But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX.
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).
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.
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".
There's a lot of open source intelligence about SpaceX rocket designs available.
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.
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.
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.
0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
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.
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.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-much-does-starlink-make-this-...
Those are revenue figures.
> 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.
And also net income.
> just makes the problem worse
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
$70mm per year for 22 birds [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-space-force-contract
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.
???
Those figures, to my understanding, include cost of services and launch in COGS.
But does a military really need that many to get the necessary capability? Would a smaller constellation be sufficient, especially without competing civilian users?
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".
[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi...
[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...
Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
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.)
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.
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.
But a military is going to be fine with an antenna that costs $3000.