It's like, well, land — if somebody builds on it, nobody else would be able to. They'd need to build nearby, or elsewhere.
It's not like Starlink is,going to exhaust all viable orbits.
It's not like Starlink is,going to exhaust all viable orbits.
No, but it is worth noting that there are about 7000 satellites in orbit right now, of which a little over half are actually operational[1]. Starlink intends to increase that number 10 fold by launching 30,000 of their own. It will have a significant impact on which orbits are available, it will cause extra work for everyone who operates in space, and (in my opinion) the benefit of "broadband internet everywhere on Earth" isn't so big that people shouldn't think about whether it's worth it. Especially given the fact there are other competitors in the market who'll be wanting to launch their own constellations too.
We could end up with many tens of thousands of internet provider satellites, and the market probably isn't big enough for more than a couple of companies providing that service. At the very least there should be rules demanding that each company makes their satellites interoperable with all their competitors, so if one company withdraws from the market someone else can take over their orbiting hardware so we're not left with immense amounts of space junk.
[1] https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/how-many-satellites-ar...
This.
Also, I would expect that there should be some kind of worldwide organism supervising this nowadays, not just the US FCC. I mean, LEO is a whole Earth thing, not just one nation's.
These constellations aren't stationary, they move based on their orbital parameters, and to properly predict their orbits, you'll have to account for their future movement for the next while (depending on expected lifetime and how close they come to your intended orbit).
Saying this is like buying a plot of land is missing the level of work and complexity that goes into orbital mechanics.
If you need to illuminate the same area of the earth, which would make sense if you're also looking to serve the same populations, then you'll need to either be at a different altitude or have neighboring or intersecting orbits, which will need to handle the orbits of all other objects. That's why the level of complexity increases a fair bit when you need to plan for two large-scale configurations.