>>1870996>Why does he need 42,000? Is there some sort of profit motive for the excessive amount?He needs 42,000 because mega-constellations are a fucking stupid way to build fundamental data infrastructure.The nodal redundancy you need to insure network uptime in an LEO shell is absolutely off the charts, and you have to remember that those 42,000 satellites, in the current design, will barely service ~100 Million people over the entire fucking network.
His real motivation is -
1) Orbital real estate. If he memes this shit into being defined as "critical infrastructure" by the international community, you won't be able to insert into a orbit with a 1:1,000,000 collision probability of any single star-link satellite. LEO below 400 km literally becomes his.
2) International EM spectrum real estate - virtually no single service on the planet has merited universal Band allocation across every country and region. Countries don't even agree fully on mobile phone allocations. Wifi/bluetooth has a universal definition and a technical allocation, but that's a definition managed by hundreds of stakeholders, and it generally comes with severe power level restrictions. If Musk memes starlink allocations into the ITU spec (Which the FCC already applied for on his behalf last year), he will own the first single private entity to have a near-zero restriction spectrum allocation all to itself.
>Probably future proofing.No it isn't. it's past-proofing. The issues with megaconstellation infrastructure are well demonstrated.
