alt Hacker NewsThe thing is - without Falcon9 / Starship they really cannot - both China and EU are ~10-20 years (sic) behind SpaceX, and without thousands of satellites on LEO you just cannot have terminal similar to SpaceX's.
(And don't get me started on how bad Iris2 is/will be. It's a program that EU has to shut down discussions on how terribly behind we are.
The last time I checked, a year ago, EU's plans were to have first Falcon9-level flights around 2035 (!!!), and that was assuming no delays, so absurdly optimistic. Adding a few years for ramping up the production, 2040 is the earliest we can have optimistically something like Starlink from 2020.
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Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go".
suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.
So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.
And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.
SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.
All of that, and the funny thing is /that is the easy part/. Moving payloads to space is just incredibly expensive, but not fundamentally hard in the same way that post-launch coordination of satellite constellations and RF tuning to support things like mobile connectivity are (I can connect to Starlink satellites from my iPhone through T-Mobile).
Can you explain what makes Falcon9 / Starship special (or needed) to launch these satellites? China, India, EU, Japan etc. all have the capability to launch satellites. So why is a Falcon9 / Starship a particular requirement?
The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea.
Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.
China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.
The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.
The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.
More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].
China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.
And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.
I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".
[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi...
[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...
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I'd broadly agree that EU is pretty behind the curve. But I think China is probably only ~5 years max behind the curve in terms of Starlink.
But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX.
I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).