OneWeb filed for bankruptcy and is asking bankruptcy court for permission to borrow between $75 million and $300 million. SoftBank wants to give OneWeb the loan. SoftBank supplied $2 billion of the $3.4 billion in equity and debt that OneWeb raised.
Softbank is forecasting $16.7 billion in 2019 losses for its $100 billion Vision Fund.
OneWeb launched 74 of a planned 648 small broadband satellites into low Earth orbit.
OneWeb plans to sell it spectrum assets. Amazon or Facebook are the most likely potential buyers.
SOURCES- Space News
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Vertical integration is one of the standard methods of beating and absorbing competition.
You would be fine competing with someone who not only has their own satellite launchers, but you also have to pay them to launch yours? Oh, and they have almost monopoly-level price control on those launches, and launch scheduling and priority.
Who do you think would be in a better position regarding end-user service pricing?
Why do you think some/any company cannot compete with SpaceX?
It doesn’t matter if Starlink’s launch costs are zero and others are paying Falcon or Soyuz retail prices, the latter only need to be able to fund that cost.
The biggest problem with SoftBank having such a large piggy bank is they tend to overpay for everything, that formula never fails.
At the time of the Falcon Heavy launch I was visiting KSC and it turned out that there was a conference of OneWeb vendors. The one question in my mind was, “How in the world will you be able to compete with SpaceX”?