Naive question - let's assume this all becomes a really competitive market and 10+ companies are pumping satellites into orbit.
Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
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.
I'd say there's plenty of room for competitors along multiple dimensions: Geopolitical security (this alone will probably preclude a single monopoly), price and lack of a moat (once a monopolist starts jacking up prices, there's an immediate incentive for an alternative), delivery profile (store-and-forward for IoT-like use cases vs. dumb pipe vs. in-space forwarding), frequency band (L- or S-band for direct to device vs. Ku/Ka band requiring directional terminals) etc.
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.
I remain convinced that the main successful business model in the satellite communications industry is to wait for the first incarnation of the satellite company to fail / go bankrupt / flounder, and then be part of the 2nd round of financing or ownership that comes in to buy it out and operate it... I don't know why this is the pattern but it seems to have played out several times over the last 2 decades that I've casually watched this syndrome.
They were about $3 billion in the hole when they went through bankruptcy in 2002 and the new owners bought it for $43 million (from Wikipedia). In 2025 they earned a return of $-8 million on that investment (plus any other money raised since then, such as $1 billion from Apple). So even the second incarnation doesn't seem to be a good business model even with free satellites.
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.
If you haven't read Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story you should. The system was operational, but Motorola's dysfunction and impossible sales goals leading to disillusionment meant that Dan Colussy & team was able to pick it up for $25 million (development price: $5 billion)
Or become a major investor on a largely public funded project with commitments set to start at a delayed time in order to benefit from R&D before bearing financial burden. (See [1].)
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).
Oh, I missed the memo that Amazon Leo is the new name for Project Kuiper, rebranded in November of last year. I saw a presentation back when it was Kuiper so have still been calling it that
SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs. I'm betting the next acquisition target will be AST SpaceMobile. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see big telecom/ISP mergers pass regulatory approval now that they have competition from the heavens
They'll try. But they are between two forces squeezing the TAM:
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.
> SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs.
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.
Intercontinental latency in air/vacuum is lower than in fiber (even in total, i.e. after accounting for the extra distance from ground and the legs up and down from/space), so there’s also a market for high frequency trading.
It's all about bypassing regulations, just like Uber and AirBNB. Most US ISPs have old copper cables that only support DSL. Upgrading them means digging up the streets and that's expensive and a legal minefield. And those ISPs are local monopolies so why would they spend money just to keep the same number of customers who are locked in anyway?
I don't think that is very true in this day in age. Here in Cincinnati, the vast majority of houses now have fiber run to them. There are still some stragglers, but that's mainly because slumlord apartment owners don't feel like dealing with upgrades.
I wonder if there will become a point where these companies will be considered too big and will be forcibly cut up to smaller chunks... If feels like they have tentacles in everything now.
There is no such thing as a company being "too big", it's only a question of market power (eg monopolies) and abuse of that power.
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.
People think that with better D2D technology, emergency and telemetry messages will still be short and to the point. These messages will not be like streaming videos.
When companies work together on things, like spectrum and constellations and handset deals it changes how people get billed.. It does not change the fact that people want to keep the messages small when millions of devices are using the same channel.
I am curious to see if people will still talk about having satellite access or if they will start talking about paying for what they use once this is up and running. D2D technology is still going to be used for these messages.
With small enough spot beams, the difference between a large rural cell and a very narrow direct-to-device spot beam footprint is really not that big anymore. Starlink apparently already offers video calling over direct to cell in the US via T-Mobile!
Fixed Starlink is competing with fiber/DOCSIS/DSL, though. That's orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people in areas remote enough to not warrant a terrestrial cell base station (which could itself also be backhauled over much more efficient fixed satellite).
Interesting, I was expecting Apple to eventually buy them.
Still, makes sense to me: The aging Globalstar satellite constellation itself is probably not very interesting to Amazon, but their global L-band and S-band spectrum is, as are their existing licenses to operate a mobile satellite service in most countries.
I guess the stack should be completed with this. AWS servers, satellite communications, boxes to view content on TVs, apps on mobiles, content creation studios, advertising, product placement, product sales. Whew!
I guess they also want expertise to launch stuff into space, in case it becomes feasible to run space data centers.
I think America in general is moving to a service based economy where you don’t own anything anymore. Everything from cars (lease) to homes (rentals) to electronics to insurance etc comes at a monthly cost. This kind of model works when the central government is trusted (or at least perceived to be trusted) to keep the wheel churning. I think the current government took some of the power back from big tech and people didn’t like it. Very interesting because the whole argument was private companies having too much power. Now the argument is government having too much power.
They would also need to protect all this stuff spread globally and into the space. No government will be able to do that - like we've already seen with the datacenters being hit in the Gulf states. Company like AMZN will have all the components for the most modern weapon system - global autonomous drone offense and defense network with the space component (or imagine a 1 GW datacenter in space temporarily rerouting its power into a laser or a microwave effector 80-ies StarWars style :) plus de-facto global intelligence network that each of these companies have, and thus will have and will be able to better protect themselves. Those large BigTechs will unavoidably have to move into defense, for themselves and as-a-service for smaller transnationals.
Why space data centers? What advantage this would have? Cooling will be a big issue, while it is easily solved on the planet earth, as we have water, air that can transfer heat away.
People point to the cost of land, but if being physically inaccessible isn’t a problem, then there are lots of cheap places on Earth you can deploy data centres too at far lower cost than launching them into orbit.
Desert land is free. Floating data centres in the middle of the pacific is free.
If a state, or even rich billionaire, wanted to take out your data centre in low earth orbit, it's only a few million dollars to launch a retrograde rocket which explodes into 10 ton of shrapnel, or even less to forget the orbit and just launch it directly up.
I don't think people are looking at this the right way. They need to be inaccessible to terrestrial and air weapons, have lower latency, not be dependent on power plants, etc.
Far easier for someone like Iran or China or the US to take out an LEO satellite than an underground data centre, or even a surface on in the case of DCs in US or China.
Are you suggesting for a fact that Iran as the guidance and targeting systems to identify specific LEO objects, and fire missiles at those targets with accuracy?
It's also pretty easy to launch another one into orbit to replace it? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. We can have all these options simultaneously. The easiest targets are where the faster paced more offensive action is going to be.
People have been talking about waging war in space for many decades now. All the arguments for and against it were made a very long time ago, and it was decided it's a hell of a lot better that way. Even a nuclear blast in orbit is more tolerable.
Space superiority is just too damn appealing as the next frontier after land, air, and sea where we've been stuck in stalemate for a while. It's perfectly natural we go to space for this, including the datacenters.
If you build a pyramid with the base pointing to the sun (as solar), and a "height" about 5 times the base in constant shadow, with decent internal circulation, that will operate at sub-20C just from the two radiative sides pointing away from Earth (you make the earth pointing sides reflective)
in space 1m2 of thin metal will radiate those 785 watt. No fan, no heatpump, nothing. Only the launch cost. Which given the projected Starship launch cost will be cheaper than installation on Earth.
The Utah Data Center [0] is a 200 acre plot with 35 acres of buildings.
Even prime farmland values is arround $10k an acre, or $2m, but for other land you're talking $400k for that much land [1]
It uses 65MW. The solar panels alone to generate that cost $100 per kW in bulk, or $6.5m.
That's 570GWh a year.
Mount Signal 1 Solar plant, from over a decade ago, produces about that currently. Total cost $365m [2].
Then there's the lifetime? What do you do in 36 months time when you want to replace the hardware with the latest generation? In an earthbound one you turn off the rack, remove the old kit, put the new kit in. In space, it just burns up in the atmosphere.
And what's the effect on cancer rates, etc. from all that toxic pollution to both launch the satellites and then vaporize them in the atmosphere years later?
Space junk would come down in other countries, too. Even if there was a great conspiracy of "them" in the USA, there's plenty of others to report on it.
Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
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.
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 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).
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.
When companies work together on things, like spectrum and constellations and handset deals it changes how people get billed.. It does not change the fact that people want to keep the messages small when millions of devices are using the same channel.
I am curious to see if people will still talk about having satellite access or if they will start talking about paying for what they use once this is up and running. D2D technology is still going to be used for these messages.
Starlink already has to constrain the number of broadband accounts per locale to avoid saturation.
Interesting, I was expecting Apple to eventually buy them.
Still, makes sense to me: The aging Globalstar satellite constellation itself is probably not very interesting to Amazon, but their global L-band and S-band spectrum is, as are their existing licenses to operate a mobile satellite service in most countries.
I guess the stack should be completed with this. AWS servers, satellite communications, boxes to view content on TVs, apps on mobiles, content creation studios, advertising, product placement, product sales. Whew!
I guess they also want expertise to launch stuff into space, in case it becomes feasible to run space data centers.
Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos' private aerospace company
The randian matra of "Private = good, government = bad" always wins out
You end up with a private company run by the elite, not the people. One Dollar One Vote.
People point to the cost of land, but if being physically inaccessible isn’t a problem, then there are lots of cheap places on Earth you can deploy data centres too at far lower cost than launching them into orbit.
If a state, or even rich billionaire, wanted to take out your data centre in low earth orbit, it's only a few million dollars to launch a retrograde rocket which explodes into 10 ton of shrapnel, or even less to forget the orbit and just launch it directly up.
It's a declaration of war much the same.
I don't think people are looking at this the right way. They need to be inaccessible to terrestrial and air weapons, have lower latency, not be dependent on power plants, etc.
It's thus far easier for Iran to hit an LEO DC than one in Colorado
People have been talking about waging war in space for many decades now. All the arguments for and against it were made a very long time ago, and it was decided it's a hell of a lot better that way. Even a nuclear blast in orbit is more tolerable.
Space superiority is just too damn appealing as the next frontier after land, air, and sea where we've been stuck in stalemate for a while. It's perfectly natural we go to space for this, including the datacenters.
a 1m2 at 70C radiates 785 Watt. Seems thet cooling will be more simple than on Earth.
Cooling isn't an issue.
The Utah Data Center [0] is a 200 acre plot with 35 acres of buildings.
Even prime farmland values is arround $10k an acre, or $2m, but for other land you're talking $400k for that much land [1]
It uses 65MW. The solar panels alone to generate that cost $100 per kW in bulk, or $6.5m.
That's 570GWh a year.
Mount Signal 1 Solar plant, from over a decade ago, produces about that currently. Total cost $365m [2].
Then there's the lifetime? What do you do in 36 months time when you want to replace the hardware with the latest generation? In an earthbound one you turn off the rack, remove the old kit, put the new kit in. In space, it just burns up in the atmosphere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
[1] https://www.land.com/property/201-acres-in-brown-county-nebr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar
https://satellitemap.space
And what's the effect on cancer rates, etc. from all that toxic pollution to both launch the satellites and then vaporize them in the atmosphere years later?
https://bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellites-p...
Sure would be nice if the answers to these questions were not guessing before we do the damage and impossible to fix after
The key to strategic usage of deorbiting is that the mass is already in position, and only needs to be properly wielded.
No amount of “investigation” or reporting would stop that from happening.