In the past this at-cost dealing would have been considered monopolistic enough to force divestment (ie, almost exactly the same as Boeing and United Airlines divestment due to the Air Mail Act).

> Air Mail Act of 1934: > This legislation prohibited the common ownership of airlines and aircraft manufacturers to prevent conflicts of interest and promote fair competition in the aviation industry.

If China where to compete they also need LEO satellites that is just over China for a couple of minutes, that have to take a long round trip around the word to give a couple of minutes access again. That’s why you need a huge constellation.

It’s either selling to the whole world or nothing. If you don’t want to go for slow GEO stationary.

When Starship starts launching customer satellites, it's possible that even the price for customers would be cheap enough to launch and maintain a LEO constellation. But competing requires massive innovation in cheap and fast production of satellites which are very energy efficient and highly capable. Especially, the technology for starshield protecting against cyber warfare in space and the direct to cell capability. This would be the main reason for not emerging a viable competitor for some time. SpaceX has innovation advantage in the satellites, manufacturing, dishes, base stations, software apart from the launch capability.

Is it really required to be an LEO constellation? It would certainly be good, so that eventually the satellites deorbit and contribute less to Kesseler syndrome risk. But some nation state might chose to not care about that and deploy at higher and more stable orbits.

Yeah in theory China is the biggest potential competitor, having both a space program, a state deeply involved in business, etc. But their space tech is archaic in comparison, using really nasty fuels to blast stuff into space. The reusability of SpaceX's rockets is a feat that is years ahead of the competition - it's been nearly ten years since the first recovered Falcon 9 booster in a commercial launch if my quick fact check is accurate, and no other competitor, private or governmental, has managed it yet. And in a few years they will have a reusable vessel capable of launching 100 tonnes into LEO, at a fraction of the development and launch cost of e.g. the Space Shuttle.

Unless of course Musk's political fuckery ends up dismantling SpaceX. But, Musk didn't do the engineering on these feats, so the knowledge and patents will continue on if he doesn't.

It's not actually necessary to use reusable rockets to get at a similar cost per launch. Long March 5 is at 2.8M$/ton (so less than SpaceX commercial price).

Also, 15M$/launch is not widely believed to be correct. There is much creative accounting SpaceX could be doing with Starlink (is at-cost account for booster depreciation? If so how, since we don't know how much reuse a booster can be expected to give? Or is it just the cost of refurbishment?), and since the last statement where Elon claimed 1000$ per kg actual cost, SpaceX had to raise their prices, claiming it was due to inflation - is that accurate? Most estimates I've seen are that the cost is 20-30M/launch, which would instead give 1.1-1.7M/ton.

So, it's a big advantage but not an insurmountable one.

Unless you're in Brazil

https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/

"SpaceX is really good and it's hard to compete with them" is not an economic reason for it to be winner takes all. Economic reasons would be, for example, regulations that either explicitly or implicitly prohibit others from competing, as are present in many terrestrial ISP markets. Some way for SpaceX to corner the market for some essential resource like spectrum or orbits and exclude competitors that way.

China is going to do it for sure. It doesn't have to be as efficient as SpaceX if it is massively subsidized for defense purposes. And China is pretty good at building things cheap.

On the commercial side Blue Origin has been slow in starting but they are almost ready and will have relatively cheap launches. There are other up and coming private launch competitors too.

And adding onto this it's not just cost, they also have the fastest turn around and the highest reliability.

It's vaguely analogous to the early automobile market where Ford was dominating by every single objective metric so competitors were left to compete on subjective metrics like styles. Incidentally this era is where planned obsolescence really took off.

Unfortunately for competitors I'm not sure coating a rocket in a chrome finish and running a sleek ad campaign is going to beat out price+speed+reliability.

blink

By spending more money in absolute terms to achieve objectives, without a necessitative need of immediate profit?

It's not the same because there are plenty of companies that can manufacture cars at scale but only one company that can launch satellites cheaply. Arguably Waymo is ahead of Tesla FSD and they have access to the mature Hyundai and Zeekr supply chains.

Apple's feature is not comparable. It is extremely low bandwidth and requires special hardware and holding the phone pointing in a certain direction. Starlink acts as a regular (albeit low bandwidth) 4G tower in space.

I’m sure LangGraph has Elon quaking in his boots.