Ask HN: Did Google/Alphabet ever try to build a Starlink?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42323832

by govideo • 2 years ago

21 50 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Seems like something like Starlink would have come out of Google/Alphabet, at least at first blush. They did have Project Loon (internet access via big balloons) and talked about space tethers/elevators.

Seems like a natural idea for (early) Google. Any insights into why nothing like it happened?

talldayo• 2 years ago

Rockets are just really expensive. It's hard to get stuff into orbit cheaply, and even now I wouldn't be surprised if Starlink is a net-loss product for SpaceX still.

Google's business strategy for the longest time has revolved around selling software services. AdSense, YouTube, Google Drive - all of these are services they can scale up by turning a knob and waiting for servers to spin up. Rocket science is a whole different ball game, and one that most businesses simply can't justify regardless of the scale they're at.

ms7892• 2 years ago

Any possibility of in future they can?

asadotzler4• 2 years ago

Rockets are getting quite affordable, especially if you build and operate them at cost. So are satellites, when you mass produce them. If you can do both of those, you can operate an effective and likely profitable internet constellation (and various other constellation use cases if your bus is easily extended or replaced.) Amazon, with Blue Origin's help, has a decent shot. China will have an relatively easy go with it. A couple of smaller players will fill niches with smaller specialized constellations and that'll be good enough and provide internet to most people who can afford it but who live outside of fiber, cable, and cellular coverage (millions of families in the US alone and these LEO constellations are of course global by nature.)

Alex-Programs• 2 years ago

Starlink is reportedly returning a profit now.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/ars-live-caleb-henry-j...

orionblastar• 2 years ago

Rockets are expensive Google should team with Blue Horizons or SpaceX to use their rockets to launch their version of Starlink or rent Starlink's satellites for cheaper to establish their Internet in space.

bwock2• 2 years ago

Meta tried that, but unfortunately their satellite was on one of the few rockets that blew up ...

justinclift• 2 years ago

their satellite was on one of the few rockets that blew up

So there was some positive aspect to losing that rocket after all. :)

A world where meta has the global satellite network happening instead of current StarLink would likely be a worse one for humanity.

jakartaInd2• 2 years ago

No. They could not even get fiber rolled out to the US. They started well but it requires immense power in local and federal level that takes decades (yes, decades) to accommodate.

Starlink would have then their focus out of search and AI which they clearly understand better and dominate.

Also, there is nothing innovative from Musk itself as far as starlink goes. More than half of research and implementation is funded by USG and Tax Payer funded rebates and concessions.

xur17• 2 years ago

Also, there is nothing innovative from Musk itself as far as starlink goes. More than half of research and implementation is funded by USG and Tax Payer funded rebates and concessions.

And the other half?

Isn't the system for delivering them to orbit at low cost an innovation?

jakartaInd2• 2 years ago

Other half is funded by LPs. Yes, Musk is not putting his own money. He is the CEO but program is funded by LPs. I am not denying all innovation. Certainly, any joe-moe-schloe can't do it. But, talent pool is funded and operated in direct parternship with NASA scientists and staff. It's not that Starlink built it's own talent pool. My point is that he does not give credit whether it belongs and there are certainly more players in success of Starlink than Musk himself.

paxys2• 2 years ago

Google Fiber's real purpose was to give large ISPs the kick they needed to take high speed fiber rollout seriously. And they (partially) succeeded at that, at least in urban areas.

bwock2• 2 years ago

A lot of Google's best products was based around giving competitors a much needed kick, it seems (Gmail, Nexus One, even Chrome originally).

jiveturkey3• 2 years ago

revisionist history

fixprix2• 2 years ago

More than half of research and implementation is funded by USG and Tax Payer funded rebates and concessions.

Absolutely not. SpaceX/Starlink didn't receive any money from the government. They tried to get a 800 million dollar subsidy, but it was revoked. Even then Starlink has cost a lot more than that to design, deploy and operate.

fragmede• 2 years ago

SpaceX has received something like $20 billion from NASA and the DoD, to launch things into space and resupply the ISS and shit starting like 2008. It's fair to say Starlink has not received any funding from the government since that $800 million was rescinded though, but the line between SpaceX and Starlink's money is a bit fuzzy.

elmerfud3• 2 years ago

Starlink is a futurist project which is really what Elon Musk wants to be. For something like Google they wouldn't do this typically because as a company and their leadership they aren't futurists.

Google has typically invested in existing viable technologies and forced them into a lower price point to make them more available. Google fiber was introduced 14 years ago when that kind of speed was unheard of. At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network. Google came in and showed that it was viable to do at a price point for the residential consumer. This forced the market to adapt. Google also had a similar program with cellular service as well.

govideo4• 2 years ago

your comments remind me of some related, potential factors. I was at Google in the early aughts... definitely had some mega futuristics visions (including later with moonshot).

But their CFO (excellent, loved by everyone) had major traditional telco background, so GoogleFi was natural idea, despite it's limited market traction. And you are right -- Google dominant mindset was "ad supported" everything.

Separately, Musk of course was physics major. Google 99% CS. So mindsets and ideas vary (with plenty of overlap too)

tgma2• 2 years ago

I think you are referring to Nikesh Arora, who runs Palo Alto Networks, the telco guy. He was the business guy, not the CFO.

I don't think Look etc was seen as competitive to Google Fi at all. If anything, that would have been a distribution channel. It was entirely execution-related. Musk is much more serious at shipping than Google where X was mostly Sergey's playground of hobby projects.

jiveturkey3• 2 years ago

disagree. it’s only recently that google dropped X and moonshots. loon and the wing thing come to mind. sure, now, google isn’t very futurist (look how they botched AI execution), but in the time that starlink was developed, google was very much still futurist.

speed was unheard of.

lol. only in the usa.

At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network.

lol again. it was all about monopoly incentives.

do you even analyze, bro?

sorry if this comes off too snarky, i have good intentions. i just find your insights very far off base.

elmerfud3• 2 years ago

Considering that I've worked at ISPs since the early '90s when they were dial-ups and watched them grow up into something more, Yes I would say that I've analyzed.

You offer no evidence of any futurist thing that Google has done. At least nothing to the scale of what Elon Musk has done. Everything Google is done has been a calculated safe risk taking a small step forward in technology that was safe. It was absolutely intended to embed their position as a global leader in search and nothing else.

So you can be snarky all you want but it's more important to be correct and back up your statements with evidence. Even Google coming out with Chrome was not a futurist moonshot it was simply taking advantage of the fact that all other browsers sucked and they wanted to cement their position as a search leader and tracking what people do.

sidcool• 2 years ago

It's great to be uber ambitious and futuristic, but not everyone needs to be. Some companies should excel at solving smaller problems. Like search, smaller AI etc.

more_corn• 2 years ago

Have you heard of google X? I think they call it the moonshot factory.

leoh• 2 years ago

What they’re doing tends to be neither ambitious nor successful when you cut through the PR

inemesitaffia2• 2 years ago

Google invested in SpaceX specifically for Starlink. I hope the OP sees this.

govideo4• 2 years ago

I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.

paxys2• 2 years ago

The bottleneck was always getting satellites up in space. SpaceX has an effective monopoly on launches at this point, so it isn't a surprise that they were the first ones to establish themselves in the satellite internet market.

asadotzler4• 2 years ago

It has nothing to do with the monopoly. They built rockets that cost about 20 million to launch and everyone else's rockets cost about 60 million to launch. This is internal costs for the launch providers. On pricing, what customers pay, the difference is hardly so stark because SpaceX doesn't leave money on the table without good reason given their superior reliability and human capability.

That cost win was because of reuse and reuse gave them a fleet. The launch market was inelastic and they had all this launch capability and not enough customers so they became their own customer with their excess capacity and now Starlink is successful enough that commercial launch will soon take a back seat to Starlink internal launches.

bryanlarsen4• 2 years ago

The ~$40 million dollars of savings that SpaceX saves per launch is only truly significant because SpaceX was so successful at trimming costs elsewhere.

That SpaceX was able to launch 60 satellites per launch vs competitor's 6 and was able to build them for $1/4 million per satellite vs a competitors $10M made a lot more difference in terms of constellation viability than the launch cost.

bryanlarsen4• 2 years ago

Yes, they essentially did. Project Loon used balloons rather than satellites, but is otherwise surprisingly similar to Starlink, technically.

And as far as I've heard, a lot of Project Loon personnel ended up at SpaceX.

Also, the synergy may be a good part of the reason why Google was a large early investor in SpaceX.

https://x.company/projects/loon/

asadotzler4• 2 years ago

Loon balloons were more like floating cell towers. Starlink is a broadband first platform that will also do some cellular sort of eventually (just beginning to roll out now).

bryanlarsen4• 2 years ago

Both Starlink and Loon are phased-array based routing setups. Traditional comm satellites are neither of those, they're bent pipes. Cell towers are routed, but not phased array.

LargoLasskhyfv• 2 years ago

Do the implementation details really matter that much?

It's all some sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_platform_station ,

limited by the constraints of available technology and budget for experiments at that time.

And not that pioneering (conceptually at least) either, because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic from 199x...

returnInfinity• 2 years ago

Or was it because Larry and Elon were good friends?

dmitrygr• 2 years ago

Yes. The project was “global bit” or “gBit” and it was also looking at a satellite constellation. It got cancelled in 2014ish. This was unrelated to Loon

Source: got approval to transfer to work on it the very day it was cancelled.

kevindamm• 2 years ago

Before that (2008-2010, I think) Google was also involved with o3b satellites, and later linked them to Loon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4...

Google eventually sold its stake in O3b around 2016.

govideo4• 2 years ago

Interesting! Sorry it was cancelled, and hopefully you ended up well in any case.

Would have been such a galactic halo for the Google brand. Not sure how the financial spreadsheets looked, but those don't do well in accurately quantifying brand value.

verzali2• 2 years ago

The original effort was all the way back in 1997 by a company called Teledesic. But it was essentially abandoned after other satcom constellations like Iridium when bankrupt.

Loon was an interesting attempt. I'm surprised we don't see any one trying to make HAPS (high altitude solar powered drones, essentially) work for communications. In principle they can do the same as satellites but more effectively and at better latency. A good HAPS network over the US could probably offer better than Starlink service for cheaper.

basementcat2• 2 years ago

Facebook's Aquila was a HAPS drone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila

verzali2• 2 years ago

Do you know why they haven't taken it further? The page talks about Zephyr drones as a follow-up, but I can't find much about them actually doing any further tests.

stuaxo• 2 years ago

We shouldn't be filling low or it with all this junk that's going to be obsolete in 10 years.

What a huge waste of energy, orbital space and pollution of the upper atmosphere when these eventually come back down, Elon needs to stop.

bryanlarsen4• 2 years ago

We shouldn't be filling low or it with all this junk that's going to be obsolete in 10 years

Starlink's cannot stay in their low Earth orbit for 10 years even if they wanted to. They have a limited amount of fuel to counteract the air drag.

Ask HN: Did Google/Alphabet ever try to build a Starlink?

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