These are service providers, not rent seekers. By focusing on OpEx above all else, they missed an opportunity to build starlink first. They were doing the right thing as long as nothing ever changed. Now they’re forced to consolidate further and are probably going to disappear.

This would only apply if they decided to expand into LEO or MEO.

But if the board decided to stick to Geostationary orbit, they were doing the smart thing by treating it like a real estate business. Because it is literally real estate.

Yes and no. They also dragged their feet on high-throughput Ka-band spacecraft with smaller spot beams. ViaSat built and launched ViaSat-1 while SES was still ordering satellites designed around analog video broadcast.

In the terrestrial real-estate analogy, this seems to me like missing out on potential returns because you built the wrong type of building on the land you own.

If space-based telecom moves from GEO to LEO, then there’s no reason for GEO telecoms to exist anymore.

Satellite TV is probably not going away anytime soon.

Dish and DirecTV are rapidly bleeding customers, the latter is not planning to launch any new birds for this dying business. It might only be a decade before this industry consolidates further into the remaining satellites, with some large providers going extinct entirely.

The real estate would still be worth quite a bit, so even in the worst case they will just move on to be literal real estate holding companies.

That just saying that 'in this massive growth market, we are totally ok with losing the waste majority of market share until we are mostly irrelevant'.

Yes. But Tesla turned it into a competition between a company that invests in real estate and a company that operates highly profitable stores on the real estate.

The product they sell is a highly complex product that took half a decade of development and substantial upfront investment in technology and organization.

The difference here is that SES has to get up front investment to buy productive asset that could then make money. The never had to do a huge up front investment in technology, including a whole butt-load of very complex very unique hardware and software.

And that's not enough, because the terminals are just as big a part of having a functional LEO platform as the sats are. And that again requires a very complex development and a very large upfront investment in production.

Literally non of this stuff, neither the rocket, nor the sats, nor the operations, nor the terminals are a commodity in any sense.

You can go to a space company and ask to buy some propulsion for such a sat, no problem. But if you tell them 'we would like to buy 5000' your gone get back blank stares. Nobody just has something like that just laying around. And then you go down the line of every single part on the sat, no provider actually has the capabilities you need, and your gone have to get involved with financing all of that at least partially.

My real estate doesn't move though. So while maybe applicable to a GEO stationary orbit, it doesn't really fit LEO oribts.

Orbits themselves don't move, they're time-invariant (short term, but so is the ground). Six numbers are all it takes to define an orbit; if you put something on it, it stays there and blocks it off - like building on a plot of land.

pedants going to pedant. objects in orbits move so that you can have multiple objects in the same orbit. you can't do that with real estate. they have the opposite with time shares where there's one object that different people get to use at different times. there is no real estate where for a portion of the day it is one building, but then it is a different building later.

this is the entire basis of timeshare real estate. it's not that hard to see how the metaphor holds up, dude.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but your homes are spinning around the earth's axis once a day (at the same rate as a geosynchronous satellite, in fact!)

Anyway, Starlink wants to scale up to 42,000 satellites. I can't imagine that's anywhere close to the maximum number that could fit in their altitude range. After all, if arranged in a grid, that's just ~ 200 x 200 satellites. The earth's surface area is many orders of magnitude larger than that, and the satellites are occupying a larger (and much thicker) orbital shell.

dude, that's exactly what i said. better context reading before going off with dude bro comments perhaps?

Actually Space Law is pretty wild, it’s a whole thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law