Europe Wants Its Own Alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink Network

[Kiwi53]

IMO this horse has well and truly left the stable, no point in locking the door now.

If the EU wants to get into the LEO Internet business, they have at best two realistic choices:
 * Buy a major chunk of OneWeb through some EU organisation - this is a good bet, but would seriously annoy the "England must pay for Brexit" faction; or
 * Buy into Kuiper - this is risky as Kuiper may never be a viable product being late to market and lacking obvious ways to launch enough satellites to satisfy their ITU "50% in orbit" commitment.

[TrevorMonty]

IMO this horse has well and truly left the stable, no point in locking the door now.

If the EU wants to get into the LEO Internet business, they have at best two realistic choices:
 * Buy a major chunk of OneWeb through some EU organisation - this is a good bet, but would seriously annoy the "England must pay for Brexit" faction; or
 * Buy into Kuiper - this is risky as Kuiper may never be a viable product being late to market and lacking obvious ways to launch enough satellites to satisfy their ITU "50% in orbit" commitment.

Amazon will be happy to sign EU as customer but with $85B of cash reserves they don't need them as investor, . For Amazon Kuiper is strategic invest, more about AWS data security than making money off subscribers in remote locals. That doesn't mean they don't want those subscribers to help pay bills.

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[Robotical]

IMO this horse has well and truly left the stable, no point in locking the door now.

If the EU wants to get into the LEO Internet business, they have at best two realistic choices:
 * Buy a major chunk of OneWeb through some EU organisation - this is a good bet, but would seriously annoy the "England must pay for Brexit" faction; or
 * Buy into Kuiper - this is risky as Kuiper may never be a viable product being late to market and lacking obvious ways to launch enough satellites to satisfy their ITU "50% in orbit" commitment.

Amazon will be happy to sign EU as customer but with $85B of cash reserves they don't need them as investor, . For Amazon Kuiper is strategic invest, more about AWS data security than making money off subscribers in remote locals. That doesn't mean they don't want those subscribers to help pay bills.

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If the EU is worried about Starlink because of sovereignty concerns, becoming a customer of a different American company doesn't really help them.

[savantu]

There's a thing called coopetition - cooperative competition. Europe has no alternatives to Starlink. No amount of money thrown at ESA/Airbus/You name it could provide a global satellite internet network that could compete with Starlink on merits. Even Oneweb retreated from mass market to specialty market. Pretty soon it will be bankrupt again.

So why not join Starlink ? Ask Spx for the Starlink II bus and license it. Build 400-600 pcs in Europe and launch it in 2-3 strikes with Starship. Then Ariane 6, Vega whatever could maintain a 400-600pcs network. You don't need more to have a fully functional, global network. In 3 years.

[alanr74]

I suspect one of the reasons is going to be the EU can see the strategic element to it. We've seen airbus and oneweb move into EU military hookups, and that is probably a bigger worry now.

They want to be a superpower and everything that comes with it. Critical infrastructure outside their control is a big no no, and as the years pass non EU countries will be excluded from playing a part.

[Chris Bergin]

Crap thread that descended into kids throwing things in a sandpit. Trimmed and locked.