have some doubts about the profitability of Starlink anyways.
- __d 5y ago
  This 100%. SpaceX is really the only provider who can credibly pick up the former Soyuz business in the next few years. And they need _a lot_ more business. Especially once Starship's capacity becomes available. Right now, there's just not enough up-mass or down-mass demand.
- mlindner 5y ago
  They're at 250,000 customers now, so that's a run rate of $300M a year from Starlink. I fail to see how their cost of operations is above that if they were to stop launching additional satellites which means they have per-unit profitability pretty good already.
thereddaikon 5y ago
It was definitely a problem in the past, hence why they originally went with the Russians. But since then OneWeb has been bought by the British government so while its a similar tech I don't think they are strictly competitors anymore.
ufmace 5y ago
I think it makes perfectly good sense for SpaceX. They've always made it clear that their real business goal was colonization of Mars based on optimizing the cost of transport to space via reusability and design for manufacturability. Everything else they've done is basically just a way to monetize their current space travel capabilities in service of funding the design and construction of what they really want to do. Making Starlink as profitable as possible was never a goal, just a way to make some more money off of their incredibly low launch costs and probably also develop technology for communicating between ground and spacecraft. So why not launch a competitor too? It's just more launches and more funding for them.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I have a nice dream that Elon will build rocket and space enterprises, get them profitable, only to break them up and go public to allow them to be independent corporations and allowing real competition to begin (plus remove all his other business interests from each companies mission) He could still rake in cash from their owned shares it would just be them creating a real public space sector for the good of humanity. This will never happen ofc, but I can dream.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    That sounds like it might be even more profitable, but he already has more money than he knows what to do with. Besides, that seems less fun than being absolute dictator of mars.
    - mlindner 5y ago
      He has a lot of wealth, but he doesn't really have that much "money". He can't re-invest in SpaceX by selling SpaceX and then buying SpaceX again... He could diversify away from SpaceX and Tesla, but he doesn't seem very interested in that.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    You can't rake in cash from owned shares if they don't pay dividends and I don't think he has much interest in selling his shares. He's previously said repeatedly that SpaceX won't go public until there are regular flights to Mars, which will likely be after his death.

eganist 5y ago

> interesting to see SpaceX launching a direct competitor to Starlink. Interesting, but entirely expected. They'd be investigated in a heartbeat if they didn't.

NotEvil 5y ago
I don't think so. That's not anti-competive. Its like intel refusing to make amd chips on intel fabs. Perfectly logical
- bpye 5y ago
  I think that only works when there is other capacity available. If Intel was suddenly the only fab available to western companies but they refused to fab AMD chips I suspect that would result in intervention.
  - j_walter 5y ago
    Not so sure. AMD is always free to build a fab to make their own chips. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to serve a direct competitor...or offer the service at a huge expense that would make it unreasonable for the competitor.
    - simonh 5y ago
      There is extensive legal precedent, and numerous outright laws in many jurisdictions restraining anticompetitive practices such as this.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      'AMD is always free to build a fab to make their own chips.' By that logic there us no limits on a monopoly abusing its power, after all you are always free to create your own water supply company, electric distribution company, etc.
- ericmay 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, but SpaceX is a bit more public/private than Intel, and likely the government would be upset and better fund competitors if SpaceX was monopolizing launch capabilities. Their strategy (at least for now, as I would understand it) is to be neutral for launching cargo/services/etc. - likely OneWeb is paying more to deploy than SpaceX pays itself internally for Starlink deployments as well.
  - Teever 5y ago
    You're saying that SpaceX, a privately owned company that has some contracts with different parts of the US gov't would find themselves in trouble with the government if they refused to launch satellites from a foreign owned company? And you're saying that the government would go out of their way to fund alternatives to SpaceX because of this? That seems a bit implausible.
    - eganist 5y ago
      "foreign-owned" in this case is still the UK i.e the closest ally we have today. So I don't think you'll see the same sort of American protectionism you might see with e.g a Chinese competitor. Therefore... yeah, nothing's stopping the DoJ (guessing the FTC would make the referral?) from pushing an antitrust matter. But I certainly can't say for sure; I'm not a lawyer.
      - Teever 5y ago
        Where's the law that says that an American business must sell their product or service to a foreign company?
        eganist 5y ago
        > Where's the law that says that an American business must sell their product or service to a foreign company? As I understand it, it's covered by the various antitrust laws in the United States. And it's not so much a "foreign company" thing so much as it's an unfair advantage for any one company thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law Again, not a lawyer. But my lay reading would say that it would feel comparable to the action the feds took against Microsoft for trying to stifle Netscape. But I'm sure there are far better analogues.
- cromka 5y ago
  Is SpaceX a subsidiary of Starlink? Cause if not then it's not that logical to me...
  - detaro 5y ago
    Starlink is not a separate company, it's a product of SpaceX.
- simonh 5y ago
  Intel doesn’t sell fab services, so it’s not an issue. However if you offer and advertise a service at a listed price (as SpaceX does), you can’t always refuse to provide that service to specific potential clients just because it serves your commercial interests. It very much depends on the specifics of the service and market competitive situation.
  - bcrl 5y ago
    This is factually incorrect. Intel has in the past and is currently trying to sell and expand their foundry services. They just happen to have done a horrible job of it so far and have repeatedly lost foundry customers (like Achronix) as a result.
manholio 5y ago
SpaceX is an american company that is subject to the Sherman act, which deals with domestic and interstate commerce. OneWeb is an international competitor based in UK that has no standing to make a complaint under the Sherman act. No similar antitrust provision or treaty exists in international commerce; charges against a monopoly must be brought within a certain national jurisdiction, SpaceX does not have partners or subsidiaries that offer launch services outside the US.
- simonh 5y ago
  I’m sure Oneweb will have a US subsidiary and offer service to US customers through it. They manufacture their satellites in the US. There’s no way they wouldn’t have standing.
  - manholio 5y ago
    But that subsidiary would need to build and operate a satellite constellation, not simply distribute internet services or act as a purchasing agent of a foreign competitor.
newaccount2021 5y ago
US DoD and NASA now have effectively SPOF reliance on SpaceX...they aren't going to be "investigated" for anything
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- HWR_14 5y ago
  I don't see why the government contracts would act as a shield for SpaceX. It's not like being forced to carry a competitor is going to make them unable to carry the government's rockets.
tomc1985 5y ago
Stone Brewing does distribution for a lot of smaller local breweries I'd like to think that cutthroat competition is not the only way of doing business
- HWR_14 5y ago
  In the beer space, Sam Adams used both their massive purchasing power and stockpile to provide hops to small brewers during a shortage.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Funny, I think I recall someone at Stone citing that story, specifically as a model for their own corporate behavior, when I was on a tour of one of their breweries.

paxys 5y ago

AWS hosts a huge amount of direct Amazon competitors. Explicitly banning certain competitors in an unrelated business would be pretty damaging to the credibility of a platform.

duxup 5y ago
Yeah someone else is going to take that money. Another competitor taking it would potentially be more damaging.
- fffernan 5y ago
  not to mention you can use that as a way to spy and choke your competition out when they rely on you
jonny_eh 5y ago
Avoids accusations of anti-trust.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Basically this, for SpaceX it is all win, they get to say "see? We are agnostic and will launch competitors." And at the same time the profit they make from launching OneWeb satellites can be invested in growing their own business. I tried to explain this sort of thing to Intel once about opening up their fabs (before Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO). Selling access to your infrastructure for profit lets you invest in better infrastructure without using profits from the things you sell using that infrastructure internally.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  Yeah especially if you know that the competitor’s product is inherently worse than yours (OneWeb vs Starlink).
mmaunder 5y ago
Good analogy. As long as oneweb can differentiate they’ll be fine. And as long as Starlink has vertically integrated launch, they’ll always have price as a differentiator. I would say that aws is a rich substrate upon which many businesses can be built - many of which Amazon simply arent interested in getting into. Space ISP is one business and the price/bandwidth ratio is one of the few differentiators and that alone may decide the winner. So oneweb better get creative about what they’re layering on top of their pipes.

walrus01 5y ago

> interesting to see SpaceX launching a direct competitor to Starlink It isn't, exactly, a oneweb terminal is MUCH too big and expensive for an ordinary residential consumer or small business. It's two active tracking parabolic antennas with their own RF chains in radomes, takes up about a 2.5 meter long x 1 meter wide space on a roof or similar. More than 1.5 years ago oneweb pivoted to a plan to sell high capacity uplink services for regional ISPs and telecoms on a business to business basis only. The oneweb terminal is still much larger and more costly than the recently announced starlink premium. oneweb in its current plan to sell services to ISPs currently dependent on geostationary is more like a cheaper/slightly smaller o3b terminal.

Stevvo 5y ago
I had been talking with AST Group about getting OneWeb set up on my boat and the size of the terminals was a blocking issue; only place I could put them would be shading solar panels much of the day.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Unless you have a gargantuan yacht the monthly recurring cost is going to be prohibitive anyways, I'd be shocked if it's less than $1200/mo to start.
  - Stevvo 5y ago
    Right, but that is cost I could potentially swallow; worth it work from paradise anchorages with little other connectivity. You don't pay rent at anchor. What I will probably end up doing this summer is a stern-to mooring to some trees with a Starlink terminal sitting on the beach with an Ethernet cable running out to the boat.
    - FDSGSG 5y ago
      > stern-to mooring to some trees with a Starlink terminal sitting on the beach with an Ethernet cable running out to the boat. How come? What's the problem with having the Starlink terminal on the boat?

tobylane 5y ago

Perhaps the government are using it as a cheaper way to provide super fast internet (flexibly defined) to the last 1% or so who can’t be affordably reached by standard exchange - green cabinet - premises measures.

lobocinza 5y ago

It's a positive outcome for SpaceX/Starlink. The former will increase revenue while the latter will have a cost advantage regarding their main competitor. There's no need for then to draw bad publicity.

InTheArena 5y ago

I thin Ukraine is proving to national governments exactly how important LEO constellations are. I was pretty critical of the decision of the UK gov't to bail out OneWeb, I think we may look back and say that it was a dramatically fore-sighted decision by the government. The UK still has a insane amount of geographical dispersion, even in their post-empire state. Having the ability to ensure that no one can turn off the lights on their communications is important.

GuB-42 5y ago

For me, I consider the main reason for Starlink to exist is to make use of SpaceX launch capacity. SpaceX focus on assembly line production techniques and reusable rockets to bring down costs per launch only make sense if you have a lot of stuff to launch. With Starlink, they create their own demand. SpaceX is probably very happy to have a "competitor" paying for launches. By itself, I have some doubts about the profitability of Starlink anyways.

__d 5y ago
This 100%. SpaceX is really the only provider who can credibly pick up the former Soyuz business in the next few years. And they need _a lot_ more business. Especially once Starship's capacity becomes available. Right now, there's just not enough up-mass or down-mass demand.
mlindner 5y ago
They're at 250,000 customers now, so that's a run rate of $300M a year from Starlink. I fail to see how their cost of operations is above that if they were to stop launching additional satellites which means they have per-unit profitability pretty good already.

thereddaikon 5y ago

It was definitely a problem in the past, hence why they originally went with the Russians. But since then OneWeb has been bought by the British government so while its a similar tech I don't think they are strictly competitors anymore.

ufmace 5y ago

I think it makes perfectly good sense for SpaceX. They've always made it clear that their real business goal was colonization of Mars based on optimizing the cost of transport to space via reusability and design for manufacturability. Everything else they've done is basically just a way to monetize their current space travel capabilities in service of funding the design and construction of what they really want to do. Making Starlink as profitable as possible was never a goal, just a way to make some more money off of their incredibly low launch costs and probably also develop technology for communicating between ground and spacecraft. So why not launch a competitor too? It's just more launches and more funding for them.

edgyquant 5y ago
I have a nice dream that Elon will build rocket and space enterprises, get them profitable, only to break them up and go public to allow them to be independent corporations and allowing real competition to begin (plus remove all his other business interests from each companies mission) He could still rake in cash from their owned shares it would just be them creating a real public space sector for the good of humanity. This will never happen ofc, but I can dream.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  That sounds like it might be even more profitable, but he already has more money than he knows what to do with. Besides, that seems less fun than being absolute dictator of mars.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    He has a lot of wealth, but he doesn't really have that much "money". He can't re-invest in SpaceX by selling SpaceX and then buying SpaceX again... He could diversify away from SpaceX and Tesla, but he doesn't seem very interested in that.
- mlindner 5y ago
  You can't rake in cash from owned shares if they don't pay dividends and I don't think he has much interest in selling his shares. He's previously said repeatedly that SpaceX won't go public until there are regular flights to Mars, which will likely be after his death.