• zhunk@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    There isn’t a direct competitor to Starlink. OneWeb is the next biggest LEO constellation, but it doesn’t cater directly to individual users like Starlink. It’s also 18% owned by the UK government, so that might have made it a no-go.

    Amazon’s Kuiper constellation should be a Starlink competitor, but they haven’t even launched their demo sats yet. Others, like Iridium and Globalstar, are too slow.

    Starlink will be incredibly difficult to replicate, which is why really only Amazon and the Chinese government are trying (what an insane sentence). SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets are the cheapest commercially and Starlink gets internal pricing. Even if someone else had identical sats, they couldn’t get that launch discount.