In March 1994, Craig McCaw and Bill Gates announced a company that sounded like science fiction: Teledesic, a constellation of 840 low-Earth-orbit satellites that would blanket the planet with broadband internet, gate-to-gate, pole-to-pole, by the year 2001. The pitch deck called it the "Internet in the Sky." Prince Alwaleed bin Talal put in $200 million. Boeing signed on as prime contractor. Motorola, running its own competing constellation called Celestri, folded its program into Teledesic in 1998 in exchange for a 26% stake.

The technical design was startlingly modern. Teledesic would fly at 700 km altitude in 21 orbital planes, using Ka-band spectrum (28.6–29.1 GHz uplink, 18.8–19.3 GHz downlink). Each satellite would carry phased-array antennas that steered beams electronically to keep contact with fixed ground terminals as the satellite raced overhead at 27,000 km/h. Inter-satellite laser crosslinks would move packets around the constellation without touching the ground. Ground terminals would be pizza-box sized and cost a few hundred dollars. Latency would be under 100 ms. Peak downlink rates would hit 64 Mbps — a fantasy in 1994, when a good modem did 14.4 kbps.

Every one of those numbers is roughly what Starlink shipped 26 years later.

Teledesic died in stages. The FCC granted the license in 1997, but ITU spectrum coordination dragged. Launch costs alone — 840 satellites at $50–100M per launch on Delta II — pushed the projected capex from $9B to $15B and climbing. The team downsized to 288 satellites in 1997, then to a 30-satellite MEO constellation in 2002 in a desperate final pivot. On October 1, 2002, Teledesic laid off its remaining engineers and suspended construction. Boeing had already burned $700 million. The dot-com crash killed the follow-on financing round.

The postmortems blamed "unrealistic ambition." They were wrong. The ambition was correct. The timing was off by exactly one generation of launch vehicles.

Consider what killed each assumption:

• Launch cost: Delta II cost $8,000/kg in 1998. Falcon 9 in 2025 is under $2,500/kg reusable — and Starlink launches 60 satellites per Falcon 9 mission.
• Satellite manufacturing: Teledesic's baseline satellite mass was 795 kg, hand-built. Starlink v2 Mini is 800 kg but built on an automotive-style production line at 8 per day.
• Phased arrays: A steerable Ka-band phased array in 1998 was a physics-department special. Today it's a $300 consumer product on your roof.
• Digital signal processing: The onboard packet routing Teledesic specified needed compute that didn't exist in radiation-hardened form. Modern SDR and FPGAs solved it.
• Inter-satellite lasers: Demonstrated on Iridium NEXT (2019) and now standard on Starlink v1.5+.

Starlink launched its first operational batch in November 2019 and had 4,000 subscribers by early 2021. By 2026 it operates over 8,000 satellites — ten times Teledesic's original constellation — with sub-50-ms latency and 200+ Mbps to consumer terminals. OneWeb, Kuiper, and China's Guowang are building parallel constellations. The market Teledesic identified in 1994 turned out to be worth tens of billions of dollars per year.

The design documents Teledesic filed with the FCC in 1995 read today like a Starlink whitepaper with the wrong date on it. The engineers weren't wrong about physics. They were wrong about who would drive launch costs down first — and by the time SpaceX did, Teledesic had been shut down for six years.