On Monday morning, Spacex completed its 100th launch so far this year. But aboard the Falcon 9 rocket there were no new Starlink satellites, but a lot of 24 competition satellites. How have we reached a point where Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, rivals on so many fronts, collaborate in space?
A little context. Starlink has been growing without opposition for six years. At this time, Spacex has deployed more than 8,000 satellites, consolidating an almost absolute domain of the satellite broadband Internet market.
Now, a competitor with a comparable financial muscle has entered the scene: Amazon‘s Kuiper project. The company founded by Jeff Bezos has begun to display its own megaconstellation to offer high -speed connections worldwide and compete directly with the Elon Musk service.
Time against. The main challenge for Kuiper is time. The license granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States requires having half of its constellation (that is, 1,618 satellites of a total of 3,232) before July 2026. Unlike Spacex, which has a complete vertical integration, Amazon does not manufacture its own rockets.
To fulfill the deadline, the technological giant made in 2022 the “greater commercial acquisition of history of history”, signing contracts with ULA to use its atlas V and Vulcan rockets, with Arianespace to use the European rocket Ariane 6, and with Blue Origin, the aerospace company of Jeff Bezos himself, to use the gigantic new Glenn rocket. The problem is that most of these pitchers are new and have suffered important delays.
They are just business. Although Bezos tried to prevent Amazon from using SpaceX services, the most honest option with shareholders was to hire several Falcon 9 rockets, which thanks to their unique reuse capacity usually offers the lowest Price per kilogram put into orbit.
Spacex has already shown that he is willing to launch satellites of his competitors. Between 2022 and 2024 he launched four lots of satellites for Eutelsat Oneweb, his European rival, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine took the Soyuz and proton rolling from the market. For Spacex, this is a round business because the money of its competitors is pocketed, which can reinvest in its own satellite constellation.
But there is another reason. A strategic issue that goes beyond the launch business. The coin of covert change is the increasingly saturated radio spectrum. According to an investigation of the Wall Street Journal, Spacex has used its dominant position in the release market to press its rivals and obtain a crucial advantage for Starlink: spectrum rights.
The radio spectrum is the electromagnetic wave set that are used for wireless communications. It is a finite, invisible and absolutely essential resource for satellite constellations to send and receive data without interference. Governments around the world, through organizations such as FCC in the United States, are responsible for assigning rights to use it.
Spacex needs more spectrum. And he needs it desperately to be able to serve the more than four million Starlink users as it continues to expand. According to the Journal, Musk’s company would have asked companies such as Oneweb and Kepler Communications to give him part of his spectrum rights as a condition for launching his satellites.
Although Spacex denies it, the report details how Oneweb, after running out of the Russian rockets, reached an agreement with Spacex that included “spectrum concessions” to ensure the releases it needed.
Elon Musk’s web. This strategy places Spacex competitors in an incredibly difficult situation. It is a dilemma that the analyst Tim Farrar describes how to “carefully choose.” Companies such as Echostar or GlobalStar have had to decide between going through the Spacex ring, giving competitive advantages, or paying more for slower access to space with other rocket companies. If there are.
Ast Spacemobile, who had opted for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, found that the Bezos rocket would not be ready on time and its satellites, much heavier than expected, will have to wait.
Apple’s case. In 2022, Musk had offered Apple exclusive access to Spacex for 5,000 million dollars, an offer that Apple rejected. Apple ended up closing an agreement with GlobalStar for its satellite emergency service, but later, the delay in the launch of GlobalStar’s satellites by Spacex seems to have benefited Starlink.
The explanation of the delay and the renegotiation of the launch contract seem to have to do with Apple ending up reaching an agreement to offer Starlink Direct-Cell on the iPhone 13, a model that is not compatible with the Globalstar service. This gave Starlink an advantage in the race for the cell connection at a time when Apple already debated internally if he could compete with the rhythm of Spacex.
The giant Starlink. In the end, each launch of a competition or agreement satellite by the spectrum becomes a tactical victory for Elon Musk. Not only does it charge for the service, reinforcing the finances of a company whose income is about to overcome NASA’s budget, but uses its domain to ensure the most vital resource for the future of global communications.
Imagen | SpaceX
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