Watch out Starlink, Amazon is coming for you

The title of this post is not the title of the article, the article doesn’t even mention Space X. There is “editorialising” (which HN discourages) and then there is just sticking a clickbait title on a post to get a debate going.<p>The thing is, the topic of the article, Amazon’s Project Kuiper winning a DoD contract is interesting to many reasons. It’s shows the DoD ensuring there are other operators other than SpaceX, but also the dedicated “mesh network” for connecting military assets.<p>It’s almost an interesting experiment, at the time of posting none of the other 9 comments mention the content of the article.<p>Current title: Watch out Starlink, Amazon is coming for you<p>Correct title: Amazon to link Kuiper satellites to DoD’s mesh network in space

By the time Amazon is relevant Starlink will have already cornered the market. Not to mention keeping such a constellation maintained requires crazy launch cadence which takes atleast a decade to hone even if your rocket is really damn good out the gate, not to mention if your rocket isn&#x27;t fully reusable you probably just won&#x27;t be able to afford to properly maintain a mega-constellation.<p>i.e I&#x27;ll believe it when I see it. For now the only thing Bezos space companies have been producing is hot air.

Kuiper and Blue Origin have been pretty entertaining. Bezos can throw all the money in the world at space but it still hasn&#x27;t bought him a single functioning satellite.

&gt; Amazon’s Project Kuiper will install DoD-compliant laser communications terminals on its internet satellites so they can transfer data from remote-sensing satellites directly into the military’s mesh network in low Earth orbit.<p>I find this deeply concerning that the military is taking more and more dependencies on Amazon, and would therefore have an interest in Amazon’s survival.<p>I spent almost 11 years at Amazon, and exited after I couldn’t bear with my mental and physical health deteriorating any more.<p>It’s a toxic, abusive culture. Their real innovation is how to manipulate and abuse employees, at scale, without destroying your business reputation.<p>What we ought to do is break up Amazon, but instead, we’re rewarding its culture of extreme narcissists and sociopaths.

I&#x27;ve seen people saying that things like Starlink are inherently safe because they use very low orbits.<p>But higher orbits are just higher speeds and when two objects collide and break apart some smaller fragments might fly off with speeds far greater than those of colliding objects.<p>So failure at very low orbit might add a lot of debris to higher orbits that might trigger Kessler syndrome.<p>Am I wrong about this?