>> Starlink is also going to be seeing competition in the coming years thanks to companies like OneWeb and Telesat, which plans to create smaller constellations that will offer service by 2021. Tech giants like Amazon and Samsung have also announced plans to deploy their own constellations, which would consist of 3,236 to 4600 broadband satellites, respectively.
SpaceX has a huge advantage in launch costs here. Mass produced satellites will be lower cost per unit than most others, and launching on used rockets will give them the cheapest deployment costs ever. And they are the only company that can reuse rockets today. I don't see the competitors really having a chance.
depends what you mean. If you think of it as a "replacement" of another launch they could have sold, then yes, it's the same cost. Lost profit opportunity is lost profit is a cost.
But if it means they can increase the # of rockets they build, they might pick up some efficiency gains on the back stretch. I'm pretty sure they're already struggling to keep up with demand, tho.
They're getting to the point where they're demand-limited rather than supply-limited - plowing through the backlog quite fast, and the GTO launch market is in a downturn.
SpaceX keeps rockets other customers "paid" for after they've landed (the customer pays for the flight, not the rocket). They've amassed a fleet they never had to pay a dime to construct.
I believe they have eight block 5 Falcon 9s that landed successfully. More if you count previous generations, but those likely won't be reused.
It does, for the competition, and there is no reason for SpaceX to go much lower as long as they don't build excessive overcapacity that needs to be filled.
Yes. They actually improved a lot of rocket construction and that's why they were cheaper then everybody else BEFORE re-usability. Now re-usability they just increase the profit.
Until somebody else challenges their price, they can get huge profit from every launch.
So then make the competitor pay for it: each time they launch for a competitor, add a margin equating to the total cost of deploying a Starlink satellite.
I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel, I'm guessing they'd be hit with anti-trust laws pretty quickly.
Yeah but with the volume we're talking about here, SpaceX is definitely going to be extremely constrained by launch capacity. I doubt they'd be hit with any antitrust lawsuit over not cancelling their own launches in order to take orders from their competitors. In any case, there's no chance that all of those companies are going to be able to launch their constellations in anywhere close to their targeted timeframes. There's just not enough launch capacity in the world to handle that in such a short amount of time.
>> I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel
The government grants monopolies (patent) on very important things (drugs and treatments for all sorts of things) and then lets companies charge different rates to different customers - even higher prices to the uninsured. It seems unlikely they'd make SpaceX launch for a competitor at anywhere near their own cost. But then politics....
They get to launch* their own stuff for only the rocket cost, that part is fine.
I mean if they have Boeing, NASA, etc. as paying customers at a standard $X they can't just go "Well Google you're launching a competitor to us so we're gonna charge you 20 * $X instead to prevent you from launching".
Could they? When you're launching such a large constellation the key metric is $/kg. All of ISRO's rockets are at least double as expensive as SpaceX's prices for customers. Plus, they're smaller rockets and it'd remain to be seen if ISRO could produce enough of them to launch an entire constellation.
Is anyone worried about space pollution and Kessler effect? There's currently around 5000 satellites up there, and each of these companies alone wants to put that much more in space.
But snark aside, having Bezos (and others) do the same thing is a good thing and will increase launch demand and lower prices and provide competition for satellite internet.
This. I'm a big SpaceX fan, primarily because they're at the forefront of advancing human spaceflight through low cost and high capability (driven both by reuse), but Blue Origin is similar in many respects (although soooo sloooow...) and we won't truly become spacefaring with just a single company having a reusable rocket.
The true power of such systems is that they might eventually help overthrow hegemony of the BigTelco, who have been in bed with governments for as long as they have been in existence.
I'm excited to see what this would mean not just for the internet but mobile communication systems that are so much dependant on a few vendors and MNOs that have time and again proven to breach on privacy repeatedly [0][1]. For instance, there's no viable open source baseband alternative for 4G+ mobile devices [2][3][4][5], and acquiring frequency and setting up base stations is mired neck deep in regulations and patents [6], so there is not much room for a startup to disrupt the incumbent.
Given the advent of eSIMs and increase in embedded SecureElements [7] in smartphones, the traditional way of going mobile might soon be gone for good. I, for one, can't wait.
Does anyone work on building satellites like the ones mentioned here? what is a normal day in the life at a job like that? Are you pulling 40+ hrs/week ?
At some point SpaceX is going to start flying the Superheavy, which will be able to carry hundreds of satellites at once, and cost less per launch than Falcon 9 because the second stage will be reusable. That will give it a huge cost advantage.
At some point they'll also start regularly flying the heavy. It's about 3 years behind schedule now, and their satellite constellation has much shorter timespans.
Doesn't distribution in space become an issue if you release several hundred satellites from the same rocket and need to get them into position without any collision risk?
SpaceX has released dozens from a single launcher. They have get released in a staggered fashion and use onboard thrusters to modify their orbits a bit after release.
Not for the Starlink system at least. If you look at the orbits simulation linked in the article there will lots of satellites on a train the same orbit. The rocket could set orbit and drop off a satellite every X minutes.
If they do actually beat microwave towers, HFTs will be their first and most enthusiastic customers. SpaceX would not even need any specific strategy for the money to come from HFT. For biggest revenues, add steeply tiered pricing for the best latency, maybe even a bidding process.
If they tried to keep those gains in-house and did their own HFT I would not be surprised if exchanges then found ways to define rules that weaken HFT as a whole. Just a gut feeling that you need to be part of the culture surrounding the exchanges to be in that game and keep winning.
You don't even need to beat microwave. NYC-Tokyo or London-Tokyo don't have microwave links (and won't have anytime soon) so using it for these very long distances could be worth it.
Hybernia from NYC to London is about 55ms whereas I remember reading somewhere these satellites would have a 30ms ping. So probably not for cross-Atlantic propagation once you add all the switching and hops, but maybe cross-Pacific might be doable since propagation delay in space is lower than in fiber.
Realistically, no. High frequency trading is a niche and not hugely profitable market. Not really worth disrupting when there is a much bigger opportunity in delivering internet access to billions of people and many billions of devices.
Interesting point. However, I believe frequency trading relies on connections with extremely low latency, while satellite links are characterized by high Round Trip Time.
Geostationary satellites have high latency because they're so far up (36000 km). But dense low earth orbit satellite constellations can give lower latency than fibre over longer distances if you relay from satellite to satellite, because the speed of light in a vacuum is 1.5 times faster than in glass.
But even NYC to Chicago you have to bounce off several RF base stations due to the curvature of the earth, and each station will add latency. One LEO satellite can probably get LOS to both NYC and Chicago at the same time.
Couldn't you build analog relay stations that add 0 latency if they are for a dedicated (non-switched) connection? Where the receiving antenna pipes the RF through an analog amp and sends it out the transmit side (possibly using filtering to clean up the raw signal)?
I wonder how this will affect Iridium in the long term. They target applications that provide critical services with low bandwidth requirements, and a need for small lightweight antennas with low power use.
Starlink's design doesn't fit those requirements for now. But I'm not sure whether Starlink will stay out of that market if they will be continuously upgrading their swarm.
On the other hand, it would be strange if SpaceX destroyed Iridium's business model after launching their latest generation satellites for them...
I could see a market where you put up a Starlink base station, which communicates to regular phones via LTE or WiFi. That could cover the use case of many Iridium deployments, where you are always within range of a camp or vehicle.
> What happens to inactive satellites? Do they de-orbit themselves in safe locations? Or just stay as space junk?
I believe they plan to use the last bit of their propellant to lower the perigee into the atmosphere, which will then naturally deorbit. They recently submitted documents to the FCC stating a change to materials to ensure everything burns up and wont impact the earth. [1]
Vapour in the upper atmosphere, though some materials with low ballistic coefficient might break free and drift down intact. There has been at least two cases of people being “hit” by insulation from reentered satellites and spacecraft. The objects were basically paper or cardboard in terms of density.
For the first 75 (or less) satellites there are some components that SpaceX thinks might survive re-entry. They've redesigned latter satellites such that they should burn up entirely.
IANASJ (I am not a space junkie) but this makes those ones sound unusually tiny and brings me back to the first question - are the Starlink birds similarly sized?
Most people on r/spacex are guesstimating that each falcon 9 will launch 25 satellites. 44 has been discounted because many think the falcon 9s fairing will be volume limited when launching that many satellites.
That being said, no official number has been given out by spacex so this is all guesswork and this article did not cite a source for the "44 satellites per launch".
They're only a few hundred pounds each. Falcon 9 can launch 50,000 lbs to LEO in expandable mode, so probably about 30,000 lbs when reusable, meaning they could launch close to 100 if they weighed 300lbs (there'd also be a deployment structure etc).
44 seems very doable, and they'd just burn up like any other satellite.
Each Starlink satellite is likely to be in the range of 200–300 kg. Roughly the size of ~220L fridge when panels are folded.
The plan for active decommissioning is to drop perigee into “atmosphere” but there are also plans for passively deorbiting satellites that fail while in higher orbits which would otherwise take Millenia to de orbit on their own.
Depends on a bunch of variables of course but ballpark a few million monthly users would probably be good enough.
The falcon heavy launches are going to be ballpark somewhere around 90 million. So excluding the satellite construction that's what it costs to launch around 70-100 satellites. They need at least about 30-35 launches. So ballpark that means a it is going to take probably 3-4 billion. Of course that is excluding the production cost for the satellites and other infrastructure. Lets call it 10 billion altogether, give or take a few billion.
Not a crazy amount to spend on infrastructure in the telco world. German operators paid tens of billions just for spectrum licenses. Considering you'd be able to compete world wide with this, 10 billion is a bargain.
It's still a lot of money of course but with a few million customers paying in the order of 10-40$ per month it would earn it self back quite rapidly. Even at the low end of that price range. Arguably they could charge more.
We also need to factor in the cost of replacing all the satellites every 5 years or so, as they only last this long in the super low orbit that they will be in. So it's ~10 billion every 5 years, not just once up front.
So 10.000.000.000 / 5 / 12 = 166.666.666 bucks per month
Say an average subscriber pays 20 bucks.
166.669.666 / 20 = 8.333.333
You'd need about eight million subscribers paying an average of 20 bucks a month to keep the business sustainable.
Compared to the $200 Comcast bill I would be more than willing to pay $50 a month for this, plus another $100 for video content. The big question I have is how many subscribers can they support per square mile in higher population density areas?
No, it won't. These satellites are placed close to earth, so they will deorbit after some time. An orbit this close to earth is not sustainable, you need fuel to keep the orbit going. Once the fuel runs out, or the satellite malfunctions, it will fall back into the earth's atmosphere and burn.
It's also in the article:
> Second, there’s the matter of attrition, as satellites will begin to deorbit after a few years and SpaceX will need to replace them regularly in order to maintain its constellation.
I don't believe the required billions of financing for this project has been obtained yet.
I am skeptical of the utility, since most humans live in dense cities, where it is both cheaper and faster to run fiber (even to 5G towers) than it is for millions of people to choke on a handful of satellites. This offering is only compelling for regions that have no people and no infrastructure (and therefore no money). All signs point to another Teledesic or Iridium.
As someone who does not live in a dense city, and is willing and capable of paying for a service such as Starlink, I resent the idea that it is not a worthwhile endeavor.
You may be underestimating the resentment with current duopoly operators in the US. I live in a dense city and I would switch in a heartbeat even if Starlink didn't offer better/faster/cheaper service. Just being on par would be enough.
For Sure. I know I would switch in a hearbeat, if there was an equivalent service that costs equal or less.
And just imagine the possibilities. once you can get your ISP internet anywhere, you won't even need a data plan on your phone anymore (just hook it up to your ISP). In this case i would be willing to pay a bit extra for that.
The steaklink receiver is not small (about the size of a pizza), last I heard it's similar to a satellite television dish. You won't be getting this on your phone.
But everything is not currently fine on price or performance. Most places don't even really have a duopoly. It's a single cable TV/internet operator and a single DSL operator, the DSL is way slower than the cable and both are overpriced. If you add SpaceX service to the mix I think you'll quickly see major price drops and equipment upgrades from most major terrestrial ISPs.
See: Google Fiber. When they started rolling it out, ISPs were folding themselves backwards trying to convince people not to switch.
Anecdotal, but I remember someone on Reddit from Kansas City mentioning that Time Warner had offered them something silly like 100M/10M down/up for more money than the incoming Google Fiber was going to be (for 1Gbps synchronous).
I have no idea what the situation is like now, but I'd imagine it's gotten better. They aren't going to sit around wasting money when infinitely better tech is knocking on their front door.
Planes, boats, busses, trains, cars, and rural sites can all massively benefit from a much bigger bandwidth pipe with low latency. Add in the US military which has already given spacex $28.7 million dollars to see if they can put it on all their vehicles (planes in particular for that award) and I think they have a decent sized market.
Once upon a time power companies refused to provide grid access to people outside of the cities because it didn't make money fast enough, the government stepped in and made it happen and now not being able to get a power hookup is a ridiculous notion. If this doesn't happen, the government will have to step in again, otherwise those people either become second class citizens or they get really angry at being excluded from society and take violent action.
It’s not at all similar. There is no alternative to wired electricity. There are lots of alternatives to wired broadband, and they’re getting better every day. A double digit percentage of households earning six figures has no wired broadband (cellular only), and that percentage is growing.
Note that water is more important than broadband, and the government doesn’t step in to build/compel people to build water/sewer systems in rural areas. (I live 10 minutes from the capital of Maryland, and we just got city water/sewer in 2015, and I just have to drive another 5 minutes down the road before all you have is well water/septic systems.)
Not being able to get a power hookup is far from a ridiculous notion. In both Thailand and India big bribes are required to get the utility companies/incumbents to move, or you at the mercy of delays that could stretch for years. In Vashi one company that consults on behalf of some big brand names paid more than the building for the power company to connect them - and this was an IT park of sorts not some remote place.
As someone who lives in a dense city (Sydney), I can tell you that I would use this satellite internet if it's faster than the ADSL2 and poop fibre most people get at home.
One of the very real dangers is that all of the satellite constellations come one line at the same time, and none of them get to critical mass before they all go bankrupt.
Mass adoption is the key to reasonable per-user costs here.
Amazon, and possibly SpaceX are at an advantage here, since they have other revenue streams, so they might be able to wait out the rest of the field and grab customers from failed networks.
Amazon and SpaceX are nowhere near equivalent. SpaceX is relying on starlink to be a major portion of their revenue by 2025, far outweighing launch. That's all they have.
Amazon has retail and aws, and satellites will be nowhere near a majority.
Think any company with remote assets it needs to monitor.
Drones, backup internet etc. There's a very big market for fast internet access which just works anywhere on the planet. It would be worth a premium just to let large organisations consolidate to a single biller.
That's unfair to the millions of Americans living in rural areas having to cope with current slow speeds. Don't you want the world more connected?
The problem with the current scenario is ISPs and wireless providers won't run lines or stand up towers for a low populated area. They know they won't ever make the money back for the project. With low orbit satellites this problem is solved. Would you rather those people live in the past just because they don't choose to live in the city?
They will be the same for SpaceX. What makes you think otherwise? Their constellation will not start out anywhere near the max capacity they've stated.
Basically SpaceX is doing what Steve Jobs first wanted to do when faced with the stubbornness of telecom giants - create his own cell phone / data network.
He was advised it would be too expensive. Maybe Apple and SpaceX should do a joint venture...
Can it really replace mobile networks? It's great for areas currently not served by 4G but would serving large cities (New York, SF, Seattle, London) really make sense via satellite?
I can tell you any more choice in the US would be a good thing. Our infrastructure is pretty much bottom rung unless you are one of the very few who can get access to fiber. I have literally a Google fiber drop installed in my front yard, but they can't be bothered to give me service. Google is no longer deploying new locations in my city.
This is an important point. Transit over StarLink looks like it will be faster than transit overland via fiber optic cable due to the speed of light being slower in fiber cable than free space.
That means that this isn't just a stunt, but an actual upgrade to our communications infrastructure.
Honestly, I’d love to see StarLink keep the latency advantage to themselves and acquire an HFT firm to extract the profits from the advantage. What are you going to do as a competitor? Build and lift your own comm sat network? The laws of physics are a hell of a moat.
If they went this route, they could run the compute at the edge; that is, in space, perhaps in another sat in a higher orbit. Thereby avoiding one trip through the atmosphere improving their latency advantage even further.
The real trick will be acquiring rooftop space at the exchanges for the uplinks.
Acquiring an HFT firm won't be worth it. Just sell it to the highest bidder. It's likely they will pay too much anyway (winner's curse) in which case Starlink just needs to sell it to the next highest bidder a year later. Much easier money (and less regulation) than trading yourself.
Nothing about SpaceX except marketing hype has to do with Mars, can we just stop it with the Mars talk? It belittles what SpaceX actually is about, which is amazing in its own right. Launch demand, cheaper LEO/GEO/GTO, and a willingness to push the industry out of the 60’s is almost unbelievable, as is the journey they’ve taken to get this far. Throwing Mars into the mix makes it all sounds like bullshit, because anyone who actually understands the challenges of Mars beyond the big rocket portion rolls their eyes and sighs.
I’d also add that competing with the likes of Comcast and Verizon could be very profitable in the long term. I don’t think we need to assume it doesn’t serve its own obvious purpose of being th first big step in getting that sweet ISP money.
Edit api: It makes sense for a lot of things that a demand actually exists for, like heavy loads, launching a number of different contracts in one reusable rocket to save on overhead, defense contracts, and more. Those will actually make them money, and are all technically feasible today.
Mars is the vision and it is going to take an incredible amount of effort to make that possible. We need to find uses for that technology here and now so that the costs for it can be brought down.
It is not just a matter of having a human put their feet down on Mars and then be done with it. How will we move around (Boring and Tesla btw)? How will we communicate there and back to people on Earth? How will we feed ourselves there? Etc..
IMHO, Starlink (on Mars) is an answer to the communication challenges we will face there. By doing it on Earth, we prove it out, bring the costs down, provide a better internet alternative to what we have now, and have synergies with his other companies like Tesla (communication without needing cell providers) and SpaceX (increase launch demand).
They are building a super heavy lift rocket that makes the most sense for sending humans to the Moon and Mars. Other roles can be served reasonably well by Falcon and FH. Outside manned tourism, exploration, and settlement there is little need for a rocket that big.
Also... marketing hype for who? We think the Mars stuff is cool, sure, but we are not SpaceX's customers. Their customers could care less. They care if their payloads fly to the right orbit.
SpaceX has a huge advantage in launch costs here. Mass produced satellites will be lower cost per unit than most others, and launching on used rockets will give them the cheapest deployment costs ever. And they are the only company that can reuse rockets today. I don't see the competitors really having a chance.