3/13/2026 at 5:50:08 PM
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.
by kolinko
3/13/2026 at 7:15:36 PM
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-...) 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).
by icegreentea2
3/13/2026 at 8:33:52 PM
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.by bryanlarsen
3/13/2026 at 9:36:56 PM
i don't get why more folks aren't just going for the much cheaper option like this https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/by polalavik
3/13/2026 at 10:22:26 PM
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]
0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
by adolph
3/14/2026 at 6:26:14 AM
Found those balloons very strange, hope they were up to something niceby triage8004
3/15/2026 at 12:48:09 PM
Probably silently dispersing an exothermic surprise.by The_President
3/13/2026 at 9:45:44 PM
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.by jacobgkau
3/13/2026 at 10:32:05 PM
Because they will be destroyed immediatelyby ExpertAdvisor01
3/13/2026 at 11:03:58 PM
To shoot something down at 70,000 ft (21 km) all you need is a conventional military jet fighter, and a long-range rocket, or even a MiG-31 with a conventional cannon. At best you can make these birds cheaper than the rocket + flight time.Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, but you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
by nine_k
3/14/2026 at 12:10:24 AM
> you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.You can fire a THAAD at one Starlink satellite, but probably not at 8000 of them.
For comparison we’re currently producing THAAD interceptors at a rate of 96 a year (though Lockheed is aiming to increase it to 400).
by pacificmint
3/14/2026 at 1:32:35 AM
Exactly; it's a limited and very expensive capability. Nobody would want to spend it on a $100k stratospheric flying vehicle, if the latter existed. It does not exist though, if you do not count weather balloons.by nine_k
3/14/2026 at 10:40:55 AM
The f-22 balloon kill was at the same height as the altitude quoted on their website .Like you said either any fighter jet + missile or an high altitude jet + auto cannon will shoot it down reliably.
This is probably a good solution for redundancy if you already have air superiority.
by ExpertAdvisor01
3/15/2026 at 12:51:20 PM
They won’t be shot down over land without debris falling to the ground.by The_President
3/14/2026 at 2:49:06 AM
>put up those numbers within a few years,And potentially exceed Starlink cumulative payload a few years after that.
US via SpaceX generates most launches/payload due to reusability PRC built 2x more disposable launch vehicles. PRC figures out disposables and they can operate reusable fleet 2-3x the size of US and simply throw more payload per year and catchup/exceed cumulative SpaceX volume in a few years. A few years after, permanent kgs in space advantage due higher replacement as old hardware deorbits.
by maxglute
3/14/2026 at 12:18:21 AM
Spy satellites you can have way fewer, but for an internet connection you really need Starlink's scale. Otherwise you need full 360 deg view of a horizon (good luck with that on the battlefield), and a much higher power use.Having said that, I double checked the numbers - it would take ~60 launches at the minimum to replicate Starlink 1.0. This is how many launches China does per year right now. So it is doable indeed for them, just absurdly expensive - $10-$30B, but they can afford that.
EU on the other hand - no way. We're doing 5 launches a year with Arianne, due to incompetent management over the last decade. Unless China or US allow us to use their infrastructure, we have no way of doing all this.
by kolinko
3/14/2026 at 3:26:00 PM
Ya, I guess one other thing to China's advantage is that they don't need true global reach. They can prioritize coverage over their relevant latitudes (roughly the same as contiguous USA). From what I understand from Starlink distributions, roughly ~60% of the overall Starlink constellation is required for that latitude range.by icegreentea2
3/13/2026 at 6:13:58 PM
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.
by bryanlarsen
3/13/2026 at 7:04:11 PM
China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things. They are not even hiding it anymore. It's almost comical how much they copied SpaceX. And I'd be surprised if they hadn't supply-chained themselves into some level of access in all the big aerospace corpos by now. But Europe? Developing this kind of stuff from scratch in a few years without an unregulated messy startup ecosystem and no army of state sponsored hackers? No chance.by sigmoid10
3/14/2026 at 12:45:03 AM
whats the issue with that? US just cloned the Iranian drone.... all countries do thisby emkoemko
3/15/2026 at 1:18:32 PM
Anyone who has seen a picture of that drone could copy it. Heck, I bet DJI or similar could make a better version just by looking at it if they really wanted to. The drone markt is super saturated with cheap, practical components. But copying a self landing rocket is simply not possible without knowing a ton of internal details that you will never get from watching videos of it.by sigmoid10
3/16/2026 at 12:19:33 AM
"Anyone who has seen a picture of that drone could copy it." and yet they bragged about taking one and reverse engineering it to make a clone.... so your saying US of A couldn't copy it by picture alone? it took them this long to get a intact one to clone?by emkoemko
3/13/2026 at 7:53:37 PM
Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".
by Liftyee
3/13/2026 at 8:57:30 PM
Bloomberg's podcast "The Big Take" has been running an interesting series on Chinese industrial espionage called "The Sixth Bureau". Here's a link to the Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38L5UzLwt-s&list=PLe4PRejZgr...by mwambua
3/13/2026 at 8:06:41 PM
[flagged]by buckle8017
3/13/2026 at 8:10:07 PM
Sure, they're trying. But there's no evidence they've succeeded in stealing anything other than open source intelligence from SpaceX.There's a lot of open source intelligence about SpaceX rocket designs available.
by bryanlarsen
3/13/2026 at 8:43:45 PM
Be serious, do you think defense industry normally respects other nations' industrial secrets?by throw310822
3/13/2026 at 10:07:51 PM
> China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.They're even espionaging from themselves in the future!
Dude, have you ever _been_ in China? They don't need espionage, they're now way ahead of the world in technology, except in a few areas like biotech research and semiconductor manufacturing.
For the last decade, China has been having more engineers in _training_ than the total number of engineers in the US. Sure, the quality of Chinese universities is not that great, but the sheer number of them has its own power.
by cyberax
3/13/2026 at 10:12:51 PM
I strongly suggest to anyone who thinks this isn't true to go to Shenzhen and then SF.One feels like the future. The other feels like you will get shot.
by noosphr
3/13/2026 at 11:25:14 PM
Rockets are notoriously complicated, though. Only a few nations even managed to get to the orbit, and not for a lack of trying.SpaceX is a rare bird - a space startup that actually achieved not just spaceflight, but (so far only partial) reusability of launchers. Most space startups died long before that, including Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. Given that they are gone, we don't think of them often, but the total graveyard of defunct space startups is quite sizeable.
Russia seems to be slowly losing their space capabilities. The EU still does not have a human-rated launcher. These aren't small entities either.
Getting to space is a dangerous business with extremely thin security margins, where previous experience matters a lot.
I think China will eventually have reusable rockets, but it will take some time.
by inglor_cz
3/13/2026 at 11:56:42 PM
China has at least two startups that launched rockets into space. Zhuque-3 launch even almost landed a booster.It's the second-mover advantage. Once you know that something is possible, you can often avoid exploring all the dead ends.
by cyberax
3/13/2026 at 11:02:02 PM
Nonexistent relevance to rockets.by mikkupikku
3/13/2026 at 8:12:53 PM
>China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.
In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."
Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.
Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.
by joe_mamba
3/13/2026 at 9:19:56 PM
Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased. The fact they had to be stolen does not give them more weight. There is a lot of bias in US governmental opinion on french technology that such a small country cannot be so advanced without stealing; opinion which started with the french nuclear and space program. My opinion on those discourses about France, China or the USSR in the past are just mostly propaganda from the US MIC to ensure continued funding.by bdauvergne
3/13/2026 at 9:36:07 PM
>Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased.As opposed to...?
by joe_mamba
3/13/2026 at 7:00:49 PM
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.by pie_flavor
3/13/2026 at 8:55:40 PM
> 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.
by jopsen
3/14/2026 at 12:21:38 AM
All the airlines, all the trains, and other government-supported entities may have a strategic interest to use a local version of Starlink. But everyone else? I don't think anyone will buy a service that will be 10x more expensive, 10x slower and 10x more energy hungry than Starlink -- this first mover advantage may be hard to beat.by kolinko
3/13/2026 at 8:59:46 PM
Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
by db48x
3/13/2026 at 7:39:17 PM
Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.by IshKebab
3/13/2026 at 7:37:58 PM
China is a full blown superpower and it should surprise no one when they catch up to or surpass the West in technical feats.by standardUser
3/13/2026 at 5:58:31 PM
SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.by db48x
3/13/2026 at 6:06:22 PM
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.by bryanlarsen
3/13/2026 at 6:26:16 PM
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-...by zitterbewegung
3/13/2026 at 7:01:32 PM
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?by fragmede
3/13/2026 at 7:32:50 PM
If you are good at making businesses then why not make more?by zitterbewegung
3/13/2026 at 8:33:30 PM
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?by db48x
3/13/2026 at 10:13:30 PM
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-... ), 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 ). Once it masters reusable launch vehicle technologies, it'll be hard to compete with ISRO on commercial launches.by thisislife2
3/14/2026 at 12:22:59 AM
36 compared to 10000. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude. It's like a corner store trying to compete with Walmart.by kolinko
3/14/2026 at 2:05:32 AM
They have a list of 434 foreign satellites launched so far as of January 2026 on their website:by ripe
3/14/2026 at 5:30:36 AM
The point was that you don't need a reusable launch vehicle if a single use launcher is just as cheap.by thisislife2
3/13/2026 at 6:13:39 PM
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-nvidi...
[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...
by jmyeet
3/13/2026 at 6:43:14 PM
> 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.
by ciupicri
3/13/2026 at 7:12:50 PM
Yes, but how they got it is irrelevant. They got it, and that's what matters.China can (and does) do the same for current tech today, through whatever means.
(Also, GP's comment directly said what you said; not sure what your comment adds to the discussion.)
by kelnos
3/13/2026 at 7:08:45 PM
Some people will give it to china too. We have even caught a few (in other industries).by bluGill
3/13/2026 at 8:47:45 PM
Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.
Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.
In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.
The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.
In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.
by adrian_b
3/13/2026 at 10:35:14 PM
also, the knowledge about how a nuclear bomb works wasn't a secret. The way to produce one was the hard part to figure out. Without the espionage, a industrialised country like the USSR would have figured out how to produce an atomic bomb eventually.by kazen44
3/14/2026 at 5:02:53 AM
How Industrial Espionage Started America's Cotton Revolutionhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...
by fakedang
3/13/2026 at 7:17:53 PM
> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.
Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.
by palmotea
3/14/2026 at 7:51:31 AM
The Soviet Atomic Project was helped by starting early and capturing massive amounts of fissile material at the end of WWII.British scientists helped some.
But the spies at Los Alamos were giving updates on US progress, not delivering secret technology.
by pyuser583
3/13/2026 at 7:42:33 PM
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).by tristor
3/13/2026 at 7:48:07 PM
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.
by bryanlarsen
3/14/2026 at 10:26:24 AM
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 ergocoder
3/13/2026 at 10:10:35 PM
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.by RobotToaster
3/14/2026 at 12:25:26 AM
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.by kolinko
3/13/2026 at 6:09:52 PM
[dead]by assaddayinh
3/13/2026 at 6:01:10 PM
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?by thisislife2
3/13/2026 at 6:05:24 PM
Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive.0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
by mooreds
3/13/2026 at 6:48:02 PM
Another major detail is that SpaceX is simply burning enormous amounts of money on this.Starlink's revenue is comparable to the ESA's entire 5 billion euro budget, and it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service. (And kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits)
The chief problem "stopping" other countries from developing a starlink competitor is that starlink simply doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction. Fiber runs are expensive but not that expensive.
by SlinkyOnStairs
3/13/2026 at 6:59:32 PM
> it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a serviceStarlink was profitable in 2024 [1] and should be materially profitable once V3 goes up.
> kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits
This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue. Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence. And the propellant depots SpaceX is building for NASA tie in neatly if the chips stablise enough to permit longer-lasting birds.
> doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction
Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-much-does-starlink-make-this-...
by JumpCrisscross
3/13/2026 at 7:09:14 PM
> Starlink was profitable in 2024Those are revenue figures.
> This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue.
That it affects everyone just makes the problem worse. If China or the EU does commit to a starlink competitor, there's even more crowding in orbit. Even more collision avoidance required.
> Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence
That's the point. These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter.
The constellation is both expensive to build and to maintain. That makes it a lot of trouble compared to running a bunch of fiber once and having only occasional maintenance trouble when some idiot drags a backhoe through it.
> Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
The military interest is real, but it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it. Higher latency more conventional satellite internet will have significant cost savings in comparison.
by SlinkyOnStairs
3/13/2026 at 7:24:16 PM
> Those are revenue figuresAnd also net income.
> just makes the problem worse
Did you skip the part where it’s not a serious cost issue? None of these birds are even close to being propellant restricted.
> These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter
Because they’re being intentionally deorbited to make room for better birds. They don’t have to be deorbited as quickly as they are. But overwhelming demand makes it a profitable bet.
> it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it
$70mm per year for 22 birds [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-space-force-contract
by JumpCrisscross
3/13/2026 at 7:11:14 PM
What would the cost be to deny these orbital altitudes?by toomuchtodo
3/13/2026 at 7:43:58 PM
Incalculable.The cost isn't in paying someone to not use the orbit, it's that the busier a part of space gets, the more expensive it becomes to do collision avoidance and station keeping.
What makes this impossible to calculate is that there's an unknown exponential involved. The more satellites, the more collisions that need avoiding. And the higher the chance that one avoidance will create new future collisions.
At some point the space is simply so busy that collisions can no longer be avoided.
by SlinkyOnStairs
3/13/2026 at 8:51:16 PM
> What makes this impossible to calculateIt’s really not impossible to calculate, particularly if you’re trying to cause damage.
The answer is it’s cheaper to shoot down individual satellites than try to create a localized cascade. Kessler cascades propagate too slowly, and degrade too quickly in low orbits, to be useful as a military tactic. In high orbit one could feasibly e.g. deny use of a geostationary band. But again, it’s cheaper to just shoot down each satellite.
by JumpCrisscross
3/13/2026 at 7:02:51 PM
From the PCMag article:> For example, although the Starlink subsidiary reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2024, the same financial statement doesn’t account for the costs of launching and maintaining a fleet of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites.
???
by estearum
3/13/2026 at 7:30:35 PM
Later: “The document also shows the Starlink subsidiary registered a net income of only $72.7 million for 2024. The year prior, the subsidiary incurred a net loss of $30.7 million. However, the financial statement notes the subsidiary purchased nearly $2.3 billion in Starlink hardware and services from the SpaceX parent last year.”Those figures, to my understanding, include cost of services and launch in COGS.
by JumpCrisscross
3/13/2026 at 7:02:49 PM
starlink has some travel niches where it makes sense. However not many cross the ocean. military where you can't trust the nearby infrastructure is the other big one. Disaster recovery where the local system is not working isn't big enough to fund anything though it will use whatever they can get.by bluGill
3/13/2026 at 7:08:17 PM
The cruise ship industry is $78B of revenue. He airline industry is $840B of revenue. Between the two, I think Starlink has enough customers crossing the ocean to be profitable, given how hard they drive down costs.by fragmede
3/13/2026 at 8:17:52 PM
Because the Chinese govt doesn’t have money to burn…by victorbjorklund
3/13/2026 at 6:03:13 PM
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 themby samrus
3/13/2026 at 6:03:38 PM
Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.by tartuffe78
3/13/2026 at 7:16:08 PM
> 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?
by palmotea
3/13/2026 at 9:48:05 PM
>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.
by iSnow
3/14/2026 at 12:36:29 AM
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.
by kolinko
3/14/2026 at 2:35:22 AM
It's more tempo, less cost, resuable has faster turn around time, so more launch per unit of time. Long March 5 is ~$3000/kg, or ballpark enough to F9/kg, but disposables can't launch every few days.by maxglute
3/14/2026 at 12:32:22 AM
Reusability. Even if money were not an issue, other nations need to build a new rocket for every launch, and it's extremely hard/impossible to catch up.by kolinko
3/13/2026 at 6:08:09 PM
None of those countries (well probably except China) have any significant launch capacity to deploy constellationsby tekla
3/13/2026 at 7:06:46 PM
They can build it in a few years though. It takes money and can be done overnight but there is nothing about that that costs 10 years. 10 years got to the moon - from a much lower base. 10 years means you are starting with college graduates and building it from no previous experience - or you already have a lot but only are putting minimal budget into improving.by bluGill
3/14/2026 at 12:41:39 AM
Apollo mission was a national mobilisation project that's size happened once/twice in a century. And it still took 10 years. There is no willpower to do that right now in EU.Right now we, in EU, plan to have first reusable vehicles (Ariane Next) in around 10 years - around 2035. And that is for the first vehicles, not for scaling up the production.
by kolinko
3/16/2026 at 1:27:09 AM
The Apollo mission was also starting from way behind what you would start with today though. Any aerospace engineer grad today has decades of science and engineering to stand upon.by AngryData
3/13/2026 at 10:02:28 PM
India is already one of the cheapest service providers for such launches - ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... (They are ofcourse working to create a reusable launch vehicle too).by thisislife2
3/13/2026 at 10:36:23 PM
Not true. The reason why they launched with India is because Russia got sanctioned.by ExpertAdvisor01
3/14/2026 at 4:27:38 PM
spacex has cost advantage due to rocket lands back on launch pad not getting destroyed like all othersby AtomicOrbital