Couldn't find any sources for this claim, could it be made up?
Back of the envelope math: SpaceX plans up to 30 Starship launches per day by 2030, each has a payload of 100 metric tons, that's 10,000 launches per year. Comes out to 1,000,000 metric tons of payload to orbit per year. A Starlink V3 satellite weighs 2 metric tons. They certainly don't need to launch 500,000 Starlink satellites per year. Currently there are around 11,000 Starlink satellites and it already covers the Earth quite well. They might go to 100,000 Starlink satellites, but people worry even that's unnecessary.
So, if they really built Starship just for internal use, after they launch, let's say (maximum) 20,000 satellites in a year (400 launches), will they just chill? Or start launching empty rockets for fun?
Refusing to work with NASA or the military in an industry that's dependent on so many approvals is so easy to fix by law. A law can be easily put in place to force rocket companies to reserve payload capacity for the Government (as an example).
Back of the envelope math: SpaceX plans up to 30 Starship launches per day by 2030, each has a payload of 100 metric tons, that's 10,000 launches per year. Comes out to 1,000,000 metric tons of payload to orbit per year. A Starlink V3 satellite weighs 2 metric tons. They certainly don't need to launch 500,000 Starlink satellites per year. Currently there are around 11,000 Starlink satellites and it already covers the Earth quite well. They might go to 100,000 Starlink satellites, but people worry even that's unnecessary.
So, if they really built Starship just for internal use, after they launch, let's say (maximum) 20,000 satellites in a year (400 launches), will they just chill? Or start launching empty rockets for fun?
Refusing to work with NASA or the military in an industry that's dependent on so many approvals is so easy to fix by law. A law can be easily put in place to force rocket companies to reserve payload capacity for the Government (as an example).