In under a decade one company put more satellites in orbit than everyone else in history combined. Here is how fast, and what it took.
The scale is hard to hold in your head. For sixty years, putting a satellite up was a national-scale undertaking measured in dozens per year. Starlink now launches in batches, dozens at a time, on reusable rockets flying week after week. The constellation went from zero to thousands faster than most people updated their mental model of what a satellite even is.
The enabling trick is on the ground: reuse. When the same booster flies again and again, the cost per satellite collapses, and launch stops being the bottleneck.
The result is a single operator holding a majority of everything humans have flying. That concentration is the part worth watching: it reshapes rural broadband, but it also crowds low orbit and hands one company an outsized say over an increasingly busy shell of space.
Six years took Starlink from an idea to the default answer for internet where wires never reached. The open question is who gets a say over a sky that now mostly belongs to one company.