6 ms·

The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LE

by kolinko 7mo ago

The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's. (And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are. The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.

db48x 7mo ago
SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.
- bryanlarsen 7mo ago
  Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
  - zitterbewegung 7mo ago
    To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-internet-spacex-amazon.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
    - fragmede 7mo ago
      What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
      - zitterbewegung 7mo ago
        If you are good at making businesses then why not make more?
  - db48x 7mo ago
    I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?
thisislife2 7mo ago
Can you explain what makes Falcon9 / Starship special (or needed) to launch these satellites? China, India, EU, Japan etc. all have the capability to launch satellites. So why is a Falcon9 / Starship a particular requirement?
- samrus 7mo ago
  Has to be the cost. A reusable launch vehicle is such a ridiculously better value proposition that it creates a discrete evolution. Some things just arent feasible to do without them
- tartuffe78 7mo ago
  Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.
  - palmotea 7mo ago
    > Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities. But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?
    - iSnow 7mo ago
      >But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? No. The German army wants a constellation of initially 40, and later just over 100 satellites. They do not want or need to replicate the massive Starlink numbers.
      - kolinko 7mo ago
        The numbers just don't add up there. With just 40-100 satellites they need to be GEO, and this means crappy transfers, big lags (200-300 absolute minimum, more 500ms), and most importantly - big, power hungry antennas. It's a PR project to calm people down, not a real solution.
assaddayinh 7mo ago
[dead]
jmyeet 7mo ago
The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea. Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953. China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries. The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips. The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates. More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1]. China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off. And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too. I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen". [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidia-chips https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi... [2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-zhuque-3-test-previews-the-global-race-for-reusable-rockets/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...
- ciupicri 7mo ago
  > many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
bryanlarsen 7mo ago
Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go". suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success. So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though. And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.
- pie_flavor 7mo ago
  The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
  - IshKebab 7mo ago
    Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.
  - jopsen 7mo ago
    > but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem. How many starlink clones are there really customers for? Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet. Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do. Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.
icegreentea2 7mo ago
I'd broadly agree that EU is pretty behind the curve. But I think China is probably only ~5 years max behind the curve in terms of Starlink. But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-contract-bigger-than-70-million/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX. I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).
- bryanlarsen 7mo ago
  China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.
  - polalavik 7mo ago
    i don't get why more folks aren't just going for the much cheaper option like this https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/ https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/
    - jacobgkau 7mo ago
      There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.
    - adolph 7mo ago
      That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight. There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer space. This debate is unsettled. [0] There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider. 0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1204 https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
tristor 7mo ago
All of that, and the funny thing is /that is the easy part/. Moving payloads to space is just incredibly expensive, but not fundamentally hard in the same way that post-launch coordination of satellite constellations and RF tuning to support things like mobile connectivity are (I can connect to Starlink satellites from my iPhone through T-Mobile).
- bryanlarsen 7mo ago
  Connecting to a cell phone and/or selling a phased array antenna that can track an object travelling 17,000 mph for $300 is crazy hard. But a military is going to be fine with an antenna that costs $3000.
RobotToaster 7mo ago
I'm wondering if we will see a resurgence in direct to geostationary, It seems like it should be a lot easier to cover the planet when you only need a few satellites.
- kolinko 7mo ago
  Bandwidth, input latency (250ms absolute minimum), energy use and antenna size (mattering for mobility and military). I don't think there is a way for geo to compete.
thisislife2 7mo ago
India's ISRO already competes with SpaceX for these launches ( ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-launches-heaviest-payload-rocket-mission-lvm3-m3-oneweb-india-2-carrying-satellites/article66663592.ece https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... ), despite not having any reusable launch vehicles (reason - it's in the top 5 in space technology and just cheaper - Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo ). Once it masters reusable launch vehicle technologies, it'll be hard to compete with ISRO on commercial launches.
- kolinko 7mo ago
  36 compared to 10000. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude. It's like a corner store trying to compete with Walmart.
  - ripe 7mo ago
    They have a list of 434 foreign satellites launched so far as of January 2026 on their website: https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html
  - thisislife2 7mo ago
    The point was that you don't need a reusable launch vehicle if a single use launcher is just as cheap.
ergocoder 7mo ago
How did Starlink get so far ahead of everyone that everyone else is 20 years behind? We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive. Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.

by kolinko 7mo ago

db48x 7mo ago

SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.

bryanlarsen 7mo ago
Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
- zitterbewegung 7mo ago
  To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-internet-spacex-amazon.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
    - zitterbewegung 7mo ago
      If you are good at making businesses then why not make more?
- db48x 7mo ago
  I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?

thisislife2 7mo ago

Can you explain what makes Falcon9 / Starship special (or needed) to launch these satellites? China, India, EU, Japan etc. all have the capability to launch satellites. So why is a Falcon9 / Starship a particular requirement?

samrus 7mo ago
Has to be the cost. A reusable launch vehicle is such a ridiculously better value proposition that it creates a discrete evolution. Some things just arent feasible to do without them
tartuffe78 7mo ago
Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.
- palmotea 7mo ago
  > Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities. But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?
  - iSnow 7mo ago
    >But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? No. The German army wants a constellation of initially 40, and later just over 100 satellites. They do not want or need to replicate the massive Starlink numbers.
    - kolinko 7mo ago
      The numbers just don't add up there. With just 40-100 satellites they need to be GEO, and this means crappy transfers, big lags (200-300 absolute minimum, more 500ms), and most importantly - big, power hungry antennas. It's a PR project to calm people down, not a real solution.

assaddayinh 7mo ago

[dead]

jmyeet 7mo ago

The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea. Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953. China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries. The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips. The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates. More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1]. China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off. And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too. I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen". [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidia-chips https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi... [2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-zhuque-3-test-previews-the-global-race-for-reusable-rockets/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...

ciupicri 7mo ago
> many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.

bryanlarsen 7mo ago

Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go". suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success. So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though. And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.

pie_flavor 7mo ago
The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
- IshKebab 7mo ago
  Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.
- jopsen 7mo ago
  > but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem. How many starlink clones are there really customers for? Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet. Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do. Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.

icegreentea2 7mo ago

I'd broadly agree that EU is pretty behind the curve. But I think China is probably only ~5 years max behind the curve in terms of Starlink. But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-contract-bigger-than-70-million/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX. I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).

bryanlarsen 7mo ago
China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.
- polalavik 7mo ago
  i don't get why more folks aren't just going for the much cheaper option like this https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/ https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/
  - jacobgkau 7mo ago
    There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.
  - adolph 7mo ago
    That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight. There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer space. This debate is unsettled. [0] There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider. 0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1204 https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...

tristor 7mo ago

All of that, and the funny thing is /that is the easy part/. Moving payloads to space is just incredibly expensive, but not fundamentally hard in the same way that post-launch coordination of satellite constellations and RF tuning to support things like mobile connectivity are (I can connect to Starlink satellites from my iPhone through T-Mobile).

bryanlarsen 7mo ago
Connecting to a cell phone and/or selling a phased array antenna that can track an object travelling 17,000 mph for $300 is crazy hard. But a military is going to be fine with an antenna that costs $3000.

RobotToaster 7mo ago

I'm wondering if we will see a resurgence in direct to geostationary, It seems like it should be a lot easier to cover the planet when you only need a few satellites.

kolinko 7mo ago
Bandwidth, input latency (250ms absolute minimum), energy use and antenna size (mattering for mobility and military). I don't think there is a way for geo to compete.

thisislife2 7mo ago

India's ISRO already competes with SpaceX for these launches ( ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-launches-heaviest-payload-rocket-mission-lvm3-m3-oneweb-india-2-carrying-satellites/article66663592.ece https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... ), despite not having any reusable launch vehicles (reason - it's in the top 5 in space technology and just cheaper - Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo ). Once it masters reusable launch vehicle technologies, it'll be hard to compete with ISRO on commercial launches.

kolinko 7mo ago
36 compared to 10000. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude. It's like a corner store trying to compete with Walmart.
- ripe 7mo ago
  They have a list of 434 foreign satellites launched so far as of January 2026 on their website: https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html https://www.isro.gov.in/ForeignSatellites.html
- thisislife2 7mo ago
  The point was that you don't need a reusable launch vehicle if a single use launcher is just as cheap.

ergocoder 7mo ago

How did Starlink get so far ahead of everyone that everyone else is 20 years behind? We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive. Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.