You have it reversed. It’s fair, it’s hard to tell if you haven’t worked in the launch industry. But drive out to Mojave and go talk to the dozens of companies out there. Many of them have reusable designs. But also if you look at the financials, I think many would laugh at the funding many of these companies get when you compare to Silicon Valley. Clear vaporware frequently gets bigger investing.

The problem with launch companies is that you have nothing to launch. It’s a vicious coupled system, because it also means you can’t bring prices down to increase the number of launches. You need scale to bring prices down. You can’t implement the Silicon Valley model of run all your competitors (ULA) without dumping 10x down the drain compared to your Uber or Netflix.

So the reason it works is because SpaceX is its own customer. You are bootstrapping. The satellite internet idea isn’t even new. I was pitching this to a company I worked for in the early 2010’s (inspired by the brand new planet labs), but what helped was I even found white papers by Qualcomm and others that clearly had the exact same idea. My boss dismissed it because the failures of Celestri, Teledesic, Iridium, and Globealstar. I’m sure this is why I was able to find those white papers too, and very clearly so did SpaceX.

The difference here is that SpaceX is a launch company AND has the funding of a billionaire that is willing to take the risk [0].

Imo, the real question is who pitched Kuiper and did they do it before Starlink? It’s a good and obvious idea, so I’d put money down that someone did. I’m pretty sure they’re fucked now as there’s legitimate reasons you want LEO satellite mega constellation to be handled by a monopoly. You just can’t have a dozen of those companies running around.

[0] side rant: why the fuck are more billionaires not willing to take big risks. Especially those with at least a billion liquidated from their stock. What’s the point of that money? You’re so wealthy it’s effectively impossible to go broke. The real exception is if your wealth is mostly paper and you’re defrauding people. At 10 billion it basically will not happen even then. If you can stash (not even) 50 million, you never have to work ever again to live in high luxury.