This is the part of Starlink that gets very little fanfare but is one of the more impressive parts of the system. Early skeptics pointed out that not only had

This is the part of Starlink that gets very little fanfare but is one of the more impressive parts of the system. Early skeptics pointed out that not only had no satellite company ever launched anywhere close to that many satellites, but that ground stations tended to be extremely expensive to maintain (tens of millions of dollars per year per station) and were few in number, but Starlink was proposing to build thousands of them. A lot of the old guard thought that if the satellite launch costs didn't kill them the ground station maintenance would. But Starlink proved that it was mostly an "old space" problem and there was no fundamental reason the ground stations had to be so outrageously expensive.