Ask HN: Did Google/Alphabet ever try to build a Starlink?

your comments remind me of some related, potential factors. I was at Google in the early aughts... definitely had some mega futuristics visions (including later with moonshot).

But their CFO (excellent, loved by everyone) had major traditional telco background, so GoogleFi was natural idea, despite it's limited market traction. And you are right -- Google dominant mindset was "ad supported" everything.

Separately, Musk of course was physics major. Google 99% CS. So mindsets and ideas vary (with plenty of overlap too)

It's great to be uber ambitious and futuristic, but not everyone needs to be. Some companies should excel at solving smaller problems. Like search, smaller AI etc.

Google invested in SpaceX specifically for Starlink. I hope the OP sees this.

Have you heard of google X? I think they call it the moonshot factory.

disagree. it’s only recently that google dropped X and moonshots. loon and the wing thing come to mind. sure, now, google isn’t very futurist (look how they botched AI execution), but in the time that starlink was developed, google was very much still futurist.

> speed was unheard of.

lol. only in the usa.

> At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network.

lol again. it was all about monopoly incentives.

do you even analyze, bro?

sorry if this comes off too snarky, i have good intentions. i just find your insights very far off base.

> Also, there is nothing innovative from Musk itself as far as starlink goes. More than half of research and implementation is funded by USG and Tax Payer funded rebates and concessions.

And the other half?

Isn't the system for delivering them to orbit at low cost an innovation?

> More than half of research and implementation is funded by USG and Tax Payer funded rebates and concessions.

Absolutely not. SpaceX/Starlink didn't receive any money from the government. They tried to get a 800 million dollar subsidy, but it was revoked. Even then Starlink has cost a lot more than that to design, deploy and operate.

Google Fiber's real purpose was to give large ISPs the kick they needed to take high speed fiber rollout seriously. And they (partially) succeeded at that, at least in urban areas.

Loon balloons were more like floating cell towers. Starlink is a broadband first platform that will also do some cellular sort of eventually (just beginning to roll out now).

Or was it because Larry and Elon were good friends?

Rockets are getting quite affordable, especially if you build and operate them at cost. So are satellites, when you mass produce them. If you can do both of those, you can operate an effective and likely profitable internet constellation (and various other constellation use cases if your bus is easily extended or replaced.) Amazon, with Blue Origin's help, has a decent shot. China will have an relatively easy go with it. A couple of smaller players will fill niches with smaller specialized constellations and that'll be good enough and provide internet to most people who can afford it but who live outside of fiber, cable, and cellular coverage (millions of families in the US alone and these LEO constellations are of course global by nature.)

Starlink is reportedly returning a profit now.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/ars-live-caleb-henry-j...

Any possibility of in future they can?

Facebook's Aquila was a HAPS drone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila

It has nothing to do with the monopoly. They built rockets that cost about 20 million to launch and everyone else's rockets cost about 60 million to launch. This is internal costs for the launch providers. On pricing, what customers pay, the difference is hardly so stark because SpaceX doesn't leave money on the table without good reason given their superior reliability and human capability.

That cost win was because of reuse and reuse gave them a fleet. The launch market was inelastic and they had all this launch capability and not enough customers so they became their own customer with their excess capacity and now Starlink is successful enough that commercial launch will soon take a back seat to Starlink internal launches.

The ~$40 million dollars of savings that SpaceX saves per launch is only truly significant because SpaceX was so successful at trimming costs elsewhere.

That SpaceX was able to launch 60 satellites per launch vs competitor's 6 and was able to build them for $1/4 million per satellite vs a competitors $10M made a lot more difference in terms of constellation viability than the launch cost.

Before that (2008-2010, I think) Google was also involved with o3b satellites, and later linked them to Loon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4...

Google eventually sold its stake in O3b around 2016.

Interesting! Sorry it was cancelled, and hopefully you ended up well in any case.

Would have been such a galactic halo for the Google brand. Not sure how the financial spreadsheets looked, but those don't do well in accurately quantifying brand value.

Meta tried that, but unfortunately their satellite was on one of the few rockets that blew up ...

> We shouldn't be filling low or it with all this junk that's going to be obsolete in 10 years

Starlink's cannot stay in their low Earth orbit for 10 years even if they wanted to. They have a limited amount of fuel to counteract the air drag.