Comment by lxgr

> Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit.

Arguably Starlink's special sauce is quantity of satellites and massively higher bandwidths combined with high-gain, electronically steered beams on both sides (i.e. terminal and satellite).

None of these are net-new as technologies: We've had LEO based telecommunications satellites for over two decades now (Iridium and Globalstar, the former of which even has in-space forwarding as well), as well as directional beams on both sides, but rarely all in one system and never at this scale.