Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
If you were to distribute 100,000 satellites across that shell, each one would have 2,600 square miles to itself. That's like having a single car in the entire state of Delaware. Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
The issue isn't space, it's traffic management. Satellites zipping around at 17,000 MPH would make one hell of a debris field if even one pair of them collide. That's the Kessler Syndrome boogie man everyone is worried about.
Yes but don't forget that orbits decline and only satellites with onboard propulsion have the ability to boost them back up. Everything else like cubesats and random debris doesn't and thus doesn't "stay in their lane".
Sure, but satellites in a higher plane will need to navigate satellites below them during de-orbit. Conversely, satellites in a lower plane will likely need to avoid non-functional satellites that are uncontrolled as their orbit decays.
In a certain sense, we do. Pumping thousands satellites to LEO increases probability of triggering the Kessler syndrome. Luckily, LEO orbits are also self-cleaning on reasonable time scales (decades), so I think that some day we will trigger it (potentially, with some "help" from anti-satellite weapons) after which some kind of international regulation will be introduced to prevent repeating it in future.
The only thing that's actually scarce and that could be monopolized rather easily is frequency spectrum. In fact, I suspect this to be a frequency/operating license driven acquisition.
My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.
For wireless, the dynamics are very different (as long as spectrum isn't monopolized). As soon as you have enough satellites launched for global coverage, you can compete for all customers, and each one that switches away to the competition is more bandwidth available to you to undercut your competitor on pricing with.
Which boils down to "Use something incredibly expensive that we have very few of, instead of something that we have a number of that is comparatively cheaper. How dare you question the holy, sacred internet!"
During the Artemis launch it was very briefly mentioned that the launch window isn't a continuous window, but a series of windows interrupted for short times. I wondered if that was because of the thousands of satellites in orbit.