Amazon Buys Globalstar For $10.8 Billion, Moving To Expand Its Satellite Internet Service

Amazon is buying satellite communications company Globalstar for $10.8 billion to expand its Leo satellite-internet network and compete more directly with SpaceX's Starlink. The deal also includes a partnership with Apple to support satellite connectivity for iPhones and Apple Watches, with Amazon planning voice, data, and messaging services starting in 2028. The New York Times reports: Leo was Amazon's move to enter the market for beaming high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. That is an arena dominated by Elon Musk's SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite-internet service. Starlink, which has thousands of satellites in orbit, already serves several million customers around the world. This month, SpaceX filed to go public in what is shaping up to be one of the largest-ever initial public offerings. Mr. Musk has valued SpaceX -- which has landed contracts with federal agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense -- at more than $1 trillion. Other companies are racing to catch up to what Mr. Musk has built for space.

Globalstar, founded in 1991, is a Louisiana-based global telecommunications company. It operates networks of low-Earth orbiting satellites to provide internet connectivity to customers. Paul Jacobs, Globalstar's chief executive, said in a statement that together, the two companies "will advance innovations in digital connectivity."

Will they though?

[saloomy]

Paul Jacobs, Globalstar's chief executive, said in a statement that together, the two companies "will advance innovations in digital connectivity."

Or will they just ME ALSO what SpaceX already has achieved with global high-speed low-latency bandwidth?

Re: Will they though?

[FudRucker]

This is Amazon.com
it will be great until Amazon starts injecting advertising into people's browsers, text messages, and email, and whatever else they can adulterate with spam

Re:

[Archfeld]

damn I miss fuddrucker's. They make some of the best burgers ever....None in Az sadly...

Re: Will they though?

[FudRucker]

I am in Arizona right now camping a few miles north of phoenix, duckduckgo shows three in the Phoenix area, I usually spend the summers in the Flagstaff area and winters in the desert near Yuma

Re:

[Archfeld]

I live in Yuma, looking after my retired parents here.
https://www.fuddruckers.com/locations
shows nothing in AZ.
Though Fat Daddy's in yuma is a really good burger.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Starlink isn't the be-all and end-all of satellite internet and cellular connectivity. It's also bad to have a monopoly on the service.

Closer to Kessler syndrome

[Misagon]

The Kessler syndrome [wikipedia.org] is when the low Earth orbit is so full of fast-moving space junk that the orbit is unusable, and space travel has become too dangerous to be feasible.
This was just a theory when it was presented in 1978.

In 2009, he warned that the debris environment had already become unstable.
Since then, the number of objects in LEO has increase a lot with constellations of small communication satellites such as StarLink.
Satellites and the space station regularly have to use maneuvering thrusters to avoid space debris.

Last year, scientists published a warning that a solar storm could knock out satellites' ability to evade space debris: and as little as three days of downtime could allow cascading space debris collisions to lead to the Kessler Syndrome.

I think we instead need a global moratorium against these kind of satellite constellations, until such a time that the space debris has cleared.
Launching them would be highly irresponsible.

Re:

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

Or force them to keep their constellations lower, which means the satellites have to carry more fuel to fight drag, but if they fail they'll just deorbit in a few years. You can go a bit lower and use air-breathing ion thrusters as well, and those will deorbit even faster.

The big danger is the stuff in higher orbits that takes 100-1000 years to come down.

Re:

[Tailhook]

Or force them to keep their constellations lower

They're strongly incentivized to do this without whatever force you think is necessary. Also, it's not the case that low orbit is the solve-all you appear to believe. When collisions occur, shrapnel distributes in all directions, some of which are longer, higher orbits.

Re:

[cusco]

Starlink satellites have an expected lifetime of 5 years, a bit less if they lose power and maneuverability. Most collisions would reduce that even further. Kuipier is similar, as is the Russian constellation (not sure about the EU and Chinese ones, but I'd be surprised if they weren't similar.)

Re:

[xpyr]

I think the word moratorium is incorrect here. A moratorium is a voluntary agreement that doesn't actually require both parties to do what the moratorium says they should be doing.

Lobbyists love moratoriums because it makes it sound they are doing something, when it is nothing more then a delay tactic, and there is no penalty when either party doesn't do what they had agreed to do.

Imagine

[SlashbotAgent]

Imagine having so much money that you could make such a massive purchase mistake -- one that is painfully obviously a mistake -- and it having no effect on you at all.

Buying Global Star to compete with StarLink is akin to me buying a single truck load of Intel 486DX 25MHz computers for millions of dollars, to compete with AWS.

Global Star is antiquated low performance space junk. There are ~55 Global Star satellites. All of them are low bandwidth underperforming junk in comparison to Star Link's new and high performance satellites. There are ~10,000 StarLink satellites.

Apple had bought a chunk of Global Star to try and enable iPhone satellite service. At least texting. Apple must be thrilled to unload that bad investment on Amazon.
The only aspect of this buy that can make any sense to me would be that Amazon is preventing StarLink from acquiring the radio spectrum that Global Star uses.

Re:

[The-Ixian]

Could their be any value in using the Global Star satellites as back-end infrastructure instead of using the meshing structure that Star Link utilizes?

Re:

[saloomy]

No, they are buying the spectrum.

Re: Imagine

[FudRucker]

I read an article where cellular services can be deployed by blimp which is much more affordable than satellites and easier to replace because they can be brought down gently and repaired and put back up

You're not buying the company

[rsilvergun]

You're buying the patents and the engineers. You will pick through the engineers and there will be some people who know what they're doing but on hamstrung by a variety of issues. And you will get a patent portfolio from those engineers that you can use to defend yourself as you build your own Internet satellite company.

You are right that being able to blow 10 billion on just that though is pretty fucking insane. But as an added bonus you are making sure that there are no competitors besides the one big

Re:

[cusco]

When I worked at Amazon it was the most amazing environment I'd ever worked in. They had so much cash on hand that 'Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks' could be an actual business plan. My boss was once told, "Failure is an option", and we saw that was a reality. A very talented PM that we worked with managed a multi-million dollar project which crashed and burned through no fault of his team (they couldn't get access to the hardware drivers). Anywhere else that would have meant the end of their

Re:

[Tailhook]

It's possible they're buying allocated frequency bands.

Exactly

[vladoshi]

The bandwidth is barely 1990s level. SPOT's use of Globalstar is infamous for slow text messages. Even with the $400m Apple SOS is limited to text message for this reason,

Stop M&A for big companies

[bradley13]

M&A is a disease. Behemoths like Alphabet, Meta, Google and Amazon should be broken up. They certainly should not be allowed to buy up other companies, thus eliminating competition while making themselves even bigger. Remember 2008? "Too big to fail"? These companies are bigger than any banks ever were.

Set two thresholds for annual, global turnover. Exceed the first, lower threshold and M&A is forbidden. Exceed the second, higher threshold and divestment or break-up is mandatory. Violating either rule results in criminal charges. No long, drawn-out anti-trust cases. Just simple numbers that lead to automatic consequences.

Re:

[gtall]

Get ready for 2008 V2. The R's in Congress and that moron in the WH have been busy getting rid of the regulations that 2008 spawned. It won't take them long to discover new and important ways to tank the economy.

And the alleged Dept. of Justice is now working to remove the convictions of the Jan. 6 rioters. So we can expect a redux of that event as well.

Remember: el Bunko destroys everything he touches. There is a limit to how much he can destroy on his own. If he tanks the U.S. as a nation, then global fin

Once again SpaceX's IPO is a scam

[rsilvergun]

And it's going to be a disaster for your 401k because that's the only place that big of a scam can be dumped. You are the rube you on musk is planning to bilk so he can be the world's first trillionaire.

SpaceX has a basic problem. There are not enough proper launch customers in order for them to grow. The only other launch customer they have that could potentially grow is muskrat's own satellite internet company.

That market is basically already tapped out. There just aren't enough people who can aff

Cost to LEO

[kqc7011]

SpaceX claims $1,500 per pound to LEO. Ariane 6 claims $2,000 per pound to LEO. Which one is a more accurate claim?

Bandwidth?

[PPH]

Globalstar is low bandwidth stuff, isn't it? Not really the same market as Starlink.

That's not to say it's bad. There may be a market for low bandwidth, high latency comms that doesn't have to chase a bunch of autistic gamers.

Re:

[cusco]

There are also ground stations, bandwidth licenses, patents and engineers that they will be acquiring, I think that's the real value here rather than their paltry few outdated satellites.

I don't think it will be enough

[daninaustin]

It's going to be really hard to compete with Starlink... they have 10k+ satellites and are constantly launching more. Amazon/Blue Origin can't compete with the launch costs of SpaceX, even if they use SpaceX. they have zero hope of competing on numbers, and their technology isn't really going to give them an advantage. The marginal cost per user for Starlink is likely close to zero (infrastructure is in place worldwide, each county is close to free, aside from adding some base stations.) Profit is

$11 billion??

[haruchai]

while total annual revenue has been improving considerably in recent years - 2024 was 2x that of 2020, this company has never made money.
in 13 of the past 20 years, negative net income has been $50 million or worse, several times exceeding $200 million

The solution is a giant space vacuum cleaner

[Mirnotoriety]

The solution is a giant space vacuum cleaner.

Spaceballs "Mega Maid" scene [youtube.com]