Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.

If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".

>China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.

Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.

In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."

Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.

Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.

> but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.

How many starlink clones are there really customers for?

Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet.

Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do.

Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.

Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.

To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...

I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?

Another major detail is that SpaceX is simply burning enormous amounts of money on this.

Starlink's revenue is comparable to the ESA's entire 5 billion euro budget, and it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service. (And kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits)

The chief problem "stopping" other countries from developing a starlink competitor is that starlink simply doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction. Fiber runs are expensive but not that expensive.

Because the Chinese govt doesn’t have money to burn…

> Starlink is apparently 65% of all active satellites, it would be very expensive to emulate that without super efficient launching capabilities.

But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?

They can build it in a few years though. It takes money and can be done overnight but there is nothing about that that costs 10 years. 10 years got to the moon - from a much lower base. 10 years means you are starting with college graduates and building it from no previous experience - or you already have a lot but only are putting minimal budget into improving.

Yes, but how they got it is irrelevant. They got it, and that's what matters.

China can (and does) do the same for current tech today, through whatever means.

(Also, GP's comment directly said what you said; not sure what your comment adds to the discussion.)

Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.

At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.

Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.

In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.

The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.

In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.

Some people will give it to china too. We have even caught a few (in other industries).

> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.

American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.

Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.