If you criticize Musk on X, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” will reduce distribution of your posts [1].
We don't want someone like that owning critical internet infrastructure.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
Given that, I'd argue that critical infrastructure like this is concerning in the hands of any individual entity.
It would be concerning even if exclusively controlled by Mr Rodgers[0]. There's an opportunity here to build a global coalition and mutual partnership like never before. All parties benefit by sharing. And all parties MUST settle for inferior infrastructure by not working together. There's no way around this... the laws of physics are just a constraint that can't be overcome...
My main comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615
I know who the CEO of the 100% owner of Starlink is, but not Starlink itself. Do they even have one?
IIRC most states when filing an LLC for private equity require a president but not a CEO.
Which is owned by SpaceX, but it appears to be a separate company.
The entity I found in an Oregon bid was registration #4503816 in Deleware.
“Starlink services” was probably legal prep in case they ever wanted to sell it off if it flopped.
The body of the evidence as far as I can tell suggests Starlink is a separate company even if employees that produce much of its products work for a different company.
[0] https://apiproxy.utc.wa.gov/cases/GetDocument?docID=10&year=...
Longer comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615If you divide up by altitude: it requires significant negotiation to place a vehicle (an arbitrary spacecraft or satellite) in any location.
If you partition by location (e.g. project current airspace upwards): your vehicles can't abide by these rules. They must orbit the planet. They will eventually go over most countries.
If you partition by orbit: you have to contend with precession. Craft drift[0,1]. This is because Earth is an oblate spheroid and not a sphere. It is also caused by angular momentum itself, so your orbit rotates. You will start in one and over time move into another. There's not much you can do about this and it is quite costly to maneuver (constant orbital maneuvering means an exponential increase in weight, complexity, and cost). Remember, the Earth does not rotate around in its axis in a fixed period of time, nor does it around the sun.
So really the laws of physics have you in a bind. Things are constantly moving and changing. So even the best laid plans will eventually lead to violation (and thus conflict) even through no ill-intent.
This is actually why a lot of (especially "hard") Sci-Fi has treated space travel as a global unification period. Because it becomes necessary in order to avoid conflict. This was a bigger discussion in the 60's and 70's when the initial space ventures were occurring and in the public eye, but has naturally drifted out of conversation as the underlying motivation similarly did. Though it stayed in conversation for domain experts who frequently content with this still.
tldr: No. Physics is a bitch
What we really need is the European Union to fund a global competitor.
Which brings everyone the same speeds instead of perpetuating a digital divide between cities and rural areas. Which may not be bad now but once we start moving to ten and hundred gigabit plans, solutions like Starlink are going to resemble dialup.
If an area could be wired with phones in the past, it can be wired for fiber now even cheaper and nearly all of rural areas were wired with electrical and phone lines before. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper lines, bucket trucks have never been more common, and there are very few existing utilities to contend with. This fiber is WAY cheaper than any satellite internet, works even when the weather is shitty, and doesn't require investments into proprietary gear.
The cool thing is that since they often own the power right of way, they can run fiber on it without any change.
The way coops work is that we're the owners, we vote for initiatives, etc. The local power company is now our region's #1 internet provider, hands down.
You need to vote and encourage others to make fast internet an election issue.
And even if every house has fiber, there are still many cases for mobile and robust Internet that can't be covered by cellular networks.
The reality is that Starlink needs a competitor. And besides, satellite Internet from LEO satellites is a viable competitive option to fiber, based on infrastructure costs alone. It's all nice to convince slow moving bureaucracies to lay out fiber, but nobody wants to wait the five to ten years for that to happen, when you can subscribe today and get it within a week.
It cost me $15,000 to establish my co-op membership 1,000 ft it went to the next guy. Our bylaws require all members to pay 100% of the full unsubsidized cost of extension up front.
This is fairly common. Not a lot of co-ops are built where prior entrants foot the full cost of new entrants.
The real cost of extending fiber can be $10+ a foot overhead or $30+ underground, which is a hard sell to prior entrants as a freebie to toss out.
This doesn't work once you get really remote, nor does fiber.
In any case none of them beat the experience of pulling an antenna out of a box and it pretty much just working.
I'd take fiber -> Taara -> Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency, and way lower total cost to deploy. Also scales massively better.
To what? Starlink is getting you to a major exchange in two direct shots. When I was testing it in North Dakota I was getting lower latency to Google and Cloudflare through Starlink than I was through local fiber providers (likely due to their long circuitous route to Minneapolis).
Same reason a lot of HFT uses microwave vs fiber paths - fiber paths are following the ROW, the microwave paths are the physically shorter paths.
LEO is a niche technology, but not and shouldn't be the default for tons of reasons.
b) In Australia they are trialing 100g over the existing fibre network.
c) Everyone was fine with dialup at one point as well.
You dont want to use us as an example of internet speeds or leading the world on anything in this space.
Our internet infrastructure/speed etc is considered sub optimal by many. It is (slowly) getting better - but it has been years of lost oppoutunity.
b) Our internet infrastructure was sub-optimal but is being upgraded to full fibre to the door across the country. 1g is available to consumers today, 10g to businesses, 100g in testing. And it’s future proof.
wonder if the EU will try to create their own constellation...
From the project web page
"Project Kuiper has secured 80 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance, and we have options for additional launches with Blue Origin, providing enough capacity to deploy the majority of our satellite constellation. The agreements comprise the largest commercial procurement of launch capacity in history, and support thousands of suppliers and highly skilled jobs across the U.S. and Europe."
Though using ULA is kinda a bridge to the looking deadline[0]. So if they can't get satellites up now they won't have this means for being their own customer in the future.
[0] https://news.satnews.com/2025/03/19/project-kuiper-facing-re...
They're even going to launch on Falcon 9 (albeit after a shareholder lawsuit..)
Bezos didn't want to launch with SpaceX because SpaceX is a Blue Origin competitor. Shareholders sued over this, saying that Amazon was putting Bezos' personal interests before Amazon's own.
New Glenn has a 100,000lb to LEO payload capacity which makes it absurdly oversized for this mission.
Atlas V has a 18,000 to 42,000lb to LEO payload capacity. The variable solid rocket booster configuration really gives this platform the most flexibility for customer needs.
Here's a possible (and apparently simulated) option: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/51480/is-new-shepa...
Now try Huygens.
It's a rather apropros name for a project which likewise plans to pollute Earth orbit with a bunch of space junk in order to compete with other junk providers. Hopefully their junk does not often touch.
In related news, I also learned recently that the Oort Cloud may not exist at all. I've often seen objects referred to as "originating in the Oort Cloud" but Oort himself had simply developed a hypothesis, and the "Cloud" has not progressed beyond "hypothesis" status since that time. It's amazing how imaginary structures enter our consciousness as if they are real, if enough scientists talk about it that way!
Wikipedia has long included IPA pronunciation info for pages about people and other things, which is hyperlinked to a handy guide. But I recently discovered something useful and not entirely obvious:
If you over your mouse over each letter in the IPA pronunciation, you'll get a tooltip describing the sound of that specific letter.
Interestingly, we had a strikingly similar event happen not too long ago: telecom.
When it was all wired, we had a choice: to allow wide competition and let the wires block out the skies[3], or share. The same problem happened again when it came to the airwaves. And again when it came to satellite communications. Here we are, at the natural continuation of this.
The physics of these things means that there are natural limitations that can't be avoided and can create advantages that can't be superseded, harming competition[4]. The physics means that there are better frequencies than others to use. The physics means that there are better orbits than others. Certainly first mover should be rewarded, but certainly the first mover cannot have undo power to squash any competition. That does not benefit anyone[5].
So now with a second player is this space[!0], we need to take the notion more seriously. Opinions of Musk aside[6], we're at a point where action need be taken. If the ball doesn't get rolling on this then everyone is worse off.[7]
I want to stress that this is a global issue. Even if the US solves the problem for US companies (in whatever manner that is), this doesn't change the fact that those laws of physics still apply and other countries exist. What about companies in China? India? Europe? Or other countries/regions? This was less of a problem for other communications but at this point the importance of a global solution becomes necessary. There is not enough space[0] for even a few countries to throw up their own mega constellations. They will start interfering with one another....
The truth of the matter is a coalition provides a better tool for everyone. But no coalition means the service is worse for every player. It is a literal Tragedy of the Commons[8] situation.
[0] pun unintended
[1] Mostly to Earth based astronomy. But there are other consequences and visible light isn't the only portion of the EM spectrum that is blocked. Plus... there's the physical layer!
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
[3] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/58872/did-they-r...
[4] If government has a role in the economy I think even those that are fairly libertarian agree that it should ensure competition is able to occur (even if that the means is through stepping back).
[5] Even in the long run it does not benefit the company in power. Only in the short term is there an advantage.
[6] Disclosure: I am very much not a fan. (Please don't get me started... I'd like to stay on this topic. At least for a bit. The other parts are also important but I'm hoping we can have a serious talk about this one thing. If nothing more than to solve a mutual problem)
[7] Even if you are a fan of Musk I think it is likely that we can agree that Musk's involvement in this decision making process should exclusively come from the perspective of SpaceX and not through his influence in the government. A functioning and competitive market needs a neutral third party decision maker, or at be a mediator. Even the perception of undo influence is detrimental to the process. It'll be difficult (potentially impossible) to decouple given current conditions.
The orbits Starlink sats are at won't cause Kessler syndrome. Even if the entire constellation exploded right this instant, all the debris would deorbit within about 5 years
A bound in time is different from not possible. Do not confuse the two.
There's also 2 critical points:
1) The lower the altitude, the easier it is to create. You need less debris to fill the orbit.
2) Even a 3 years "lockout" period would have significant consequences on our world due to our reliance on space.
Also, remember that when objects collide that this can send parts into higher orbits, which will take longer to deorbit. Even just through collisions, while the total energy of the system may be lower than the input this does not require each object to have the same or less energy prior to collision. Then we also have to consider that some craft have propellants. Considering that Starlink satellites have collision avoidance systems on them, it is quite safe to assume they have propellants. This similarly can result in more objects ending up in higher orbits.
Remember, just because it sounds right doesn't mean it is. There are non-negligible factors at play here and overly simplistic models will lead you to the wrong conclusion.
(Source: I have a degree in physics and formerly worked in the space industry. My job consisted of modeling a lot of things, including radiation transport, orbital dynamics, and acoustic engine stability. I'm not stating this to flex, I'm stating this to claim I'm not just some rando who read a few wiki pages)
I think there's worse effects though. Like the impact on astronomy.. SpaceX has done a few things to minimise the effect but there is still an effect.
The Kessler syndrome is a hypothetical phenomenon that could possibly occur under the wrong circumstances. But inference with astronomy is happening now.
This is why Starlink keeps launching new satellites on the regular. I believe theirs have a six years lifespan but don’t quote me on that.