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Comment by AustinDev | Hacker News Reader

11B to launch 300 sats. Starlink costs SpaceX about $1M on the highest end for construction and launch per sat. True cost is likely lower by 20-30% for SpaceX and Starship will drop this further. Given the history of the EU, I think it's likely the environmental laws in will end up killing this before they can build a proper constellation, regardless of cost.

I think they got a bad deal.

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I looked it up - Starlink plan s to eventually have 42,000 satellites. These are small and cheap, that's why so many are needed.

It seems likely that the EU is planning for a smaller number - perhaps much smaller - of more powerful satellites. So comparing costs like the probably doesn't make sense.

Starlink satellites are not small.

> Starlink satellite is roughly 260 kilograms. Iridium System satellite is 680 kilograms.

The current generation is v2 mini, which is ~740 kg. It's no smaller than Europe's IRIS2 concept (which are unknown, but can't be heavier than 820 kg—see my sibling comment).

(And just in case anyone's lost track: SpaceX has already launched over ten times more v2's than the entire (proposed) IRIS2. This is not a case of EU opting to do "fewer, but larger" satellites; they're simply just not competing in the same league).

Well, that brings up two questions:

1. Does the weight of the satellite mean much? The bandwidth/concurrent users etc. is what matters. I know I started this by using the word "small", but I wasn't actually thinking about weight when I wrote that, but rather, capacity.

2. Did the EU itself say anywhere that this is supposed to be competitive with Starlink? Or did the article just frame it that way to gets clicks?

I think 260kg is small for a satellite. For comparison, GPS satellites weigh around 1000kg. Google's AI results told me that there are standard classifications for satellites, with 10-100kg being "micro" and 100-500kg being "small". I wasn't able to verify that elsewhere though.

But in any case, what I really meant was lower capacity per satellite. Until we can get numbers to compare the capabilities of each satellite, comparing launch costs doesn't mean anything. It's almost certain that Starlink will have lower costs, but probably not as much lower as people are trying to imply here, given that I also found some claims that the entire Starlink fleet of satellites is expected to run 100-200 billion USD.

I think a better comparison would be the US department of defense starshield constellation, for which SpaceX was awarded approximately 1.8 billion to build.

I could not find much detail on the number and capabilities of the satellites, but they do launch alongside starlink.

However, it looks like the big money is in additional communication contract services, with up to 13 billion for the next 10 years [1]

https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2024/11/2...

> EU does nothing

HN: aha look at these losers they never do anything

> EU does thing

HN: aha look at these losers they're doing something we already did

Nobody has ever argued in the history of Hacker News that the government of the European Union does nothing.

The article also indicates this is for secure government comms rather than than public internet use; so it’s not exactly a competitor to Starlink. The interesting part is that it’s a small constellation numbering in the hundreds, which is an arrangement similar to Starlink, but not nearly at their existing scale or future ambition.

I don't see anything wrong here. here's what could also happen, but has not:

> EU does thing the US hasn't

HN: OH SHIT USA NEEDS TO HURRY UP AND DO THING TOO

EU just needs to stop being behind technologically.

Why should they be more ahead?

EU constantly does things the US hasn't - such as consumer protection laws. But HN response to that is always "oh no EU is bullying US companies".

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