this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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The tradeoff being done here that makes me really excited for the future of astronomy is that Starlink is funding the development of Starship, which will in turn make space-based telescopy a hugely easier thing to do. So I'd gladly hand off a bit of spectrum pollution here on Earth (which comes with vastly improved global internet access) for Starship's launch capacity.
So being dependent upon the company that ruins the sky on earth but offers to get your science off planet (if starship will even work as promised in the end) is a good thing?
If Starship doesn't work as promised then there will be no Starlink constellation in the long run. The two projects are dependent on each other. Starlink V2 satellites are necessary for the long-term profitability of the constellation, and Starlink V2 satellites can only be launched by Starship.
The "dependency" is only a "dependency" in the sense that SpaceX Starship will be insanely cheap to use compared to any existing competitor. Maybe some of those other well-established space launch companies should have been working on making their launchers better too. I'm sure they'll be scrambling to do so now that they face actual competition.
Maybe, however last time I checked starship still had significant issues that have some chance of not getting resolved and flacon 9 launches are still quite expensive but that may have changed since then
SpaceX is a for-profit company, so you can expect them to price their launches only a little bit lower than their competitors even if the cost of the launch is dramatically lower. That gives them the most profit. If you want the price to go down significantly then you'll need to find someone else who can start actually reusing their rockets to get their costs into the same ballpark as SpaceX.
What specific significant issues did you hear that Starship had? NASA is confident enough in their chances that the success of the Artemis program was literally dependent on Starship being successful (the human lander is a modified Starship), and the design has changed a lot even since their previous test launch.
I don't think starship is going to be priced like that. They've long been saying it's going to dramatically reduce cost to orbit for everyone.
Will they make it more expensive than what it would cost them for a starlink v2 launch, sure, but it's not gonna be priced per kg just below the next cheapest non resuseable rocket either.