| Bofferbrauer2 said: And even there, things start to crumble. Problems at Tesla Gigafactories with rebelling workers and technical problems with their cars, while SpaceX had to delay 2 Falcon 9 launches in a row (which was unheard of before), Starship getting delayed, Starlink being denied as broadband by the FCC because of too low bitrates, the last Starlink launch was supposed to be the new second gen satellites but were mostly still the much slower (and much smaller) 1.5 gen... Seriously, Starlink is gonna bleed SpaceX dry at this pace, which everybody with just a passing knowledge of global economy could see coming from a mile away. (Warning: Incoming rant) There have been 67 launches so far and they just passed 1M subscribers. The satellite dishes cost more to manufacture than what the users pay for, so basically the first 6-8 months payments are to recoup that cost at a monthly rate of $120. $120 is quite a lot for third world and even developing countries, so only the rich in those regions have enough disposable income to actually afford Starlink, while in most developed countries, there are faster options available at a lower price. This seriously limits the possible amount of clients worldwide to maybe 300M, and that's a very generous estimation - but at fundraisers they casually throw numbers around of over 1 billion future clients, which is totally unrealistic. With 1M subscribers at $120, it's just enough to fund 2 launches per month onboard a Falcon 9 rocket, disregarding any other costs like that of the satellites themselves, the dishes for the customers, employees or R&D. But SpaceX tends to send 3-4 rockets with Starlink satellites into space every month, continuously draining the capital at hand and needing endless rounds of fundraisers to keep them afloat. And the next-gen satellites are 5 times (Falcon 9/heavy) to 8 times (Srarship) heavier and bulkier than the current satellites, so you can send much less of them at once into space. Add to this increasing competition (Oneweb, Blue Origin, Samsung all announced their own constellation, and China wants it's own constellation to avoid their people circumventing the Firewall of China through them) and those that were there already before Starlink (mostly slower and on geostationary orbits, which don't have as big of a bandwidth and a ping of ~650, so unsuitable for online gaming, but good enough for YouTube or Netflix), and the number of potential customers shrinks rapidly. 10% of all the Starlink Satellites sent into space are already out of order, most of them deorbited already (3666 in total, 3374 still in orbit, 3335 in working condition). Only about 80% of the satellites are actually operational (3063), meaning that SpaceX will have to increase the cadence of their launches just to keep their constellation in place the more they expand the fleet. It's been estimated that with the full constellation in place, Starlink would need at least 50M subscribers at $120 just to keep the company afloat. Increasing the prices is not much of an option as like mentioned earlier, in most countries there are options that are both faster and cheaper, and would further shrink the pool of potential clients. And the reputation he's building at Twitter will probably hurt sales from people who don't want to have anything to do with Elon anymore as a result of this whole debacle. |
Elon made it clear a year or two ago now that gen 2 sats and Starship will be required to keep things going and to get them to profitability sooner than later. Starship is a little behind, at least based on Elon's estimates, but he's always a year or two ahead, sometimes more, which is probably mostly hype and marketing on his part since that's the way it's been for like a decade now. So it's not like it hasn't been factored in. Starship will also send over double the amount of sats into orbit every launch, and each of those sats will also be much larger, more advanced, handling way more subscribers. Starship is also tied to the Moon missions and Mars eventually, so it has to work and in time or the entire space business and dream dies, besides launching other companies payloads.
Those 1M subs aren't all residential at $120. Some of that is business like air travel and cruise lines and they are paying way more and that's helping SpaceX cover some of the residential losses. Even Big box stores are starting to use Starlink as a backup, so they're paying for service at all times even though they only need it on rare occasions where they would lose even more money without it when the landline is down. There's also government and military contracts. Some of the near future Starlink network will be separate and called something else, Star whatever, and will be government and military only. That's going to make huge profits.
As for the launch costs, nobody knows exactly what the costs are for everything, but what is known is the typical costs are far less for SpaceX Starlink since they aren't charging themselves any extra for anything since there is no profit in that. They also have been shuttling more and more payload for customers instead of their own sats because it makes way more profit which can be used to offset the Starlink overhead and up front costs. The eventual profits are going towards the Moon the Mars missions anyway so both SpaceX and Starlink are working together to reduce prices as much as possible and asap.
Starlink also isn't a finalized product or service yet. It's still maturing and changes are being made on the fly. Having too many customers too early would actually hurt more than help. Which worked out great because it gave them time to work out major kinks in the system earlier on, minor kinks now, along with getting the dishy manufacturing up to par, and making newer more economical dishy designs. People have been waiting up to a year or more for their dishy to ship because there is such global demand for Starlink, and while Elon has improved production, there's still a long way to go. Not to mention the focus and all the free dishes he sent to Ukraine over the past year.
As for the sat network itself, it can handle way more than 1M users right now. Some people, mostly in the US, are complaining because their area is over subscribed, which is another issue to work out due to things like mobile Starlink, etc, but worldwide, there are so many more consumers who could be on the network who are simply waiting for their dishy or saving up to buy in.
Starlink sats are low earth orbit. Ping times are in the typical range of 30ms to 80ms. Gaming, even FPS, is totally doable. It's not for the most hardcore, but totally acceptable for the casual gamer. Speeds tend to be 75mbps on average. Light to medium rain and snow have little impact on speeds. Heavy rain and snow does slow speeds by quite a lot and can lead to total loss of connection. Anything less than hurricane winds isn't a problem either.
Blue Origin is far from launching sats. They're too busy charging millionaires and billionaires massive fee's for 5 mins of weightlessness in almost space.
China isn't close to launching sats either, and won't be able to offer their own service for much cheaper, so most people outside of China will purchase Starlink then anyway. That is 1.5 billion people though that Starlink wouldn't be getting as customers. Yet there is a Tesla factory in China because they caved to Elon's ownership demands, so it's not entirely impossible that Starlink will be blocked completely from China in the future.
The amount of rural consumers in the US alone who are waiting for Starlink is staggering. You've also got more and more people moving out of the big cities, and plenty of them and others would love to be living out in the woods, who don't, for reasons like poor to no internet. Starlink will and is changing that. Some countries, or states, etc, are buying up a bunch of dishes and giving them away to residents that apply, who only have old sat tech access or dial up landline. Some are even covering service costs for a time due to those residents being left behind for so long. You're likely going to see this happen more and more in the underdeveloped parts of the world.
Right now Starlink looks just fine. Nothing to really worry about. The majority of people interested in Starlink, don't care what Elon is doing with his other business ventures. They just want a reasonable internet connection that nobody else will offer them. Either that, or they've had enough of the local or big telecommunications monopoly and would simply rather get a similar or better internet service and give that money to Elon's SpaceX Starlink instead.
