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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

They won't launch on spacex, for sure. And there literally is no one else offering the capabilities to do it. The article mentions 10 billion dollars. That is only about 50 launches with the "competition" of SpaceX. Ok, you might get a discount, but still you would have to place 20+ satellites into a launch vehicle and have pretty much one launch per month to meet the requirements. "vaporware" sounds about right to me, tbh.

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India and Russia can also provide a much cheaper alternative to ULA.

You assume that Amazon has to use a US launch provider which isn’t the case.

I do not know that India has the capacity. Russia could, potentially, reduce the cost of Angara to about what an expendable Falcon 9 costs. Call it $50M per launch. But then you have to ship the satellites to Russia. Amazon still need to acquire 6 launches a year (assuming they can launch 60 satellites at once, which is totally unclear atm). That would be more than the currently planned launches and might require substantial investment into the production facilities.

So far there are at least five "maybes" in the equation:

1. amazon launching from Russia in large numbers 2. Khrunichev lowering the price of a single Angara significantly 3. Khrunichev being able to produce enough rockets in the first place 4. amazon being able to stack their satellites into the Angara 5. amazon being able to produce enough working satellites in the remaining time frame.

For me that still counts as vaporware.

Why not? The money is green and if SpaceX is convinced they could still beat a competitor with Starlink might as well make some extra dough?

If Starlink can't beat Kupier they're dead anyway those satellites will go up eventually.

> if SpaceX is convinced they could still beat a competitor

That's not really the point though. Amazon is a fierce (and many times dirty) competitor to be up against.

If you're competing directly with AWS then you need to take every advantage you can get. If you're trying to build a global satellite network to provide internet access and not having launch capabilities will delay AWS long enough to get a foothold in the market then you take it.

T-minus X: "Starlink: offering free transit to Azure & GCP."

Eventually someone's going to launch an orbital data center to cut down on round trip latency. You think AWS bandwidth is expensive now lol.

Thought occurred to me, but I imagine heat dispersion would be cost-prohibitive vs terrestrial options.

I suppose {sat -> orbital DC -> sat} (latency) or {sat -> orbital DC processing -> ground} (transmission bandwidth) are the primary use cases? Maybe security?

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