The slap fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has highlighted the absurdity of keeping so much of our space program and satellite internet infrastructure in the hands of a single oligarch.
SpaceX is putting up satellites for SpaceX, they’re the manufacturer and operator…
It’s definitely in their best interest to keep them working as long as possible.
That said, they’re high end communications devices, very fancy routers essentially. And like all computer technology, these things become obsolete quickly. So even if they could last 20 years, you wouldn’t want them even 10 years from now. 100 GB/s speeds might be great now, but 10 years down the road 10 TB/s could be the norm, so at that point why are you still trying to provide service with ancient hardware 100x slower than it should be.
Who’s buying satellites?
SpaceX is putting up satellites for SpaceX, they’re the manufacturer and operator…
It’s definitely in their best interest to keep them working as long as possible.
That said, they’re high end communications devices, very fancy routers essentially. And like all computer technology, these things become obsolete quickly. So even if they could last 20 years, you wouldn’t want them even 10 years from now. 100 GB/s speeds might be great now, but 10 years down the road 10 TB/s could be the norm, so at that point why are you still trying to provide service with ancient hardware 100x slower than it should be.