Oh… ESA has plenty of heavy lifting capacity and beyond lower orbit. That’s not the limiting factor. Launch base close to the equator and the Ariane 5 series of rocket ( comparable to lift of falcon 9) that was meant to carry the Hermes shuttle. Ariane 6 is coming along nicely. The sat internet Europe is aiming at is not as low orbit intensive as Musk’s endeavour, it’s a mix with geo stationary satellites doing a lot of heavy lifting for non critical latencies and low orbit satellites dealing with triaging to reduce latency for critical uses( in which case the data path stays close to earth ).
Next year, the site at Kiruna will be available for launching satellites and I think there was a site in Norway that tries to be ready before the Kiruna site. But I have no idea what the situation is on rockets and everything else that is need to launch a satellite.
Does the Euro Space Agency have the lift capability to get a serious quantity of satellites into orbit ?
If I’m not mistaken the main reason starlink has the jump on kuiper is because spacex has a massive capability and Bezos’ Blue Origin has struggled.
I can’t see the nazi helping a competitor get their satellites up any more than he helped Bezos.
China maybe ?
Oh… ESA has plenty of heavy lifting capacity and beyond lower orbit. That’s not the limiting factor. Launch base close to the equator and the Ariane 5 series of rocket ( comparable to lift of falcon 9) that was meant to carry the Hermes shuttle. Ariane 6 is coming along nicely. The sat internet Europe is aiming at is not as low orbit intensive as Musk’s endeavour, it’s a mix with geo stationary satellites doing a lot of heavy lifting for non critical latencies and low orbit satellites dealing with triaging to reduce latency for critical uses( in which case the data path stays close to earth ).
Next year, the site at Kiruna will be available for launching satellites and I think there was a site in Norway that tries to be ready before the Kiruna site. But I have no idea what the situation is on rockets and everything else that is need to launch a satellite.