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Starlink's disruption of the space industry


Like many five-year-olds, Starlink celebrated its birthday with a big candle. In its case, it was a Falcon 9 that lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on May 23, placing 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.

If successful, it would allow SpaceX to enter a far larger market than launch, generating significantly more revenue to satisfy investors and fuel founder Elon Musk’s visions of sending humans to Mars. The rise of Starlink, though, disrupted plans by those operators to rely more on broadband services as SpaceX attracted customers with high-bandwidth offerings at latencies far lower than what GEO systems could achieve. During an earnings call in February, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck started musing about operating a constellation, rather than just building and launching satellites for others, citing the much larger market for providing space services like communications.

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