SpaceX Dominates Satellite Internet, Will Reach 4 Million Users This Week – But Will Anyone Care?
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network is about to hit an arbitrary milestone, with its customer count expected to surge past 4 million, according to company President Gwynne Shotwell’s boastful claims. So what? Who cares if SpaceX is dominating the already-mediocre satellite internet market?
The truth is, Starlink’s incredible growth rate is just a reflection of the industry’s utter lack of innovation. SpaceX’s constellation of over 6,000 satellites is a behemoth of redundancy, clogging our skies with unnecessary hardware and wasting precious resources. Meanwhile, the company’s rival, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, is still languishing in development hell.
And what’s the grand plan behind Starlink? To generate a whopping $6.6 billion in revenue this year, supposedly to fund the development of Elon Musk’s pet project, Starship. Great, because what the world really needs is more oversized rockets and unnecessary satellite orbits. The real question is, what’s the value proposition of Starlink aside from being a cash cow for SpaceX?
The once-thriving satellite industry is now a stagnant dinosaur, with legacy players Viasat and SES scrambling to keep up with Starlink’s rapid expansion. It’s a David-vs-Goliath battle that’s more about marketing might than actual innovation. SpaceX’s dominance is a fait accompli, but let’s not pretend it’s anything more than a momentary distraction from the crushing lack of progress in space exploration.
So, while SpaceX may be celebrating this "milestone," let’s not get too worked up about it. We should be focusing on meaningful advancements in space technology, not just the latest megadeal for a dodgy satellite internet service.
