I got pinged by a recruiter from Kuiper the other week and all I can see is that there's no way they're on track to be working in 5 years. They don't even have a stable launch platform. Would Musk sell Bezos the ride?
First of all, why wouldn't they? They are confident that their satellite tech is superior.
And second, SpaceX is dominating the commercial launch market to such a degree that they would run into antitrust issues if they were to use their launch dominance for antocompetitive behaviour.
But Bezos would probably be too proud to launch on SpaceX...
I've been ok with the tesla-only superchargers, because they are good. But it is a self-serving infrastructure and a competitive advantage.
I wonder what the reality would be about sending up bezos's satellites? It could also be a PR problem, PLUS it would undermine the bezos employees working on their launch platform.
For example, they intentionally swap hardware components between reflown boosters to better understand their behavior after multiple reuses, to the point they have individual modules that have flown more times than the current maximum number of reuses of any booster as a whole (currently at 9).
Another example, they've stopped having static fires for flight proven boosters first for Starlink, then for customer payloads too, unless the customer explicitly requests it.
It's unbelievable that "flight proven booster" turned out to be really what it says on the tin, and not just a piece of marketing speak.
That's a thing to love about SpaceX. When they first started using this phrase, it was tongue-in-cheek in a pretty obvious way. Three years later, it was no longer a joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk
And Bezos launching his satellites on someone else's rockets would be a pretty bitter pill...
Besides having the money to basically give it away for free, that could be a big value add if so.
idk maybe enabling the blanketing of the earth in ever expanding ring/echo surveillance. or a cdn though uploading huge video files to a satellite hard drive might not make any sense or actually save any MS given the inherent satellite -> earth delay.
But doing it all solid state with RAM + SSD could totally make sense, especially if you cache only the highest access items in space... Something like this could also make sense to do custom silicon/ASICs to keep the power and weight requirements down.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/microsoft-expands-its-space-...
Unfortunately storage or compute in space likely don't make much sense at least for now. Its more about direct point to point speed of light access. Where the downlink is directly onto of the cloud datacenter.