Amazon to acquire Globalstar and expand Amazon Leo satellite network

The business model that works seems to be spectrum gambling. Do the minimum amount of satellite investment for decades until someone with a real business plan comes along and has to go through you to get it.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8e75ed31-0c72-4160-b406-1ca6aa36a...

This is a pretty common pattern in capital intensive businesses. It's often the case that revenue is inline with operating costs, but revenue can't really ever pay for the start up costs. That dooms the initial business, but after bankruptcy it can be viable.

Depending on circumatances, the very visible bankruptcy also helps deter other businesses from joining the market. But if the cost was high due to technology, doing the same business 10-20 years later can work out because the start up costs may be significantly less.

They are completely unprofitable otherwise. Eventually even Starlink will lose money, as more and more rural regions around the world are wired for fiber.

This is exactly what "the Internet" said about spacex when they announced Starlink. Oh, it never worked. LEO constellations were tried in the 90s, ALL of them failed. Haha, it will never work. 14k satellites, that's insane, dreams, lies, hahaha.

... and yet, they are now at ~10k satellites launched, and are serving 9+mil customers, for some unknown billions/year in revenue (should become clear in a few months when they IPO).

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.

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.

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.

The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.

The hammer: electronics get cheaper faster when they don't have to be space grade, and electronics get cheaper faster than rockets. As they get cheaper, terrestrial wireless will be deployed in more areas that are uneconomical right now.

And that is how the satellite TAM gets slammed.

Traditional ISPs already have a nice network of copper and fiber optic cables. I don't think satellites offer any advantage to most people here, except for those living in an area with slow wired connections.

Or possibly viasat.

For LEO data it seems that there will be plenty of competition. If you're talking about Amazon, they're in fiercely competitive markets. Them having the capital and cash flow ('size') to launch a competitor to SpazX is only a good thing.

Starlink already has to constrain the number of broadband accounts per locale to avoid saturation.

It is impossible to overstate the success of the iPhone, but there are so many recent examples where they dipped their toes in only to fail or be left behind (autos, VR, AI, etc).

What will the next 20 years of Apple look like? Just more iPhones?

Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos' private aerospace company