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Comment by TrainedMonkey | Hacker News Reader

Very few, capital cost to build and launch is quite significant, cost to operate is significantly less, but still substantial. You need a lot of subscribers to make this worthwhile and this is likely will be winner take most tech market. Left alone global LEO market would probably support 1-2 constellations. Given geopolitical nature it is likely that some constellations will be outlawed in certain areas. SpaceX will likely capture a 75%+ portion of the market everywhere it is not prohibited.

It is feasible to see project Kupier and One Web eventually getting competitive with Starlink 1.0, but they are not launching or innovating fast enough. By the time they are ready to start offering V1 constellation SpaceX will be launching V2 and testing V3. Long term the only real competitor is China because they have a large protected market and capable of subsidizing launch and scaling up incredibly rapidly.

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Sorry I can't resist but put my hacker hat on:

How would effective prohibition work? Beams are directed enough to make them hard to find from a frequency perspective. Payments will probably be possible in BitCoins at some point given Teslas move in that direction. Controlling the import of hardware seems like a way to do it, but I bet it would still show up everywhere.

That's easy. If spacex does not respect the ban, China will fire anti-satellite missiles to the spacex constellation.

That's not easy. There will be tens of thousands of satellites. It would be prohibitively expensive to hit them all with missiles. Not to mention the debris cloud which, while temporary, would cause real problems for everyone in space for a few years.

More feasible attacks would be hacking the satellites or ground systems, RF jamming, or just locating users on the ground by their RF emissions and throwing them in the gulag. Or how about holding the Shanghai Tesla factory hostage? Less fancifully, China can put pressure on SpaceX via the ITU. There are plenty of options for China and there is zero chance SpaceX will try to break Chinese law.

Hitting one satellite is a hell of a warning shot though. Literally no one wants the debris clouds.

Every country, US included, would pressure SpaceX to stop operating in countries that don't want it if it were to result in any debris.

no no

no no no

please. if you want to make Starlink illegal what you do is state Starlink is illegal and maybe make it illegal to pay Starlink. that's a lot cheaper and doesn't piss off the international community.

It's easy: Just make it illegal, and put make it incumbent on starlink to enforce it. Violations are met with (eg) sanctions on Tesla and other related parties.

This has played out many, many times in history and it's generally successful.

Yes, it's often not perfect. There are small numbers that slip through the cracks. But as soon as it's any significant number the crack will get closed. c.f. great firewall of china, north korea anything, various European data location requirements, russian internet payments and search, etc etc etc etc.

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