If you're on the younger side, you may not remember how we've been here before. In the 1990s there was a glut of satellite companies (eg Teledesic, Iridium, Worldsat) [1].
SpaceX's strategy here is quite brilliant: they induce demand for launches and prove Falon 9 reuse while deploying satellites at relatively low cost (because of the reuse) at a price level absolutely nobody can compete with. They're doing well over 100 launches a year at this point.
Bezos seems to want to repeat this with Amazon, Blue Origin and Kuiper but I think they've lost before they've even started. Blue Origin simply doesn't have the orbital launch capability that SpaceX does and certainly not anywhere near the price point. BO has underdelivered on BE-$ and New Glenn. SpaceX did too to be fair but that's in the past (ignoring Starship).
Starlink is a relatively simple design: it's surface-to-surface through a single hop. I think satellite Internet is likely already a saturated market given you're competing with 4G/5G wireless and fixed line. There's only so many remote locations and people on the move to sell to.
What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it. They've already slogged through most of New Glenn's development with hardly any revenue, and that's after skipping over small lift completely.
As for the market being saturated, I think Blue Origin could plenty of business in the "anybody but SpaceX" market. They're up against Rocket Lab (who is still stuck in small lift.)
>What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it.
Infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group, and Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
But Starlink needs to get the traffic to/from the ground eventually, right? And those ground links having their capacity. So I think it is nice to have laser crosslinks, but they will not eliminate the base stations capacity requirements.
SpaceX's strategy here is quite brilliant: they induce demand for launches and prove Falon 9 reuse while deploying satellites at relatively low cost (because of the reuse) at a price level absolutely nobody can compete with. They're doing well over 100 launches a year at this point.
Bezos seems to want to repeat this with Amazon, Blue Origin and Kuiper but I think they've lost before they've even started. Blue Origin simply doesn't have the orbital launch capability that SpaceX does and certainly not anywhere near the price point. BO has underdelivered on BE-$ and New Glenn. SpaceX did too to be fair but that's in the past (ignoring Starship).
Starlink is a relatively simple design: it's surface-to-surface through a single hop. I think satellite Internet is likely already a saturated market given you're competing with 4G/5G wireless and fixed line. There's only so many remote locations and people on the move to sell to.
[1]: https://interactive.satellitetoday.com/via-satellite-at-30-t...