According to The Information, Facebook found out the hard way about the satellite business: it’s expensive to get anything off the ground.

The social networking giant abandoned a project to invest as much as $1 billion to build and launch a geostationary satellite that would have provided internet coverage in emerging markets, according to a source with direct knowledge of the scheme, and another person briefed on it.

The price was deemed prohibitive and the scheme abandoned, following in a tradition of such schemes trying and failing to prove airworthy.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, discussed in the past using satellite capacity to support the internet.org initiative via its Connectivity Lab, but apparently the shelved project was unrelated.

Looking back to the nineties, there was a string  of projects that tried – and failed – to put infrastructure in space to provide connectivity in the world’s most inaccessible regions.

Back then, the focus was voice telephony, while now it is internet coverage. But still the results are the same.

Efforts such as Globalstar, Iridium, Teledesic and Skybridge struggled commercially due to the cost and complexity of the technology.

Facebook can still push ahead with its plans by leasing capacity on someone else’s satellite, even if it doesn’t build its own.