A European, Karl Benz, invented the motor car. But it was the Americans who made it into a production-line product. It took 27 years after Karl Benz unveiled the first commercially sold car in Germany before Henry Ford put the Model T into mass production in Michigan in 1913.
A similar thing may now be happening in the satellite industry, where artisan processes are being replaced by mass production.
GEO satellites have been produced by a high-tech artisan industry in small-scale processes. A lot of GEO satellites have been made in the U.S. but also in Europe at high-tech factories in France, Germany, Italy and the U.K.
They were made with great care and precision. They needed to be — one slip-up in production and they would be entirely wasted. No one can replace the screws once in orbit.
Arguably the first commercial GEO artisan satellite, Intelsat-1, was built by Hughes Aircraft in the U.S. for Intelsat and launched in 1962.
The production line era started in 2018, when the first OneWeb and Starlink satellites were manufactured. So the satellite artisan era has lasted more than a half century.
But that era of dominance is coming to an end and mass production has taken much of its place.
Seattle is taking that new role in satellites, with Amazon having built its own factory not far from that of SpaceX in Redmond outside the city.
Together in 2025 these plants produced more than 3,000 Starlink satellites and probably several hundred for Amazon as it ramped up. That total is above two-thirds of the year’s worldwide relevant satellite tally.
Commercial GEO spacecraft orders for the year were in contrast around no more than two dozen.
Satellite costs drop with mass production
The latest artisan satellite, Viasat-3 F2, which was launched in November 2025, was probably one of the crowning achievements of the ilk, with its 1,000+ spot beams and sophisticated processing. To give a very conservative estimate of its value, the partial loss at launch of its precursor, Viasat-3 F1, led to an insurance claim of $420 million for about 90% of its capacity.
Each Falcon 9 Starlink launch adds more than 1.5 times this amount of network capacity. Around 28 Starlink v2 minis are launched together on a single Falcon 9. These launches happen about twice a week.
SpaceX has not released cost figures for the v2 minis, which it is currently launching, and there are only estimates to go on. But estimates from serious sources do not generally go above $1.3 million a pop. With $36 million for the total payload this equates to close to $21/Gbps against $450/Gbps for Viasat-3. That is 21 times less.
The price gap in orbit incidentally also remains a yawning one. SpaceX has referred at different times to launch costs for internal use of Falcon 9 at between $20 and $25 million. Launch cost for an outside customer would be closer to $70 million. The ULA Atlas V launch for Viasat-3 F2 cost around $150 million.
To a certain extent though, the price gap comparison is unfair because GEO satellites last in orbit much longer than LEO satellites, so the price gap is nearer 1:7, rather than 1:21.
Scale and volume have produced a radically different business
This combination of radically lower costs and scale for LEO are the real achievements of Musk in satellite communications.
LEO probably was not commercially workable earlier on. The satellite industry largely did not believe that LEO could become a big viable business in consumer broadband. It required too much investment, and its unit costs were too high. LEO satellites spent a lot of their time whizzing above parts of the world where they would not be used.
Musk brought the cost way down and then built such a large system that he is now able to fully tap into the price sensitivity of demand – the demand for a reasonably priced service with a good product (and better than satellite broadband via GEO).
A niche for artisan in the modern era
In cars, European producers adapted to mass production and took back a lot of their local markets long term.
Meanwhile the satellite industry has a big and growing government and military side. After a massive battering in commercial satellite communications from the disruption from Musk (and it does mainly come from Musk) there is a silver lining in geopolitics, as rising Western defense budgets are pushing new funds into the space industry. There is renewed interest in smaller national sovereignty GEO spacecraft.
Perhaps most of the European satellite makers will survive.
In Europe, the Bugatti car line has now been resurrected as the epitome of the modern artisan car, and one of the most expensive.
Simon Baker is a Senior Research Director in London at global IT market research and consultancy company IDC.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not necessarily represent the opinions of Fierce Network.