The U2 operated at over 20km, so maybe the altitude is higher.
I suspect the greater issue is vehicle cost, lifetime, and safety. A starlink satellite is much smaller (and as result cheaper) and is rumored to have a 5+ year lifetime. Also, at end of life it burns up in the atmosphere. No worry about pushing the life on a component and having it crash and kill someone as a result.
I’m a bit puzzled by the economy here. Is creating, lunching and orbiting a satellite really cheaper then flying an airplane? Is it really cheaper to have a decommissioned satellite totally burn up in the atmosphere then reusing parts of an airplane to fix another, recycle unusable parts and put the rest in a landfill?
This feels like comparing potatoes and pineapples.
A new Cessna vs a used Falcon 9 launch hardly seems like a fair comparison. The cost of the rocket is written off as externalized. The actual satellites are not factored in at all. Really what we are comparing here is the cost of an operation vs the cost of an airplane. The economics still seem dubious.
Indeed, and the $432,000 is the price on the consumer market. A mass order of Zephyrs by, say, the British Government is sure to land a much smaller price tag per unit then a lone hobby pilot can expect when buying a single airplane.
If Airbus is successful, you'd have to compare SpaceX's scale to a similarly massive manufacturing operation of solar-powered aircraft. And you could theoretically make money from multiple sources since the aircraft could carry multiple pieces of equipment. You could make money from being an ISP and from selling imaging services.
I suspect the greater issue is vehicle cost, lifetime, and safety. A starlink satellite is much smaller (and as result cheaper) and is rumored to have a 5+ year lifetime. Also, at end of life it burns up in the atmosphere. No worry about pushing the life on a component and having it crash and kill someone as a result.