A techno-economic framework for collaborative low Earth orbit satellite constellations

The growing demand for global communications has led to the rise of large satellite constellations in low Earth orbit. While many service providers today operate independently and competitively, a well-structured collaboration can improve resource efficiency and enhance business viability. This paper introduces and demonstrates a techno-economic framework to quantify the benefits of collaboration between two hypothetical satellite constellations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we examined the impact of consumer adoption rate, inclination angle, and the number of orbital planes on the increase in customer count when service providers shared satellite capacity. Results showed that collaboration increased customer count by 8% to 43% across different scenarios. The benefits of collaboration were higher when parties had more capacity surplus, and when their satellite constellations had more dissimilar architectures. Future work will focus on enhancing the model fidelity and functionality by refining the economic model and market assumptions.