Starlink was originally a google idea, originally a sister project to Loon, the founder quit and brought his team to SpaceX and then got fired by Elon. Everyone who repeats this story to me says it was because "Elon doesn't suffer fools" but YMMV.

Global Bit didn't originate at Google X, it was an acqui-hire of O3B which later spun back out to become OneWeb.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat_OneWeb

There was definitely some weird cross pollination with SpaceX happening.

IIRC first version was very overengineered and team was replaced that built a simpler one.

Who was that? Can't find anything about it.

Maybe this: "top designer Mark Krebs, who worked in Google's satellite and aircraft division"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-insight-i...

I think that might be it - it was called "Project Air" circa 2011-2015.

Yeah, so much progress can be done when you can overwork your employees to unsafe levels and treat them like dirt. What a fantastic company where you are paid less if you are black or a woman.

If that's progress, I don't want any of it.

this completely discounts dozens of startups and universities that pioneered cubesats, swarm deployments, and engineers who developed amazing RF tech, not to mention the companies that SpaceX acqui-hired to develop this technology.

it's really interesting how even here on HN there's such fanboyism. Starlink D2D isn't even a thing yet and yet D2D already exists in the world.