"Just how many satellites can we fill space with"<p>That's the (honest) question I have. Articles like this pop up from time to time on HN, but it's hard to tell how big a problem this is. What's the reasonable upper bounds for LEO satellites? How do we determine what is reasonable? Who gets to decide and enforce that?
Is this really reasible to scale for a company without their own launch platform though?<p>As a Canadian living in a "rural" area, 15km from a municipality of 160,000 people with no access to wired broadband internet, I'd rather see whatever funding gets thrown at this startup into actually developing Canadian terrestrial infrastructure.<p>As a rant, in the 8 years since living here, I've seen cellular data prices double. Yes, double.
It remains to be seen whether they can really raise the money to do this.<p>I am a bit skeptical that a double-6U-cubesat will have enough power and RF link budget possible to compete with starlink. I'm saying this as a starlink beta customer for a year now.<p>If their intended target market is more like a lower-bandwidth competitor to Iridium and Inmarsat's L-band based services for mobile terminals/offshore/industrial/aviation and similar markets, maybe it can find a market niche, but it will have to be a whole lot less costly in dollar per MB.
So their business plan is to buy launches from SpaceX to build their own fleet. Then SpaceX has the booster paid for and can re-use it up to 4 times to launch their StarLink satellites for a fraction of the cost.<p>Seems like it would be simpler for them to just write a check to Musk...
This might as well be a joke. I am willing to bet anyone here that this will never happen. It would be like trying to start a new company to compete with AMZN selling the same things they sell online. Yeah, good luck with that.<p>Why is it no one wanted to put up a fleet of Satellites to provide Internet access until SpaceX did it? What makes these companies/countries think they can do it when the expense will be (?) times greater than what SpaceX can do it for?
At what point will this be cheap enough that we could crowdfund enough satellites to build an Internet that can't be taken down with conventional means?<p>What rights does my satellite have? Is it like ships, that they must be registered to a nation-state? Or is it total anarchy? e.g. If I am ISIS can I launch a satellite filled with recruitment videos and have it essentially outside the jurisdiction of any country?
This won't just cause issues for earth through collisions. Imagine a mass coronal ejection that would fry the electronics in all orbiting satellites. The more that are up there the more that can come down very quickly and randomly.