China aims to launch nearly 13,000 satellites to ‘suppress’ Elon Musk’s Starlink

This reeks of "announcementware." Startlink is already most of what's in orbit and currently working. Falcon 9 has way more launch capacity than current satellite construction other than Starlink can use. But without a reusable rocket, the Chinese will have a difficult time launching a constellation almost 3X larger than Starlink is today.

Satellite size and capacity are also an issue. I doubt Starlink can scale without next gen sats that weigh 5X as much, and that have laser links among satellites so that Starlink is not bounded by availability of ground stations (some of this is in "v1.5 Starlink sats). These sats need Starship. China has nothing like Starship, certainly not aimed at being low-cost. (Not that Starship is guaranteed to work or meet cost targets.)

the headline on this article is really an egregious example of the negative impact of sub-editors on journalism. The implication is that China is sending up LEO satellites in order to suppress Starlink, when the article says nothing of the sort, rather that the intent was to create a rival system and not have Starlink dominate the (literally) space and therefore the market. But hey, China bad gets clicks and upvotes

More like US's army defense system, the US is building a giant fleet of satellites with spying capabilities

I find it interesting that the press keep saying "Musk's Starlink" in their headlines, they really want to make sure you don't question the association

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-space-exploration-spacex-...

We got a taste of it in Ukraine