They would not be allowed to do so - too many shareholders. That’s why e.g. SpaceX will be going public even though Elon Musk would want to keep it private
Another poster here - I can confirm, have the same thing. I don’t worry too much about it though, I assume it will fade if I ever switch to other headphones.
Depends on how they are configured, I think in some regions (where power outages are very rare), they are wired to sync up with external network, and without external network they shut down as well.
The thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's.
(And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are.
The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.
I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).
China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.
That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight.
There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying
criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer
space. This debate is unsettled. [0]
There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider.
There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.
To shoot something down at 70,000 ft (21 km) all you need is a conventional military jet fighter, and a long-range rocket, or even a MiG-31 with a conventional cannon. At best you can make these birds cheaper than the rocket + flight time.
Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, but you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
Exactly; it's a limited and very expensive capability. Nobody would want to spend it on a $100k stratospheric flying vehicle, if the latter existed. It does not exist though, if you do not count weather balloons.
And potentially exceed Starlink cumulative payload a few years after that.
US via SpaceX generates most launches/payload due to reusability PRC built 2x more disposable launch vehicles. PRC figures out disposables and they can operate reusable fleet 2-3x the size of US and simply throw more payload per year and catchup/exceed cumulative SpaceX volume in a few years. A few years after, permanent kgs in space advantage due higher replacement as old hardware deorbits.
Spy satellites you can have way fewer, but for an internet connection you really need Starlink's scale. Otherwise you need full 360 deg view of a horizon (good luck with that on the battlefield), and a much higher power use.
Having said that, I double checked the numbers - it would take ~60 launches at the minimum to replicate Starlink 1.0. This is how many launches China does per year right now. So it is doable indeed for them, just absurdly expensive - $10-$30B, but they can afford that.
EU on the other hand - no way. We're doing 5 launches a year with Arianne, due to incompetent management over the last decade. Unless China or US allow us to use their infrastructure, we have no way of doing all this.
Ya, I guess one other thing to China's advantage is that they don't need true global reach. They can prioritize coverage over their relevant latitudes (roughly the same as contiguous USA). From what I understand from Starlink distributions, roughly ~60% of the overall Starlink constellation is required for that latitude range.
Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go".
suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.
So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.
And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.
China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things. They are not even hiding it anymore. It's almost comical how much they copied SpaceX. And I'd be surprised if they hadn't supply-chained themselves into some level of access in all the big aerospace corpos by now. But Europe? Developing this kind of stuff from scratch in a few years without an unregulated messy startup ecosystem and no army of state sponsored hackers? No chance.
Anyone who has seen a picture of that drone could copy it. Heck, I bet DJI or similar could make a better version just by looking at it if they really wanted to. The drone markt is super saturated with cheap, practical components. But copying a self landing rocket is simply not possible without knowing a ton of internal details that you will never get from watching videos of it.
"Anyone who has seen a picture of that drone could copy it." and yet they bragged about taking one and reverse engineering it to make a clone.... so your saying US of A couldn't copy it by picture alone? it took them this long to get a intact one to clone?
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.
They're even espionaging from themselves in the future!
Dude, have you ever _been_ in China? They don't need espionage, they're now way ahead of the world in technology, except in a few areas like biotech research and semiconductor manufacturing.
For the last decade, China has been having more engineers in _training_ than the total number of engineers in the US. Sure, the quality of Chinese universities is not that great, but the sheer number of them has its own power.
Rockets are notoriously complicated, though. Only a few nations even managed to get to the orbit, and not for a lack of trying.
SpaceX is a rare bird - a space startup that actually achieved not just spaceflight, but (so far only partial) reusability of launchers. Most space startups died long before that, including Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. Given that they are gone, we don't think of them often, but the total graveyard of defunct space startups is quite sizeable.
Russia seems to be slowly losing their space capabilities. The EU still does not have a human-rated launcher. These aren't small entities either.
Getting to space is a dangerous business with extremely thin security margins, where previous experience matters a lot.
I think China will eventually have reusable rockets, but it will take some time.
>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.
Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased. The fact they had to be stolen does not give them more weight. There is a lot of bias in US governmental opinion on french technology that such a small country cannot be so advanced without stealing; opinion which started with the french nuclear and space program. My opinion on those discourses about France, China or the USSR in the past are just mostly propaganda from the US MIC to ensure continued funding.
The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.
All the airlines, all the trains, and other government-supported entities may have a strategic interest to use a local version of Starlink. But everyone else? I don't think anyone will buy a service that will be 10x more expensive, 10x slower and 10x more energy hungry than Starlink -- this first mover advantage may be hard to beat.
Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)
But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
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-...
What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
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?
India's ISRO already competes with SpaceX for these launches ( ISRO puts 36 OneWeb satellites in orbit - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-successfully-... ), despite not having any reusable launch vehicles (reason - it's in the top 5 in space technology and just cheaper - Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo ). Once it masters reusable launch vehicle technologies, it'll be hard to compete with ISRO on commercial launches.
The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea.
Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.
China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.
The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.
The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.
More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].
China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.
And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.
I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".
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.
also, the knowledge about how a nuclear bomb works wasn't a secret. The way to produce one was the hard part to figure out.
Without the espionage, a industrialised country like the USSR would have figured out how to produce an atomic bomb eventually.
> 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.
All of that, and the funny thing is /that is the easy part/. Moving payloads to space is just incredibly expensive, but not fundamentally hard in the same way that post-launch coordination of satellite constellations and RF tuning to support things like mobile connectivity are (I can connect to Starlink satellites from my iPhone through T-Mobile).
I'm wondering if we will see a resurgence in direct to geostationary, It seems like it should be a lot easier to cover the planet when you only need a few satellites.
Bandwidth, input latency (250ms absolute minimum), energy use and antenna size (mattering for mobility and military). I don't think there is a way for geo to compete.
Can you explain what makes Falcon9 / Starship special (or needed) to launch these satellites? China, India, EU, Japan etc. all have the capability to launch satellites. So why is a Falcon9 / Starship a particular requirement?
Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive.
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.
> it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service
Starlink was profitable in 2024 [1] and should be materially profitable once V3 goes up.
> kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits
This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue. Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence. And the propellant depots SpaceX is building for NASA tie in neatly if the chips stablise enough to permit longer-lasting birds.
> doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction
Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
> This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue.
That it affects everyone just makes the problem worse. If China or the EU does commit to a starlink competitor, there's even more crowding in orbit. Even more collision avoidance required.
> Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence
That's the point. These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter.
The constellation is both expensive to build and to maintain. That makes it a lot of trouble compared to running a bunch of fiber once and having only occasional maintenance trouble when some idiot drags a backhoe through it.
> Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
The military interest is real, but it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it. Higher latency more conventional satellite internet will have significant cost savings in comparison.
Did you skip the part where it’s not a serious cost issue? None of these birds are even close to being propellant restricted.
> These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter
Because they’re being intentionally deorbited to make room for better birds. They don’t have to be deorbited as quickly as they are. But overwhelming demand makes it a profitable bet.
> it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it
The cost isn't in paying someone to not use the orbit, it's that the busier a part of space gets, the more expensive it becomes to do collision avoidance and station keeping.
What makes this impossible to calculate is that there's an unknown exponential involved. The more satellites, the more collisions that need avoiding. And the higher the chance that one avoidance will create new future collisions.
At some point the space is simply so busy that collisions can no longer be avoided.
It’s really not impossible to calculate, particularly if you’re trying to cause damage.
The answer is it’s cheaper to shoot down individual satellites than try to create a localized cascade. Kessler cascades propagate too slowly, and degrade too quickly in low orbits, to be useful as a military tactic. In high orbit one could feasibly e.g. deny use of a geostationary band. But again, it’s cheaper to just shoot down each satellite.
> For example, although the Starlink subsidiary reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2024, the same financial statement doesn’t account for the costs of launching and maintaining a fleet of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites.
Later: “The document also shows the Starlink subsidiary registered a net income of only $72.7 million for 2024. The year prior, the subsidiary incurred a net loss of $30.7 million. However, the financial statement notes the subsidiary purchased nearly $2.3 billion in Starlink hardware and services from the SpaceX parent last year.”
Those figures, to my understanding, include cost of services and launch in COGS.
starlink has some travel niches where it makes sense. However not many cross the ocean. military where you can't trust the nearby infrastructure is the other big one. Disaster recovery where the local system is not working isn't big enough to fund anything though it will use whatever they can get.
The cruise ship industry is $78B of revenue. He airline industry is $840B of revenue. Between the two, I think Starlink has enough customers crossing the ocean to be profitable, given how hard they drive down costs.
Has to be the cost. A reusable launch vehicle is such a ridiculously better value proposition that it creates a discrete evolution. Some things just arent feasible to do without them
> 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?
>But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability?
No. The German army wants a constellation of initially 40, and later just over 100 satellites. They do not want or need to replicate the massive Starlink numbers.
The numbers just don't add up there. With just 40-100 satellites they need to be GEO, and this means crappy transfers, big lags (200-300 absolute minimum, more 500ms), and most importantly - big, power hungry antennas.
It's a PR project to calm people down, not a real solution.
It's more tempo, less cost, resuable has faster turn around time, so more launch per unit of time. Long March 5 is ~$3000/kg, or ballpark enough to F9/kg, but disposables can't launch every few days.
Reusability. Even if money were not an issue, other nations need to build a new rocket for every launch, and it's extremely hard/impossible to catch up.
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.
Apollo mission was a national mobilisation project that's size happened once/twice in a century. And it still took 10 years. There is no willpower to do that right now in EU.
Right now we, in EU, plan to have first reusable vehicles (Ariane Next) in around 10 years - around 2035. And that is for the first vehicles, not for scaling up the production.
The Apollo mission was also starting from way behind what you would start with today though. Any aerospace engineer grad today has decades of science and engineering to stand upon.
Well no, all the routers on your subnet need to understand it.
So let’s say your internet provider owns x.x.x.x, it receives a packet directed to you at x.x.x.x.y.y… , forwards it to your network, but your local router has old software and treats all packages to x.x.x.x.* as directed to it. You never receive any medssagea directly to you evem though your computer would recognise IPv4x.
Your local machine isn't on the IPv4 internet if it doesn't have a globally routable IPv4 address.
Your home router that sits on the end of a single IPv4 address would need to know about IPv4x, but in this parallel world you'd buy a router that does.
> And it can still send outbound to a v4x address that it knows about.
No, it cannot, if there is a router on the way that is unaware of v4x, it will interrupt the signal.
Say your router is 1.2.3.4.0.0 in IPv4x (and 1.2.3.4 in IPv4). You are 1.2.3.4.0.1 . Someone sends you a message from outside. Your router only sees the previx of the address (1.2.3.4), and since it thinks it has 1.2.3.4, it reads the message and doesn't forward it further.
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