On Thursday, July 16, 2020, 12:39:00 PM PDT, таракан <[email protected]> wrote: >Reminds me of the Iridium project ... a great success ... Your criticism is very misleading. Iridium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation was conceived 'late', 1988, and was completed far later: 2002. And that was nearly 20 years after commercial cellular phone service began. And the economic (not technical) failure of one satellite-communication system in no way suggests that there won't be a valid market for data today, and in the future. By and large, the competition (such as it now is) for Starlink has ALREADY been created. That's far from the situation for Iridium's telephone system in 1988. That produces a world of difference between these two business models.
>The problem is that it is impossible to maintain so many satellites, too >costly for a small interest. I'm sure that's what the pre-existing operators of commercial internet service would want SpaceX to believe. I suspect that SpaceX has thoroughly modeled the market and technical costs. >Doesn't really seem a novelty to me, I used to access ASTRA to get internet >for many times. Of course as one can imagine it's completely anonymous ... lol >... Sounds a bit like YAGNI, "You aren't gonna need it" syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it Or NIH (Not Invented Here) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here#:~:text=Not%20invented%20here%20(NIH)%20is,and%20costs%2C%20such%20as%20royalties. >Would be more impressive to see real space travel... Waving the shiny object. I've been following the concept of the "Space Elevator" for many years. I was quite amazed, well over 10 years ago, to see supposedly-intelligent people working on how to build a "climber" and supply power to it, when a far more straightforward system would be to create a pulley-implemented system that merely held onto a rising (or falling) rope: So, the motive power would be supplied by a motor on the ground, whose weight was completely irrelevant. But some people are just stupid. Jim Bell
