I'm trying to figure out the new Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications companies. Starlink, OneWeb etc.
The field is littered with the dead, Iridium (pre-bankrupcy), Teledesic (with Bill Gates as funder) etc.
The more recent consensus is "well, it could work this time if...."
It doesn't seem like a _compelling_ set of business cases. Especially for the consumer market.
Comments?
Starlink is different because they are putting much more of their satellites at a much lower orbit than the competition. Lower orbit means much better performance, since the satellites are closer. However, there is a significant drawback to putting them close, which is that the coverage of the satellites becomes much smaller. This means that you need to have much more satellites in orbit to achieve the same coverage as a constellation in higher orbit. Imagine shining a giant flashlight from a satellite down onto the Earth below: if the satellite is close, the "coverage cone" of light will only cover a teeny tiny circle of coverage on the Earth, but if it is far, the cone will cover a big huge circle on Earth. Because of this, it has been financially infeasible for any satellite internet company to launch a fleet of satellites into low Earth orbit due to the high number of satellites needed--the teeny tiny coverage cone of each satellite means you need
tons of them. That is, until SpaceX came along with its reusable rockets and started being able to launch satellites for a fraction of the cost of the competition.
For example,
Gogo Inflight Internet (the internet you get on airplanes) uses a
fleet of about 70 satellites in Geostationary orbit (GEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). Because these satellites are so high up, Gogo can cover a large surface area on Earth with only these 70 satellites.
In comparison, Starlink plans to operate a fleet of up to 42,000 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). Due to the high number of satellites and how close they are to the ground, the bandwidth (number of connections and volume of data) and latency (response time) of the network is far superior to Gogo's network. In comparison, Gogo can only connect to a small number of customers due to the tiny size of its fleet of satellites, and the performance is much worse due to the limited bandwidth of the small constellation as well as the vast distance from the surface of the Earth.
Ultimately, what this means is that due to how many Starlink satellites there are and how close they are to Earth, Starlink will have much better performance and be able to serve far more customers than any of the competition. Furthermore, only SpaceX has rockets which are economical enough to launch such a huge constellation into orbit. SpaceX already charges much less than the competition to launch stuff into orbit, but their true costs are even lower. SpaceX just has no reason to lower prices that low, since they are already the lowest. But for the purposes of launching its own satellites, SpaceX is able to fund its own launches for much less than any other company, even if that other company purchased launches from SpaceX. That's the value of SpaceX and Starlink being vertically integrated within the same company, since Starlink can utilize much lower "private" launch costs.
Given all of this, it is easy to see why so many predecessors to Starlink have gone bankrupt. Their launch costs were simply too high, and the performance of their networks were too poor to attract enough customers to pay for the high launch costs. SpaceX hopes to hit a "sweet spot", where the high performance of their network is able to attract a large amount of customers, and between all the paying customers plus their far lower launch costs, they will be able to afford to launch a network of 40,000 satellites without going bankrupt.
So, TL;DR is:
Starlink
* More satellites (like, tons more)
* Very low orbits (very low LEO)
* High bandwith (more connections, more data transferred)
* Low latency (faster response time)
* Lower launch costs due to vertical integration with SpaceX, can afford to launch 40,000+ satellites into low Earth orbit
* Can support more customers, more revenue
Other satellite constellations
* Less satellites (less than 100, compared to Starlink's planned 40,000+)
* Much higher orbits (MEO and GEO)
* Low bandwith (less connections, less data transferred)
* High latency (slower response time)
* Higher launch costs due to having to buy 3rd party rocket launches on the public market, cannot afford to launch 40,000+ satellites into low Earth orbit
* Can support less customers, less revenue
A few other interesting takeaways are due to the extreme low orbits of Starlink, the satellites will naturally slow down by brushing with the Earth's upper atmosphere and fall back to Earth in only a few years. This means much less problems with
Kessler syndrome, since if the satellites collide and explode, the debris will be gone in just a few years. In comparison, satellite debris in just slightly higher orbits than Starlink can take
decades to centuries to fall back to Earth. This also means that fleets of satellites like Starlink will require constant rocket launches to continuously replenish the satellites as they fall back to Earth every few years. In other words, between the huge amount of satellites and continual replenishment of said satellites, it will be a
big business for launch providers like SpaceX and Rocket Lab.
So I hope this explains why Starlink is so special and important, and why companies like Blue Origin and Rocket Lab are rushing to build rockets which are economically capable of launching large satellite constellations into orbit.