A decade ago, you’d be looking at 2mbps under good conditions, significant outages and reliability issues, and paying $50 to $100 per gigabyte.
replyStarlink is subsidized by Golden Dome
replySame was true for Iridium and Teledesic as they thought they'd win new Strategic Defense Initiative contacts in the late '90s, but that didn't happen and they all went bankrupt when that gold pot disappeared.
With the midterm election results, the same is probably happening soon with Starlink. Dems won't fund Golden Dome and Starlink satellites only last 5 years before burning up.
Read about Pete Worden and Michael D. Griffin and how they started Mars Society for the history.
SpaceX launch costs are an order of magnitude lower than those of the launches that deployed Iridium and Teledisic's satellites.
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replyYeah and the reason is that providing this kind of coverage is wildly unsustainable.
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