Really? You can put up 50 starlinks at a time for tens of millions of dollars, whereas asats need a more expensive an maneuverable kill vehicle and a launch for each one with lots more complicated targeting and maneuvering. It’s pretty hard to track and follow something down moving so fast through space and hit it. Plus Russia just doesn’t have the launch capacity to put up that much mass to orbit.
Not to mention that SpaceX has designed things so that they can piggyback starlink deployments on the back of other commercial launches. So, for example, AT&T pays them $25 million to launch a new telecom satellite, and they toss in another dozen or so starlink satellites along with it.
AT&T pays for the majority of the launch costs and starlink benefits from it.
Really? You can put up 50 starlinks at a time for tens of millions of dollars, whereas asats need a more expensive an maneuverable kill vehicle and a launch for each one with lots more complicated targeting and maneuvering. It’s pretty hard to track and follow something down moving so fast through space and hit it. Plus Russia just doesn’t have the launch capacity to put up that much mass to orbit.
Not to mention that SpaceX has designed things so that they can piggyback starlink deployments on the back of other commercial launches. So, for example, AT&T pays them $25 million to launch a new telecom satellite, and they toss in another dozen or so starlink satellites along with it.
AT&T pays for the majority of the launch costs and starlink benefits from it.