I’m amazed Antirez didn’t fork Redis and start fresh like Monty did MySQL. AWS, Azure and GC would be thrilled to support his work on an OSS fork. After 9 years surely any contractual constraints have expired? Maybe a sense of moral obligation? Or perhaps Redis Inc recruited him to prevent exactly this?
Either way we all very much appreciate the work you have done. Redis has been a game changer for many of us running small businesses on tiny budgets.
He has stock options in redis labs, so existing financial ties - although he mentions in his blog his comp for coming isn't wild, I wonder what the option package looks like
This seems hand wavy. Nothing that demonstrates that they have any understanding of how aircraft currently navigate with GPS, WAAS, levels of accuracy that enable or rule out certain procedures. It’s like they decided to just co-opt aviation because it’s mission critical and has money. “Like one day maybe we’ll be able to do the fancy airplane stuff with the radio stuff and math stuff.”
Vertical integration by Starlink of the cheapest launch capability in the world (by far) is the reason there are no competitors, and there will be no competitors. The pace of innovation at SpaceX is not THE reason - it’s an additional reason that no one has a snowballs chance in hell of ever catching Starlink.
I’ve seen talk of competitor satellite networks or a possible competitor emerging. Folks it’s game set and match, the trophy has been handed over and the crowd has gone home.
SpaceX and Starlink have the same owner, both are private companies, with SpaceX launching 80% of the global space payload last year and rising, and Starlink has a constellation two orders of magnitude bigger than any competitor. It’s over. And IMO it’s awesome.
I disagree. Starlink is indeed awesome and SpaceX deserves every bit of their success. But there will be competitors eventually, if for no other reason than foreign militaries sponsoring them. There's no inherent reason for this to be a winner takes all market.
We can only hope the competitors are half as responsible as SpaceX has been about space debris risk and ensuring the satellites are not visible to the naked eye and don't disrupt astronomy. So far the proposals I've seen have been much worse than Starlink in these areas.
IMO, one of the central problems is the cost of launching stuff into space.
Today, SpaceX offers world leading low prices to launch satellites: $4 m / tonne[1]. But Starlink has access to launch at cost, which is $0.86 m / tonne[2]. Which is a huge advantage when launching an enormous number of satellites.
One thing to keep in mind, especially for these LEO constellations: the lifetime of these satellites is 5-10 years. Which means the operators can never stop launching. It's an ongoing operational cost.
For smaller operators like OneWeb, they don't have to launch that often, but for a serious competitor like Kuiper, they'll be constantly launching some satellite every year.
IMO, launch cost will be a problem even for China. The cost of an LEO constellation is so high that even if it's partially subsidized by the military it'll be a serious cost for the country.
That could change pretty soon, though - various companies and organizations in China are aggressively working on getting reusable rockets working.
---
1. $70 m / 17.5 tonnes == $4 m / tonne
2. $15 m[3] / 17.5 tonnes == $0.86 / tonne
3. The $15 m number is not public info, but it is widely believed that it is in the correct ballpark.
In the past this at-cost dealing would have been considered monopolistic enough to force divestment (ie, almost exactly the same as Boeing and United Airlines divestment due to the Air Mail Act).
> Air Mail Act of 1934:
> This legislation prohibited the common ownership of airlines and aircraft manufacturers to prevent conflicts of interest and promote fair competition in the aviation industry.
> In the past this at-cost dealing would have been considered monopolistic enough to force divestment
I guess we'll see what happens.
As with most things monopoly related, the critical fight is over how to appropriately define the market. Presumably SpaceX would argue that Starlink is an ISP and that it just happens to use satellites to deliver its service.
And if that doesn't work, then it's a satellite internet provider, but competes with both LEO and GEO services.
If it ever goes to court, it'll be interesting to see how such an argument holds up.
For obvious reasons I think it's pretty safe to say we can count on at least the next four years of zero regulation or government scrutiny of any company Musk is involved in, monopoly-related or otherwise.
But you may have noticed companies like Boeing getting white-glove treatment from regulators.
You know, deciding that their competitor's cheaper aircraft should be subject to a 300% tariff. Not burdening them with too much scrutiny about whether that modified aircraft should keep the same type rating. Taking their word for it when they say every aircraft has 100% of the door bolts installed. If they have broken some regulations, maybe giving a $150 billion company a $250 million fine.
Not ceasing to regulate - just regulators with broad discretionary power exercising that discretion in line with the will of the politicians who appoint them.
Starlink is the most important military weapon in the world right now. Those civilian organizations have no say when state security is at hand. It's like disarming nuclear rockets because some green guys care about birds. Will not happen.
"National security" obviously gets significant concessions from regulators. That doesn't mean military and adjacent industries or significant industries and works are above the regulators, it just means the necessity of the activity and input from military and other interested parties would be duly taken into account by regulators.
That's not unique to SpaceX and I don't think that's wrong as such, although people argue that military interests in general get too much leeway.
Parent should have said "SpaceX", Starlink is just a subsidiary.
SpaceX has more military applications than Starshield alone. For example, SpaceX's assembly line will be pumping out (eventually) a rocket a day. That's the plan.
From a military perspective, Starship is supposed to be able to send 100+ people on long space trips. If that is instead to deliver troops to other parts of the planet, I'm sure hundreds could be packed in. Imagine a fast deploy with parachute capability for personnel and cargo, just as with planes, but with immense range and deploy speed.
You may wonder why, but aircraft carriers and their fleets are considered less usable as deploy platforms, due to increased vulnerability. If the US continues to withdraw from the world stage, its ability to deploy could be affected by a reduction in 'friendly' regional countries and thus leased bases. I don't see any issue with this now, but once a large conflict breaks out, who knows... and this could vastly enhance Starship or equiv as a deploy platform.
I'm sure some reading this will balk at "large war" and "never happen" and so on, but Starshield is an example of a platform for such a large conflict. So considering the use of Starship itself as a lightning speed, emergency deploy platform is important.
There are all sorts of gotchas, such as being shot down, but of course those same issues exist with planes or ships.
Frankly, with the state of AI, the close-to-real Android + military robots, along with drones, Starship would be best served by mass fly-over and deploy of 100k small drones, or hundreds of military robot platforms, or.. well, lots of things.
This really isn't about Starship of course. It's just that we've gotten to the point where this sort of platform is very usable. I can't imagine sending in a large-cost asset like this for general troop deploy, but I can for special ops, weapons platforms in low-risk flyovers, and a variety of other use cases.
Starship as passenger transport point to point on Earth is a nonstarter most likely, even for civilian applications.
It looks just like an ICBM, because it is an ICBM. I doubt Russian and Chinese air defence forces will wait for them to land and see if it’s full of people or plutonium before launching a retaliatory strike.
Your missed the part about parachutes. Also about flyovers. No landing would happen.
(We've been dropping people and gear for 100 years by plane. And yes, it can be done with Starship.)
On the side of civilian transportation, there is nothing to stop normal passenger planes from having nukes on board. The shape of the object is irrelevant.
Kind of yes. I mean Trumps Supreme Court changes the rules because they interpreted something differently. So any political or government agency is all vibes based to me. Anything other interpretation is rose tinted.
Elon Musk was just appointed by Donald Trump as being in charge of firing half of the government. He won't likely do that. But any regulator who gets in his way?
Yeah, not many will volunteer for "the firing line."
He hasn't been appointed to any government agency since DOGE is not a government agency. DOGE has no power to fire anybody. All they can do is make recommendations.
I really don't know what Musk has been appointed to do and it's a laughably blatant conflict of interest, but conflicts of interest seem to be what the entire government is built on. Politicians involved with energy and military companies are involved in decisions to go to war, generals get lucrative consultancy jobs at military firms, congress makes billions of dollars insider trading, foreign aid somehow finds its way funneled through "charities" owned by the ruling class, politicians cosy with medical companies block real healthcare reform, etc.
Musk isn't anything new or different here. The idea that he'll just be above the law is fearmongering hyperbole though. Sure he'll get favorable treatment and be able to push his agenda to degrees well out of reach of us commoners. No more than if he'd just stayed in the shadows and bought his politicians and judges and bureaucrats and generals like a normal billionaire.
I follow the same reasoning as you. This is actually nothing really "new". Patronage from politicics is something that is publicly criticized but is quite common among politicians and business.
It's too bad no one in government will ever step up to undo the citizens united ruling. At least we didn't have legal-but-opaque bribery, prior. The difference is substantial when people can't report on where campaign financing comes from without someone first talking too loud about it in a public setting.
The good news, at least, is that Citizens United was only a legal ruling and can be overturned by another ruling. Laws are much harder to undue, with rulings we don't need anyone in the government to step up (other than judges trying the case).
> The idea that he'll just be above the law is fearmongering hyperbole though
Is it? If there is anything the 45th and the aftermath has shown is that there are people clearly above the law. And even without the 45th, Musk himself has escaped justice many many times - especially the SEC whose explicit orders he openly defied multiple times.
Yes I think it is, and I think the rhetoric around Trump is hyperbole and fearmongering too.
Not that you can't criticize them, I just don't see exaggeration being interesting or helpful there. Also I think caring about certain corruption or conflicts of interest when it happens to politicians one disagrees with is fairly easy to be seen as being divisive or politically motivated even if it's not. I thought that wheeling out the architects of the Iraq war to denounce Trump's corruption/incompetence/bad foreign policy/etc was particularly ironic and sad, for example, even if they might have been technically correct.
Musk isn't going to be immune to federal regulators. I'm sure he'll get the kinds of favors that come with buying politicians as all the rest of them get though.
> Yes I think it is, and I think the rhetoric around Trump is hyperbole and fearmongering too.
Well just reading through Project 2025 is very sobering. It's not like old times where what they wanted had to be read through the lines any more, it's right out in the open what they want to do - and even getting a quarter of their plans actually passed through is a very, very troubling perspective.
> I thought that wheeling out the architects of the Iraq war to denounce Trump's corruption/incompetence/bad foreign policy/etc was particularly ironic and sad, for example, even if they might have been technically correct.
A sad consequence of people no longer debating policy on a shared common ground based on facts, but on tribalism, lies and propaganda instead.
I shouldn't have brought up Trump, the subject never goes anywhere useful in an online debate. That was just my opinion, and other opinions and fears are not invalid.
> > I thought that wheeling out the architects of the Iraq war to denounce Trump's corruption/incompetence/bad foreign policy/etc was particularly ironic and sad, for example, even if they might have been technically correct.
> A sad consequence of people no longer debating policy on a shared common ground based on facts, but on tribalism, lies and propaganda instead.
Yep. When they do that it does make you wonder who shares common ground with whom, and who spreads lies and propaganda about what.
I just seriously wanna praise, first without commentary, that you just said
>other opinions and fears are not invalid
And then for commentary:
I'm the sort of person "intense" enough that I'd want to pounce even on your comment about not bringing up trump, but that overall phrasing was such a perfect way to communicate what you mean, and your good intentions, to me when you at first read (to me) as apologist and unwarrantedly dismissive.
That's all, often in these times it feels hard to even achieve this basic level of communication across personal and political differences. I really admire it.
Because I heard he was going to have some advisory or executive capacity on government operation. There's a significant conflict of interest there if he's running and owning these companies at the same time.
Its hard to determine a conflict of interest when the role isn't clear though, and the problem there is that everyone can really go off of what they heard through the grape vine.
If the role truly is advisory I wouldn't personally see that as a conflict of interest. Regulators are often asking for advise from those they are meant to regulate without it getting flagged as a conflict of interest (for better or worse).
It used to be that even a WHIFF of conflict of interest was treated as "no smoke without fire, better divest".
Carter placed his peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid precisely that - sadly, we have seen a complete erosion of norms, standards, and morals in public life.
I don't think it's that hard to determine. He has big companies involved in significant regulatory actions and oversight, he would stand to gain a lot by influencing things slightly in his favor. Sure, taken to absurdity everybody in government has a conflict of interest because they are alive on the same planet and have heir own views on things, but for the case of someone like Musk it's pretty clear.
Politicians and bureaucrats can and should consult with the people they govern of course. The "proper" way to do that would be via reasonably open and transparent process that is open to interested parties so competitors, customers, unions, scientists could have their say.
Again I'm fully aware this isn't how things actually work, so I'm not saying Musk is really doing anything outside the norm in American politics by buying a seat at the table. He's just being slightly more open about it than most of them.
I wouldn't be opposed to going after such situations as corruption or conflict of interest issues, but that's going to be a big can of worms.
From the FAA and Boeing to multiple health agencies and pharmaceutical companies, there are a ton of advisory type roles that involve industry leaders "recommending" policy. I'd be surprised if Musk ended up at the top of the list when sorted by impact, counted either by financial impact or number of rules and regulations impacted by industry.
I’d say it’s just as likely that six months from now there will be a falling out, Musk will be called a pathetic loser, government agencies will be turned against him, etc.
If past behavior is any kind of indicator, it’s more likely than not. I would not be surprised if we see Musk doing a perp walk within 12 months.
For those who forgot, Musk joined Trump v1.0's advisory council in December 2016 [a], and resigned from it in June 2017 [b]. All of this played out once before.
Elon knows well enough to act as a supporting character. He can't run for presidency anyway given he's not a native, and no other political post would be interesting enough. There'll be no falling out.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that addressed Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and declared that they're only enforceable by Congress really opens a can of worms.
It sounds to me like the 22nd Amendment and the Article II natural-born citizenship requirement are also only enforceable by Congress. If you're making your plans based on a theory that Congress is able to do the right thing, or that the Supreme Court is not a hyper-partisan institution, I would have a strong C because plans A and B are pretty questionable.
What silly political posturing. Native-born is the specific reference, and a perfectly valid one. By your logic, if the current descendants of people who have been here for many centuries by now aren't natives, than vast parts of the world's population are also not natives of the places where their families have lived for centuries.
Why not go further and say that the "natives" also aren't natives since they also migrated to the Americas over the Bering land bridge?
People were here, and Europeans showed up and killed nearly all of them, claimed all the land as their “manifest destiny”, and proceeded to subject the few original inhabitants they didn’t kill to lives of desperation.
> By your logic, if the current descendants of people who have been here for many centuries by now aren't native.
It's not my logic. The term Native American has an agreed, standard meaning. Trump's family does not meet that meaning. My comment was not an attack on your political views.
Are you suggesting that being born in a place makes one native? I'll accept that definition. Now go convince the rest of the world to update their definition of Native American.
And as you apparently agree, the term native, in reference to someone born in a particular place (regardless of ancestry) also has a standard meaning, which millions of Americans who are natives of the country meet. It also happens to be a good definition, because it helps fight against the kind of idiotic racism by which the descendants of immigrants (especially those who are non-white) still get labeled as foreigners despite being native born.
Again, silly, pedantic social justice posturing because the context of the comment about Musk not being native is obviously in reference to this, not native American history.
As the other reply above states, the first nations, as they're called where I'm from, often suffered terribly at the hands of white settlers historically, and there's no honest way to deny that, but it's a separate matter from discussions about what makes a person American today.
Parent didn’t say Trump is a Native American, just a native (of America, from context). That’s a perfectly normal use of the word ‘native’, and you don’t win consciousness points by pretending otherwise.
And this is why we can't have nice, cheap things. Instead we usually get that "cost" pressure solved by giving it on a silver platter to worker-rights-leading China.
There has to be a better way to prevent abuses in the market without crippling it. But following from that, at what point did we assume this kind of (monopolistic) abuse would happen automatically anyways? I haven't seen it yet, so let's maybe hold off till it happens?
Maybe one day X will host all sorts of government-unapproved content on satellites that are free from US jurisdiction and control? @Elon, do this now, they'll come for you eventually.
it is a fascinating outcome when a vertically integrated monopoly is the cheapest option, and best consumer value. The challenge is figuring out if the firm is really providing the best value, or just a local minimum.
My understanding is Standard Oil provided good service for low prices in most cases. It's not always the case that monopolies provide super expensive or bad service.
> vertically integrated monopoly is the cheapest option
I would like to remind you that you can use google, gmail, google maps, google drive and a bunch of other services for free (and the best consumer value even if accounting for their data gathering).
Now that Starlink owner Musk effectively runs the US government from Trump's ear no divestment of any kind will happen that negatively impacts Mr. Musk
If China where to compete they also need LEO satellites that is just over China for a couple of minutes, that have to take a long round trip around the word to give a couple of minutes access again.
That’s why you need a huge constellation.
It’s either selling to the whole world or nothing. If you don’t want to go for slow GEO stationary.
I suspect a China-based constellation could probably serve most of africa, much of asia, most of south america, and some of the middle east. Maybe Russia too.
Not North America or Europe.
In fact, it probably has similar coverage population-wise to what a USA based company can offer.
It's not actually necessary to use reusable rockets to get at a similar cost per launch. Long March 5 is at 2.8M$/ton (so less than SpaceX commercial price).
Also, 15M$/launch is not widely believed to be correct. There is much creative accounting SpaceX could be doing with Starlink (is at-cost account for booster depreciation? If so how, since we don't know how much reuse a booster can be expected to give? Or is it just the cost of refurbishment?), and since the last statement where Elon claimed 1000$ per kg actual cost, SpaceX had to raise their prices, claiming it was due to inflation - is that accurate? Most estimates I've seen are that the cost is 20-30M/launch, which would instead give 1.1-1.7M/ton.
So, it's a big advantage but not an insurmountable one.
They do depreciate, even if the later launches are more valuable, that increase in value is marginal compared to the per-launch capital cost. Airplanes, cars, buildings, everything depreciates.
What do you mean by per-launch capital cost? Maintenance? The increase in value of a F9 booster after use is more than the near-negligible per-launch maintenance cost.
"Depreciation" and "capital cost" reflect the fact the vehicle has a maximum life, even given maintenance.
Imagine if I buy a $200,000 Lamborghini which, with regular servicing, will survive 100,000 miles.
That means for every mile I drive, not only am I paying for fuel, and insurance, and tyres, and servicing - I'm also paying, on average, $2/mile in depreciation.
And sure, the "true" value chart might not be linear. Maybe there'll be a sharp drop when the car ceases to be brand new, or a bump in value when it becomes a classic. But so long as it's worth $200k at 0 miles and $0 at 100k miles, the average cost of a mile must be $2.
The statistics here are inverted. The main marginal cost of a launch is the risk of loss of payload which the customer must insure against. The risk of loss of payload actually goes DOWN with more launches, making costs cheaper the more a booster is reused.
It’s as if your car gained value with every mile driven.
The fact that customers launching exceptionally expensive payloads (the US space force, for one) tend to demand new boosters is not consistent with this.
But even then, it doesn't change that the booster has a maximum lifespan and/or eventually increasing repair and therefore depreciation - we are working on an amortized basis.
They don't anymore. They actually require the use of flight proven boosters for important payloads now. Astronauts too are usually sent up with reused boosters, for safety.
We don't know what the maximum lifespan of these boosters are. There are workhorses that have over 20 launches under their belt, and no sign of deterioration. Obviously at some point something will give, but we're not there yet.
> The fact that customers launching exceptionally expensive payloads (the US space force, for one) tend to demand new boosters is not consistent with this.
When Starship starts launching customer satellites, it's possible that even the price for customers would be cheap enough to launch and maintain a LEO constellation. But competing requires massive innovation in cheap and fast production of satellites which are very energy efficient and highly capable. Especially, the technology for starshield protecting against cyber warfare in space and the direct to cell capability. This would be the main reason for not emerging a viable competitor for some time. SpaceX has innovation advantage in the satellites, manufacturing, dishes, base stations, software apart from the launch capability.
Is it really required to be an LEO constellation? It would certainly be good, so that eventually the satellites deorbit and contribute less to Kesseler syndrome risk. But some nation state might chose to not care about that and deploy at higher and more stable orbits.
Yeah in theory China is the biggest potential competitor, having both a space program, a state deeply involved in business, etc. But their space tech is archaic in comparison, using really nasty fuels to blast stuff into space. The reusability of SpaceX's rockets is a feat that is years ahead of the competition - it's been nearly ten years since the first recovered Falcon 9 booster in a commercial launch if my quick fact check is accurate, and no other competitor, private or governmental, has managed it yet. And in a few years they will have a reusable vessel capable of launching 100 tonnes into LEO, at a fraction of the development and launch cost of e.g. the Space Shuttle.
Unless of course Musk's political fuckery ends up dismantling SpaceX. But, Musk didn't do the engineering on these feats, so the knowledge and patents will continue on if he doesn't.
PRC didn't take reusables seriously until a few years ago, really when strategic value of starlink became obvious. They're already making relatively quick progress, as in the expected faster than original catchup mode progress.
Ultimately the issue with simping for SpaceX is that it's still an American company working at American scale. People are conflating SpaceX doing cheap payload advantage at modest scale for actual scale. There's like <20 F9s doing more than 50% of global launches, 80% including starlink. People see 50% and 80%, but ignore that <20 is rookie numbers. Frankly no reason PRC won't have 100 reusables fleet _IF_ demand justifies it (TBH only real justification after megaconstellations is space weaponization). And then like with all PRC catchup, they'll put more than SpaceX lifetime aggregate payload in a few years, and then it won't even be close. Sure Elon can wank about starfactory building 1 vehicle per day, but if there's strategic reasons for it, PRC will be able to build 5 per day at less cost once they sort out the tech stack.
> There's no inherent reason for this to be a winner takes all market.
Economics?
Competitors would have to match SpaceX's vertical integration: Satellite design, reusable launches at cost, its exiting armada of satellites, and its moving target of customer penetration. The latter is huge. Starlink is clearly not satisfied leaving any satellite demand on the table.
There is no military on Earth that has demand for satellite bandwidth approaching anything like SpaceX's, which is basically being designed to meet the needs of the whole planet.
Note that militaries (US, China, Russia, Europe, ...) have their custom means of communicating on planet, for unique reasons, but the vast majority of their communication is over commercial cell phones. This is no different.
If anyone was going to have a chance, it was Bezos. But neither his launch capabilities, or big satellite constellation plans, have amounted to much.
China will feel the need to try. But they won't have SpaceX's customer base to support a fraction of a comparable effort. (And I say that as someone who has tremendous respect for the multi-decade cadence of their space capability march.)
"SpaceX is really good and it's hard to compete with them" is not an economic reason for it to be winner takes all. Economic reasons would be, for example, regulations that either explicitly or implicitly prohibit others from competing, as are present in many terrestrial ISP markets. Some way for SpaceX to corner the market for some essential resource like spectrum or orbits and exclude competitors that way.
Vertical integration is definitely one. It's such a big factor it can cause regulators to break up a company. See Google/Chrome as an example from last week.
"SpaceX is vertically integrated" is also not an economic reason for the space ISP market to be winner takes all. Vertical integration doesn't cause breakups. Anticompetitive behavior causes breakups, with or without vertical integration. And vertical integration is not some kind of cheat code to suppress competition. It can be a business advantage but it can also easily be a disadvantage.
I don't know what the precise defining lines are, but I can certainly see how you'd make more money running an electricity cable to a home with no electricity, than running a second cable to a home that already had an electricity supply in place.
And Wikipedia says "frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate [...] examples include public utilities such as water services, electricity, telecommunications, mail, etc" - starlink does sound like capital-intensive telecommunications.
Of course, even if nobody cares to take on Starlink in the broadband satellite internet market, there are a bunch of incumbent cable and cell phone companies. So it's not like starlink are on course to an internet access monopoly.
Tesla fanatics espouse the same sort of thinking. Tesla will figure out FSD and will capture the entire automotive market leaving competitors to close up shop and give up. I don't get it. Otherwise intelligent people have told me some version of this with a straight face. It's like they've somehow blocked how the economy functions out of their minds in an effort to further exalt Tesla.
It's not the same because there are plenty of companies that can manufacture cars at scale but only one company that can launch satellites cheaply. Arguably Waymo is ahead of Tesla FSD and they have access to the mature Hyundai and Zeekr supply chains.
It is the same. In both cases people are doubting the ability of the free market(and non-free markets) to detect and respond to an opportunity. How long do you think it will be before a, say, Chinese SpaceX catches up while being unfettered by environmental restrictions and backed by government subsidies?
Space is quite important and as the world deglobalizes there will be intense pressure to compete. SpaceX is breaking new ground and giving other competitors plenty to copy.
Waymo could be much better at driving but without a low cost sensor strategy they can’t make money in a market that will immediately become commodity priced.
Reaching huge scale needs the right market strategy as well as good supply chain.
SpaceX has a clever strategy of exploiting their first mover advantage in cheap launch to create the first cheap satcom system. They will suck up so much of the available revenue from that market that the next movers will have trouble getting sufficient investment.
If what you are saying is true, why would Waymo not then pivot to a cheaper sensor system like Tesla? They have extensive experience with deep learning and plenty of training data. Surely this only buys Tesla a few years of lead time?
You seem to demonstrate what my point that Tesla maximalists assume a temporary lead becomes a permanent one and competitors just give up.
China is going to do it for sure. It doesn't have to be as efficient as SpaceX if it is massively subsidized for defense purposes. And China is pretty good at building things cheap.
On the commercial side Blue Origin has been slow in starting but they are almost ready and will have relatively cheap launches. There are other up and coming private launch competitors too.
The issue is that space launch has some huge economies of scale.
And {world space launch demand} is >> {one country's space launch demand}
The argument for China overcoming SpaceX would be:
- China needs to get within functional (not cost) technological parity with SpaceX ASAP (i.e. which means reusability, albeit for cadence/capacity reasons)
- After that, they need to incentivize global demand to launch on Chinese rockets (likely heavily subsidizing prices to attract demand)
- After that, they need to continue to out-innovate SpaceX on technological and economic fronts
Of those, convincing a substantial portion of global launch demand to use Chinese rockets seems the trickiest bit, give the CCP's relationship with the rule of law.
The issue is that SpaceX, unlike any space company since some never-realized 1960s hypotheticals, is a flywheel company built around scaling.
They create demand so they can scale manufacturing that they can use to decrease prices that creates more demand... etc. etc.
You can't beat a company doing that by just getting "big enough" unless the scaling company (a) runs out of increased demand or (b) cannot convert increased volume into cheaper economics per unit.
"convincing a substantial portion of global launch demand to use Chinese rockets seems the trickiest bit, give the CCP's relationship with the rule of law."
Expound more on this please assuming I'm a potential Brazilian South African ,Saudi or Thai client .
For countries that aren't on the US' shit list (e.g. Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, or Thailand), why would I take a chance on Chinese legal agreements instead of American ones?
The American private company might be prohibited from launching military assets for you, but once a launch contract is otherwise signed, you know it's going to happen.
In contrast, a Chinese legal agreement is worth what, if the central government decides to get involved?
This is an interesting comment because Russia and China have been sending satellites for many countries over the years .Do you have an example of a Chinese company refusing to launch a payload for a foreign customer ?
I'd love a link so that I can get educated more
American Gov is far, far more fickle and likely to "get involved" / abuse export controls / fuck over friendlies due to domestic politics. Space is ITAR heavy, there's less guarantee that private American company can honor agreement than CCP verbal contract. This is 2024, JP steel just happened, US "rule of law" means nothing when strategic interests involved, never have. Can't say the same about PRC, granted they're to high end capabilities export. Ultimately, going with PRC likely will get you ITAR tier tech access bundled with cheaper launch, see state of military drones sales.
> On the commercial side Blue Origin has been slow in starting but they are almost ready and will have relatively cheap launches.
[citation needed]
Sure, New Glenn is designed to be a partially reusable rocket.
But it's far from clear that they'll even successfully launch on their debut, not to mention recover the booster.
And even when they've sorted all that out, word on the street is that the rocket was not designed to be inexpensively manufactured. It's not clear to me just now low reuse can help drive down their launch price.
And adding onto this it's not just cost, they also have the fastest turn around and the highest reliability.
It's vaguely analogous to the early automobile market where Ford was dominating by every single objective metric so competitors were left to compete on subjective metrics like styles. Incidentally this era is where planned obsolescence really took off.
Unfortunately for competitors I'm not sure coating a rocket in a chrome finish and running a sleek ad campaign is going to beat out price+speed+reliability.
With respect, I’m not sure you understand the scale of what we are talking about. No other organization — including national space agencies and military contractors — has the life capacity to compete with Starlink at ANY cost. Even if money were no object, the other contenders literally don’t have the launch capacity and can’t reasonably scale up.
It’s as if Intel released the Pentium Pro back in the 50’s when everyone else was working with vacuum tubes. Yes, in theory there is room for competition. But the gulf is so large in practice.
You have no idea the margins at which Elon Musk operates.
If you read his biography he is obsessive about cost cutting like no else in the history of mankind. There are plenty of examples where Musk brings down the cost of a component by 90%.
No other leader takes risks like Musk and hence he will always push frontiers.
His companies never get lazy or bloated even if it reaches $10T market cap.
Musk methods can't be replicated because it is the anti-thesis of every management practice.
Apple's feature is not comparable. It is extremely low bandwidth and requires special hardware and holding the phone pointing in a certain direction. Starlink acts as a regular (albeit low bandwidth) 4G tower in space.
My family had starlink installed at a remote house we own for internet access. While we could get it up and running, the connection wasn't reliable and we encountered many issues. When we tried to contact Starlink for help, support was non-existent; sent us to multiple dead ends, and often wasted our times with repairs promised weeks into the future, over and over, which never surfaced. After 8 months of pain, we ended up getting rid of it and moving back to our 6mbps.
Starlink is like Elon's other companies. Engineering marvels—where the customer's are merely an annoyance and the means to an end. They are basically hostile to the customer every step of the way; and from what I've seen from Elon—I think this attitude comes right from the top.
Where was this? Members of my family have three different remote cabins surrounded by trees in Montana, Idaho, and Oregon, and all work perfectly. The early days were a little more glitchy, but with the constellation they have today, you don’t even need to aim.
2023 in the Pacific Northwest. We were given the argument that tree cover was a problem quite early on in our attempted troubleshooting. The house is a waterfront property, with a clear view of sky to the east. Anyways, the suspected issue continued to evolve, and we were not able to get to the bottom of it with the support we received.
Certainly, our experience could be an anomalous. But I certainly hear this happening all the time with Tesla, with the manufacturer trying to void warranties and evade liability for vehicle defects.
I just.. wouldn't be bullish on any of Elon's companies in a crowded market; which I suspect will define more his companies in the future. His politically obtuse behavior and lack of respect for authority is enough to turn off ethically minded consumers; and that's before the general crummy experience of being his customer. My best friend has a Honda EV that broke down twice, one time being potentially out of warranty-and the dealer repaired it, no questions asked
It can be counterintuitive because the user terminal is shaped like the kind of satellite dish we’re mentally prepared to understand, the kind we’ve had for the last 50 years, but it’s fundamentally different. The “clear view of the sky to the east” is the source of your problems. Starlink satellites move quickly across a the sky, and the dish needs a comparatively massive 100+ degree view angle to ensure continuous contact. If you look around online you can see comical configurations with Starlink mounted on enormous poles to get them above the tree line. This issue is the #1 cause of problems we see with new installs.
Realistically Starlink is not going to diagnose RF issues at your site. Microwave either works, or gets expensive fast (because you need an expensive person with expensive test equipment to properly investigate). A wild guess based on the available information is that reflections off the water surface are the cause.
Yeah I'm not really sure what issues you could reasonably expect a satellite internet provider to be troubleshooting at all. It's very much a 0 or 1 situation.
Again... the logistical structure of the company is not something that the customer should have to be privy to when trying to figure out if the product is going to workout for them, or not. If the product is not going to be working, the company should not be charging the customer $100 a month for 8 months promising a fix that will never come in.
Just pointing out that there's things you can't diagnose without being physically present. And these kinds of issues aren't only existent in Telecoms or SATCOM in particular.
The user should ask for a credit/refund. The product was almost certainly working. But not meeting expectations. If not it wouldn't have been on for 8 months. Can't tell me you ran 0 bytes over it
Generally, sky to north is what matters. I've done a fair bit of boondocking with starlink and found it to be very sensitive to tree cover in the wrong part of the sky.
I don't think that starlink's support or documentation is particularly great, but it still seems better than my experiences will cell phone and internet service providers.
Did you try a different wifi hotspot, convinced the one they ship with it sucks from my experience with it. Couldn't handle a connection maybe 8 meters away and one floor up, no walls.
IMO it depends on what you see as the point of business and entrepreneurship. I don't see money as the goal, but rather on creating great things. So Buffet wouldn't even rank for me, while you would have omitted Musk's closest competitor - Thomas Edison.
Put another way, if in 30 years Musk has 10 trillion in wealth would seem, to me, to be much less relevant than if he succeeds in making humanity a permanently multi-planetary species.
Advancing humanity in so many different revolutionary fields all at once is something that had not been achieved in a very long time.
I get what you're saying, but I also think you're being reductive in devaluing wealth creation.
Why is a company worth more today than it was five years ago?
Because it's generating more revenue, has more assets... is better at doing whatever {company thing} is.
One can argue that (a) {company thing} isn't good for humanity at all and/or (b) a company which generates more money isn't really more successful, but merely a side effect of capitalist valuing.
And maybe...
But I'd say there's a pretty strong argument that Buffett is worth what he is because BH made multiple companies very much better at doing what they do. In the same way that Ford or Walton made their money by building companies that did what they did better.
And I'd add in the perspective that science and discovery without engineering into mass application is... a hobby with limited impact. The real litmus test is "Can you use this to improve many people's lives?"
And when you do that in a capitalist society, you usually have a chance to make a lot of money.
Many people don't have any real understanding of how wealthy people have been in the past. The Walton family is a fun case. Split the fortune among the family and there are still billionaires in the mix.
Edit: should add that Elon is still valued at a good percentage of the US gdp. So, not unreasonable to say that is incomprehensible, as well. By that measure, is similar to Rockefeller, I think.
I wouldn’t use the Waltons in this example, considering Walmart is eclipsed by a few companies, and even by 50% by one business that Musk has a significant share of.
Silly comparison, all told. Walmart is the single largest private employer. 1.6 million in the US. Literally 10x what Tesla and SpaceX have. Such that it is clear valuation is tough.
Look, Elon is worth a lot. Walton family is worth as much, as well. Just split among several people. None of which should be scoffed at. None are made more impressive by pretending the others are less.
This characterization isn't entirely unreasonable. Isn't Musk objectively the richest businessperson ever in nominal dollars? Inflation-adjusted, I think only Rockefeller or Carnegie may come close, but the variety of businesses Musk has is impressive, and it appears he is just getting started with a long way to go.
Inflation-adjusted I believe Rockefeller was worth more than $400b at the peak of his wealth.
The Walton estate now is worth over $350b, but it’s not a fair comparison as it’s had much longer to compound.
The other thing is that while SpaceX is incredibly successful, the other companies he’s started aren’t. Tesla (despite its massive growth) is in a market of rapidly growing competitors, and he’s on record saying the company lives or dies on tech his own engineers have suggested in court isn’t coming (FSD).
I think this is a psychological thing. Humans during evolution were highly rewarded for seeking and keeping powerful allies. So by imagining that Elon is my friend (because I'm his friend) and Elon is really intrinsically powerful (instead of just a lucky, well positioned grifter that can fall from grace at any moment) I can feel better about my own safety. I can feel more powerful by extension and the indirection somehow muddles that fact that it's all made up. The same mechanism works in religious people.
You might be onto something but we need a proper "evolutionary theory of bootlicking" before we get carried away.
Its pretty clear that the all-too-common in space and time hierarchies, oligarchies, command-and-control pyramids etc. rely on trickle-down privilege to sustain.
But the feeligs of disgust and disbelief at how a person can diminish themselves in the hope of some crumbs falling their way must also have strong evolutionary basis?
The OP said “the most successful businessman in the world”.
Sure one can argue about how OP came to that conclusion, by what measure, etc, but the man produced a highly successful car company, in a field nobody has really been able to do it, under terms where everyone was counting down the days until it went bankrupt.
That alone is an amazing feat.
Then he went on to create a rocket company that broke barriers of space travel no one has been able to do.
Then he started a satellite company that pushed the boundaries of communication for the average person.
I’d say all those feats are worthy of praise and make him a person who stands out significantly from any other businessman in recent history.
So saying he’s the “most successful businessman” doesn’t seem like an absurd or overly hyperbolic statement.
And how you got “stroking off” or the even more absurd “bootlicking” from that statement is just bizarre. I saw zero evidence of either.
I’d say your comments are the odd ones here and say more about you than the OP.
> Then he went on to create a rocket company that broke barriers of space travel no one has been able to do.
Look closer into how the sausage is made. For example the Moon grant for SpaceX to the tune of about $3bln was awarded by a person who wrote it in first person singular and after she did it, she promptly quit and went to work for SpaceX.
Musk is definitely successful, but a grifter not a businessman.
> [...] man produced a highly successful car company
Musk is claiming to posess and even selling non-existent technology to both investors and consumers (pre-orders never fullfilled) for almost a decade now. Other people (Theranos, Nikola) who tried to replicate his success in this field but didn't have pants padded with hundred bln$ are curretly serving very long prison sentences for investor fraud. While Musk got off on the grounds that what he says is widely known to be pure puffery and no-one of sound mind should expect what he says to be accurate. Funny how billions "in the bank" can change how justice percieves you.
Musk is now basically so full of hot air that when he stumbles he falls up.
We also used to not have have LLMs, bipedal and quadrupedal robots, ubiquitous GPS maps, cell phones, miniature cameras of insane quality, ridiculously fast mobile internet connections, residential fiber and many other useful things.
Many smart people make things happen all the time. Regardless of whether there's some singular rich grifter in that specific that can latch onto them soon enough to claim credit or not.
It's just scary that so many people that find such "businessman" something to admire.
That latching onto smart people and ousting them out of their own achievements and replacing with yourself in public imagination is something to admire.
People make a simple statement "Musk is the most successful businessman" and you think you know their internal thought process and are ready to condemn them.
This simple statement shows that either they don't understand what kind of "businessman" Musk is exactly or they know but they don't care about it. He's the most successful grifter. Most successful conman. Those are simple statementd too. I condemn people who say those in honest admiration. I also condemn those ignorant of what means to be the kind of businessman Musk is while praising him.
It sounds like your entire point is "stop liking things I don't like". The very fact you say "I condemn people who say those in honest admiration" shows this is more about you than the person who made the comment.
You've provided zero evidence to back of your claims of "grifter" (whatever that is).
It's not hard. Businessmen run businesses. Musk runs many and in a very successful way. You're entitled to your own opinions, but that's what they are - nothing more than your opinions.
sorry, the burden is on you to distinguish genuine business accomplishment from what others might suspect, less charitably, is excellence in crony capitalism [1],[2].
The Economist made a feeble effort to rank countries in this respect [3] but it does not even include the tech sector in the "crony-prone" sectors (eyes rolling).
[1] "situation in which businesses profit from a close relationship with state power, either through an anti-competitive regulatory environment, direct government largesse, and/or corruption. Examples given for crony capitalism include obtainment of permits, government grants, tax breaks, or other undue influence from businesses over the state's deployment of public goods, for example, mining concessions for primary commodities or contracts for public works" etc.
sorry, the burden is on you to distinguish genuine business accomplishment from what others might suspect, less charitably, is excellence in crony capitalism
No, actually the burden is on the person making that claim (you).
If you think "ideal businessmen" can spend millions to influence political outcomes and overtly commingle public and private interests I question the integrity of your judgement and feel no burden whatsoever.
> Now that you’ve brought up political money and public and private interests
"Crony capitalism, sometimes also called simply cronyism, is a pejorative term used in political discourse to describe a situation in which businesses profit from a close relationship with state power, [...] In other words, it is used to describe a situation where businesses thrive not as a result of free enterprise, but rather collusion between a business class and the political class."
> I can think of any other business who doesn’t spend millions for politics and “commingle public and private interests”
So if cronyism is prevalent in US to some degree then a person who does that best shouldn't be criticisized?
So please provide evidence how Tesla, SpaceX or Starlink have benefited from "a close relationship with state power".
You realize that prior to the latest election, the government generally was opposed to Elon Musk. He was investigated by the SEC, and attacked by politicians.
That sounds like the opposite of crony capitalism.
> So if cronyism is prevalent in US to some degree then a person who does that best shouldn't be criticisized?
Maybe you should start with some evidence first? Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like him and you're mad that others do like him.
I find your view even more perplexing. I get that it’s entirely motivated by anger and contempt, but it’s still weird that someone would get upset over the respect someone else is getting online.
I suppose it’s some deep personality trait difference that makes us right wingers appreciate his work and what makes leftists hate his guts.
> SpaceX - may or may not be profitable in the last year - it's hard to know. Until recently definitely no profitable
SpaceX is very much in the same position as early Amazon.
If they wanted to, they could be profitable today. But they are investing heavily in the future.
IMO, that's a good sign for SpaceX. Many large companies have run out of ideas of what to do with money, so they accumulate it in bank accounts, or do dividends/stock buybacks.
Your experience is not typical. Starlink has been working flawlessly for me for the last few years. It revolutionized Internet access in my remote area. HughesNet was the only game in town with speeds under 3Mbps and 10GB monthly data cap. Now everyone has Starlink with over 100 Mbps speeds. Never heard of issues.
I stated in a neighboring comment that our experiences could be anomalous. Based on how frustrating it was talking to them on multiple occasions with multiple different service reps I assumed it was endemic to their culture; a la Comcast. At the very least, Telsa seems to be trailing tens of thousands of angry customers online who are struggling with defective vehicles.
Tesla has some of the highest customer satisfaction scores among car brands. I'm not sure what you are referring about "tens of thousands of angry customers", you need to look at percentages and not absolute numbers. Tesla has had quality issues and problem with services but overall people are very happy as far as car brands go. And you have to be reasonable with your expectation for customer service of an internet service provider. There's only so much you can do to help an individual customer. Maybe it doesn't work in your area for some specific reason, you can't expect their engineers to spend time investigating that single case. If it was a broader issue i'm sure they would look. Did you try getting new Starlink receiver?
I appreciate you have had a bad experience, but to then think that's the overall experience is myopic. There are many highly remote areas where people can't speak more highly of Starlink.
Internet provision not all that far out of major Australian cities can be abysmal. I'm only 30 minutes drive from the centre of Perth and my options are currently 5G (operating at about 4Mbit), Wireless Broadband (performance promise - the download speed will reach 25Mbit at least once in any given 24 hour period!) or Starlink, at a pretty stable 120/20.
I'd love to not have to pay for it, to use what local/national companies can provide, but so far nothing comes close.
I am informed that the wireless system is due to be upgraded to support much higher speeds, but that was supposed to happen this year and there's not a lot of this year left.
I would think 5G could really improve that situation. In the states we have the 600 MHz spectrum on T-Mobile and can pull down decent speeds 30-150mb through trees 15 miles from the tower. Upload is not great.
At least in part that's been delayed because of someone in the area raising a band of nutters and giving the council hell about 5G killing her grandchildren. Sigh.
Might happen before too much longer - she managed to get the project to build the new antenna on private land killed (I'm sure much to the annoyance of the landowner, who was going to pocket a nice chunk of ground-rent). But now the local authority have given the go-ahead for one to be built on their land, and they're going to get the rent. She is apoplectic, which brings me great joy.
It may or may not be relevant to your case, but every time a story like this comes up I will remind people in general that fiber-optic cable is 50 cents per meter (probably $1 per meter Australian), wireless links cost equipment and a regulatory approval fee and are easier in less densely populated areas, and there are tons and tons of stories of people dissatisfied with their ISP creating a better competitor, your neighbours are likely as frustrated as you if they use the Internet, and there is no minimum size to an ISP.
I'm not sure there are tons of stories about people creating their own ISPs in Australia are there?
I know of companies that set up competing wireless infrastructure, and even one suburb around here that is served by a private network rather than the national network, so I guess they did it, but they have (at minimum) hundreds of customers.
At that price I might be looking at $1k-$2k just in fibre-optic cable, before we talk about any of the necessary equipment or the price of actually installing that cable underground. That covers starlink for quite a while.
If you set up a wireless ISP, you become a carrier and that is expensive.
TIO membership, the carrier licence fee, telecommunications interception and data retention obligations create recurring costs in the thousands of dollars a year before you serve a single customer.
I use Starlink in Italy and it's been flawless. To be honest it's like magic with how easy it was to setup and use.
One my colleagues tried Starlink at his cabin in the PNW and he had to return it. He just couldn't get a clear and wide enough line of sight through the tree cover. I wonder if that was your issue?
I think this is quite perceptive. Musk is a narcissist, and the driving motivators of narcissists are a bottomless need for praise and attention and contempt for others.
Musk is famous for being contemptuous of his employees, and he's starting to show more and more contempt for Rest of World. Cybertruck and X both reek of it.
Everyone here is assuming Musk is rational and SpaceX and Starlink will continue to develop rationally.
I don't think they will. He appears to be becoming more and more unhinged, and that's going to have negative effects on his fledgling empire.
I was an early user of Starlink, starting with the original terminal (today I have the 3rd generation high performance terminal). Being in a very rural area in MT where there was never congestion in my cell and I have a very open view of the sky, it has worked well for me since day 1 and has only gotten better with time.
Personally, I monitored latency more than speed, as I always had enough speed to do whatever I wanted. When I first started using SL, latency averaged around 100ms (which compared to my previous provider HughesNet was amazing, but was high compared to ground based connections), but today averages around 35ms which is still technically higher than ground based connections, but for all practical purposes for me, is indisguishable from any other internet option, even for online gaming and live video streaming.
Although I did not monitor speed as regurarily, it averages around 300Mbps for me. Sometimes it exceeds 400Mbps (I just ran a speed test and got 420Mbps), and it is rarely less than 100Mbps.
I have contacted support twice, and always received quick replies. However, based on my monitoring the Starlink Reddit forum, customer support during their beta period did appear to have often been poor. And there was also a period of time where performance was poor in many populated regions as they started opening up the floodgates a bit sooner than they probably should have, resulting in slow speeds for people in many regions, until their satellite launches caught up to demand.
However, my impression is that both of these issues have improved significantly since Starlink left beta. I do still see some complaints about customer service, but anecdotally it appears less frequent. My impression is that they have the ability to remotely troubleshoot many hardware issues, and will quickly send a replacement if they can confirm a fault. I do worry about this though, as even a quick reply and a quick hardware replacement means several days of downtime.
Speed complaints are almost certainly less frequent than they used to be.
I have no doubt that your customer service hell story is true, and if that happened to me I would be just as turned off, but I think that, especially today, that is not the norm.
I have considered purchasing a spare terminal as a backup, but I do have some concerns. I have heard that terminals that stay unpowered and unconnected for very long periods of time get too behind on FW updates and essentially become bricked, I don't believe that is the case today but I am not 100% sure. Also, back when there used to be a queue for signing up, it would not have been practical to just set up a new account for the new terminal, but now that the sign up queue is gone, maybe it is an option today. I have not fully researched my options for this redundancy idea.
A (temporary) monopoly is not as bad in something that wouldn't otherwise exist. If Elon Musk concentrated only on cars, or SpaceX had had another couple of launch failures and gone bust, this functionality might be 40 years away.
Not to say you're wrong, we all benefit from competition in the long run. We get it from a level playing field and preventing natural monopolists from locking the gate behind them.
If you read it uncharitably. If you read it charitably, the “it’s awesome” can be referring to how quickly they made something work that otherwise wouldn’t for many more years.
politically derelict? he's not a politician, how can he be derelict? From my perspective he's pretty politically deligent... I think what you mean is you disagree with his policies.
The European Union wants its own satellite network to counter Starlink. It will be build by SpaceRISE, a consortium that include Airbus, Thales, Deutsche Telekom...
It took roughly 20 years for the EU to deploy 30 satellites.
How long do you think it's going to take to deploy 300 or so of them when the Ariane 6 had only one launch (with a partial failure) in the last 14 years?
If you want to build a constellation, you need the means to send payloads in space at a relatively low cost. The EU can't do that so it will be an expensive and slow endeavor and by the time those 300 satellites are up there, Space X will have deployed 10s of thousands of them.
You can say, that the EU does not want to compete with Space X or that their goals are not the same but either way, it's just too little too late IMHO.
I agree with your overall point, but that's a super deceptive metric to use. First Ariane 6 was scheduled for 2020 and only the first one ever launched.
Or when they built their own GPS system and it ended up being far more accurate than any other system in use? Or when they built their own Earth observation system and it was also better than anyone elses? Or when they built their own weather monitoring constellation and forecast model and it ended up superior to all others? Or when they built the world's most powerful particle collider and discovered the Higgs boson? The world's largest passenger aircraft? The first mRNA Covid-19 vaccine? The weight loss drugs keeping American celebrities thin?
> Or when they built their own GPS system and it ended up being far more accurate than any other system in use?
It took 20 years to deploy 30 satellites. You can call that a success I guess.
> The world's largest passenger aircraft
That is an Airbus project which is not an EU project. Airbus is the result of a merger between multiple companies and was not initiated by the EU.
> The weight loss drugs keeping American celebrities thin?
This drug is manufactured in Denmark by a Danish company. It has nothing to do with the EU.
> The first mRNA Covid-19 vaccine?
You mean the Pfizer vaccine? That's a German company, not an initiative from the EU.
> Or when they built the world's most powerful particle collider and discovered the Higgs boson?
They did build the CERN ... in 1954. Which we can agree was a long time ago. Since then the ability of the EU to deliver big projects such as for example Ariane 6 has gone down rather quickly. Also you ll notice that when the CERN was created, the EU as we know it today did not exist.
> Or when they built their own Earth observation system and it was also better than anyone elses? Or when they built their own weather monitoring constellation and forecast model and it ended up superior to all others?
Ok and so what? Does that invalidate my arguments? A few successes amongst a ton of failures. That does not inspire any confidence.
That is why I am skeptical but I am prepared to eat my own words if the EU has a complete up and running constellation of 300 satellites in orbit by 2035.
The EU has some great companies for sure but these companies did not get there because the EU helped them or because the EU decreed that such companies have to exists.
So between the US, the EU, and China's version of starlink how many satellites will that require? I see Starlink will use 42,000 when fully completed so that is 3 * 42,000?
Which is precisely why it will not be built. Too many cooks in the kitchen and too many known grifters with their own vested interests.
SpaceX, as much as there is to dislike about its founder, has the advantage of being one company with a founder at the top who has made it very clear that only his vision matters and intra-company political bullshit just Does Not Fly.
That constellation doesn't even play in the same league as Starlink.
It makes some sense for Europe, but it will likely be more for government use and a few large European commercial uses. This has no chance what so ever in the larger global consumer market.
And the claim that it will exist by 2027 is utterly hilarious.
But even this small constellation is way beyond what European industry can currently do, they need to basically mobilize every European space company to do this, and all of them working together to get this working. Lets see them pull this off first.
I'm sorry but if you think this has even a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding you need to learn more about the launch and satellite comms industries. This is political posturing, not a plan.
I don't want to spend hours typing on this so let's just say this; Arianespace is on the "team", so it's going to launch on Ariane 6, a rocket that was obsolete before it launched (and it was not a successful launch).
The idea that you can launch mass on Ariane6 to challenge Starlink is like saying you can win NASCAR on a horse and buggy. I'm not even exaggerating, that is literally the price differential between Starship and the rest. This initiative is a joke.
The EU's one skill is to turn my tax money into shit ever better than my socialist government. If any private company was as reckless with its customer's money as European governments, they would be fraudulent.
Perhaps they merely mean it's awesome to have one global satellite broadband service, and one semi-affordable launch option, instead of zero which is what we had before?
A more charitable interpretation would obviously be that the OP is very happy with the products and services that these companies build and provide and if the alternative is between this never happening and the companies becoming monopolies, at least in the short-term, they are OK with it.
Can you read this sentence and tell me how none of this follows from it?
> SpaceX and Starlink have the same owner, both are private companies, with SpaceX launching 80% of the global space payload last year and rising, and Starlink has a constellation two orders of magnitude bigger than any competitor. It’s over. And IMO it’s awesome.
It says: "It's a private monopoly, and IMO it's awesome"
Yes, being able to manufacturer and deploy your satellite services at cost is an insurmountable competitive advantage. There is one other player in this space, Rocket Lab. They are 5-10 years behind SpaceX, but are the #2 launched rocket in the USA and 2/3rds of their revenue is from satellite manufacturing. I think something like 25-50% of the non-SpaceX satellites in-operation have a Rocket Lab logo somewhere on the craft. The next step in their vertical integration plan is to launch their own constellation and provide some sort of space-based service. Although it's several years away and pending the scale-up of their medium launch vehicle test flying next year.
Their CEO has come to the same conclusion as you. The major space companies of the future have to be vertically integrated if they want to compete. The founder has a pretty cool story. From New Zealand. Built a rocket bike and a rocket pack, but didn't go to college. Being a foreign national without traditional education meant he couldn't work in the space sector due ITAR. So he started Rocket Lab in 2006.
Their small lift vehicle (300kg) was the fastest vehicle from first orbit to 50 orbital launches, and tracking to be the fastest to hit 100 orbital launches. Their medium lift vehicle (13,000kg), if it makes orbit next year, will become the most capital efficient ($300m spent) MLV developed, and the fastest MLV to go from announcement to orbit (5ish years).
After Rocket Lab and SpaceX, the competition is pretty thin. Blue Origin is launching their HLV (40,000kg) New Glenn for the first time in early 2025 and there are a couple of startup and traditional defense contractor projects, but all unproven.
SpaceX is so insanely far ahead of everyone else. They will hit 100+ launches in 2024, Rocket Lab is at 15ish with their 300kg vehicle, and planning to scale their 13,000kg vehicle to 3 launches in 2026, 5 in 2027 and 7 in 2028. New Glenn will be on a similar ramp.
Define the time frame. 1 year? Quite likely. 10 years? nothing is less sure ... But in 50 years, I bet SpaceX doesn't even exist anymore. Companies rises and falls and it's always been like this (and the same applies to Empires, Countries or .. Species). It's always a matter of timeframe
It'll be interesting for sure. similar to requesting Chrome to become separate from Google, there might some law enforcement scenarios where they'll have to split things.
If you are right and Starlink will have no competition, then why would it not be regulated? Generally speaking, monopolies are regulated to prevent price gouging, including natural monopolies. And if its not a monopoly, then clearly the game is not over.
Starlink mostly does have competition but they are seeking out specifically underserved customers which is an ever decreasing market. 5 or so years ago I signed up for the waiting list because there was no reasonable internet, 6mb DSL. Before I got the invite there was 4G for $50 a month. Now there's two 5G service providers and Fiber is suppose to come very soon.
Because it is not abusing its position. Monopolies are not an inherent bad, they just tend to start abusing their position, and when they do then they get handled.
This is more common with public companies than private companies though.
Founders have their own life, honor, ethics, desires, etc. which usually help strongly keep the company on a positive track. e.g. Valve Corporation.
This is the American model of anti-trust, very much not the European model (which explicitly targets competition for its own sake even when consumers are not harmed by the monopolistic behavior).
Just because you like a company (and as a consumer, I like Steam) doesn’t mean it’s not acting monopolistically.
Valve is certainly abusing its position. It charges extremely high rents for the services it offers because of its dominance as a marketplace.
It does provide a host of services and does them well, but whether they are value for the platform fee is another question. Using those services creates lock-in and friction to port to other platforms. By providing them as part of the package, Steam has extinguished companies that used to provide those services, meaning that it’s even harder to provide the same functionality elsewhere.
Companies always abuse their position. Its basic capitalism; markets only thrive and are fair when both buyers and sellers have multiple options, and it would be odd to assume this time is the exception.
So start drafting up the policies if they need time, but don't enact them yet. I'm not a fan of the owner, but if the product is good and the price is fair, leave it be until it becomes a problem. Let's not punish innovation.
In the market for internet service, Starlink is a disruptor to existing ISPs. Especially for those servicing rural areas. I don't understand a reflexive reach to encumber a nascent business model with additional regulations. What problem are you trying to solve?
What people sometimes don't understand about monopolies, specially of a new product, is that the competition, in additions to all the competition that already exists for internet, is simply not having it.
SpaceX can just asked for an absurdly high price, because if they want to sell into the broader consumer market, people aren't going to pay 1000s of $ a month to watch Netflix.
Perhaps you’re not aware that SpaceX sued the US government to break ULAs monopoly on national security launches and brought down costs.
And perhaps you’re unaware just how many national telcos world wide have a national monopoly and for the first time ever may have to compete with Starlink?
Perhaps you’re also unaware of the grip that Russian rocket engine manufacturers had with the RD180 engine on the US launch sector until recently and the positive impace SpaceX has had on that.
On the one hand you’re arguing that SpaceX is awesome for breaking monopolies. On the other you’re saying it’s awesome that “it’s over” and they own the market now.
> Would we have had Bell Labs without the AT&T monopoly?
The implication here is that Bell Labs was a good thing. While I find it hard to say I wouldn't have loved to have been a part of something like that, I think we may have been better off without it, considering what it squashed.
A research environment like Bell Labs freed from the behemoth of AT&T would have been a great boon to society had it stayed around in a similar form to today.
AT&T was heavily regulated (common carrier) through much of it's history and was a big part of the reason that BellLabs was so influential. Not true of SpaceX and Starlink.
Would we have had a single lab that became famous for so many things? No. Would we have got thousands of smaller labs that added up to more innovation? Maybe.
For example: Mitutoyo seems to have a monopoly on producing accurate digital calipers that have battery life measured in years (using one dainty little LR44 alkaline cell). They use approximately fuck-all for power whether switched on or off.
Certainly, the market is open for others to produce an actually-competitive product with similar performance. All it takes is for the competition figure out how to do it and put them into production, since any necessary patents expired long ago.
But they simply have not done so.
So here we are today, wherein: The free market has decided that Mitutoyo has a defacto monopoly on tools of this capability.
>For example: Mitutoyo seems to have a monopoly on producing accurate digital calipers that have battery life measured in years (using one dainty little LR44 alkaline cell). They use approximately fuck-all for power whether switched on or off.
metrology is vast. I am a fan of Mitutoyo too, but this is a poor example of a monopoly.
I have literally 3 different brands , including Mitutoyo, on my desk, and the Mitutoyo unit offers the worst value-to-dollar ratio and it's the hardest to read at a glance; it's only there because it's the coolant-proof unit I have on hand at the moment.
i'd gladly give up a bit of battery life for a backlight and some bigger character display; thankfully the market responded by offering this from about numerous other manufacturers..
>So here we are today, wherein: The free market has decided that Mitutoyo has a defacto monopoly on tools of this capability.
well, no.
Mitutoyo is great, but American shops, especially any DoD affiliated ones, push American made Starett like crazy. All of my less-discerning maker friends use Amazon/Harbor Freight/Chicago no-name Alibaba glass scale calipers and they're perfectly happy with them. My German friends often use Vogel/Hoffman/Mahr.
But anyway, whatever. I love my Mitus, and I even have a pair of their very first electronic scale calipers in a drawer somewhere ; the battery life was great even then.
Mitutoyo isn't a monopoly, not even close. Just because a company offers a product that is arguably just slightly better in one aspect than others does not make it a monopoly. (I say this with a 10 year old pair of harbor freight calipers on my desk that easily have a 2 year battery life with regular usage. Also, Dial Calipers.)
But to answer your question, must they? No. Do they tend to be bad? Yes. Does their behavior get worse over time? Typically.
Yeah I should think so. edit: I don’t use this category of tools so for the sake of argument I will assume your assertion on Mitutoyo’s monopoly is accurate.
Without serious competitors, Mitutoyo has little reason to push the boundaries of performance or reduce costs further. Monopolies can result in complacency, where companies become gatekeepers rather than innovators.
In this case Mitutoyo may have a fine product but the monopoly introduces a systemic risk of lack of innovation or price gouging.
You’re assuming the market has chosen rationally but economic conditions, patent legacies, and lack of competition might simply be symptoms of market failure rather than optimal outcomes.
They are when you can regulate the crap out of them to benefit everyone after they’ve benefited from government contracts, FCC governance, an educated population, etc.
SpaceX has no qualms launching competitors constellations, it has done so with Kupier already.
Sure the prices might not be quite as good as what Starlink gets but definitely comparable in big-O notation (especially compared to other launch providers).
It’s not over precisely because it’s vertically integrated. Buyers want to maintain leverage. SpaceX wants to avoid forced divestiture. Hence the airlines inking deals with AST Mobile, and SpaceX lofting their birds.
I would even go to say that the reason Starlink exists is to use up SpaceX excessive launch capacity.
With its idea of building assembly lines and reusable rockets, can launch more stuff than there is market for. So they create their own market. Starlink launches are almost free besides the fuel, as they have rockets lying around that are already paid for.
A state-funded competitor could come up though. China for instance may want their own satellite internet for strategic reasons, and fund that. I am sure Russia would be interested too. This in turn, will pay for development of a reusable rocket program.
Lets cool down a bit. Falcon 9 launches cost much more then 'just the fuel'. Estimated launch price is still 10-20 million $. The Upper stage is an expensive thing to build. Operations cost are also not that low. Fuel cost are only like a couple 100k$.
China is deftly building something. Russia doesn't have a snowball chance in hell of building something like Starlink.
You don't think that Blue Origin could be a competitor? They are quite behind, but they are backed by quite a lot of money, I feel like I remember even hearing news about Blue Origin placing their own internet satellites.
I don't know about everything else but 3bln out of that 15 were supposed to fund entire Moon mission and he burnt through that cash delivering a handful of suborbital empty metal pipes ... sorry, the last one was containing a banana to add insult to injury.
That's ridiculous. There's no extra money coming. This is a firm fixed price contract. And the original plan was 2028 before Trump changed things.
Most of the 15billion is for already delivered deliverables. (You have absolutely nothing to stand on) Blue Origin is also going to the moon and received more money for a smaller lander.
Where's their rocket?
The Moon lander contract is less than what SpaceX will make from starlink alone in 2024.
I think it's important to recognize the irony in how much SpaceX and Tesla benefit from government programs and funds that he now wants to turn off as part of DOGE, but you can't say SpaceX has barely done anything.
Even if you like Elon and his companies monopolies are still bad. He is not going to live forever, somebody else will be in charge sooner or later and that person/group may not adhere to same principles.
Monopolies due to the State granting permissions to only one company, or gaining advantages due to coercion or lobbying are indeed terrible.
But monopolies due to excellence in the development of the product, like Starlink, are not bad at all. In any case these are extremely rare and tend to last very little time.
The conpetition is there already. In Europe you can get satellite Internet for around $40 a month. It’s slower than Starlink (transfer is decent, but the latency is in the hundreds), but much cheaper.
While you're technically correct, the parent is more correct. Competitors have to pay normal launch rates. The competitive service needs to include those costs to end users.
Starlink "pays" for launches at cost. While we don't know what SpaceX's cost margins are, they are not trivial. To setup a low orbit constellation is extremely expensive and competitors lose millions per launch that Starlink gets to reinvest.
There's been 136 launches of Falcon 9 for Starlink. ~US$62m per launch? If their margins are 20% that's that's $1.6b in savings. And I bet F9's margins are closer to 50% - supporting Starship and more.
Musk is similar to Henry Ford in that he currently has an advantage due to the innovative nature of his business. However, over time, his ideas will likely be replicated by other businesses or even governments.
I'm not entirely convinced that becoming a strong political figure by aligning with one side is a wise long-term strategy. This election was a loss for the opposition, not just because of their poor communication of achievements but also due to the ordinary cycles of politics. People often place blame on those in power for any problems during their tenure. The pendulum of trust will eventually swing back to the other side. Musk's political aspirations also pose a risk for him, as they could jeopardize his relationships with allies within the currently dominant party.
What I’m suggesting is that monopolies like this often collapse when they become too politically entrenched, threatening the very power structures that initially enabled their rise and powet accumulation.
Swarm wasn't a competitor to SpaceX at the time, Swarm and Starlink wasn't aiming at the same market at all. And they didn't exactly kill Swarm. They launched Swarm satellites for a while and there was talk of integrating Swarm transceivers on Starlink satellites. I think once direct-to-cell became a reality, the idea of Swarm was subsumed into that project since it should do everything Swarm did but better. It's worth noting that the Swarm founders are now working on the direct-to-cell project.
It’s awesome but also worrying. Elon is a political timebomb. I wouldn’t put it past him to selectively deny people usage based on political alignment, sex etc. At least for now there are much worse geosynchronous competitors, but some future state where one doesn’t exist is worrying.
Musk is at least a named individual, somewhat accountable for his decisions. Yes him having the ability to cut people off is worrying, but I'm less worried about him doing it than e.g. the Internet Watch Foundation, or whoever cut off Kiwi Farms (where we still don't really know who's actually responsible).
Allegedly. Even assuming they were the people who wanted that to happen, we don't know how/why they have the authority and who to vote out if we don't like their decision, whereas Musk is expected to be appointed by the duly elected president who made it clear to the electorate that this was his plan.
Oh we know damn well. The good old "scream so loud the issue cannot be ignored anymore" issue. Especially with Fong-Jones' background in tech with access to a lot of vocal influencer figures in the field.
Not to mention the big amount of brain-melted teens who immediately assume anything said about anyone who dares to express negative opinions about what the aforementioned teens believe as true and create a supposedly warranted lynch mob against them.
There are countless examples of Musk selectively banning people on Twitter based on political belief, such as this one [1]. And of course, he banned the @elonjet account, even after specifically saying he would not [2]. More specifically to StarLink, he banned Ukrainian forces from using them around Crimea [3].
I believe by the time Starlink arrived in Ukraine Crimea was already occupied and post "referendum" and providing service there would be like providing service to Russia, no?
I didn't say "it was sovereign" (all by itself). I referred to "its sovereignty", in terms of who it belonged to (both in 1991 and now). The two contexts are entirely different.
what it is, is an occupied territory of ukraine fully controlled by russia with russian military on it
And yet -- still entirely under Ukrainian sovereignty. It seems you're a bit unclear as to what the term means. It doesn't mean "military control".
Point mean: just because the Russian currently military sits on the Crimea, doesn't mean it's "part of Russia".
And no, it's not just a symbolic difference. It's a hugely, hugely important one.
my question was rhetorical.
Indeed, it looks like you're shooting into the wind here. I'll have to leave to explore these topics on your own.
Whether to provide Crimea with Starlink or not depends on who sits there. Similar reason why all Crimeans got under sanctions immediately after annexation. Not just Starlink but every other Western company respecting sanctions stopped doing business with Crimea. Same with Donetsk and Luhansk.
No one cares if it's "legally" Ukraine. People care about the "effectively".
Legally always depends on who you ask. Some will tell you that Taiwan is part of PRC for example. Maybe at least half of the world will. However Taiwan is not under sanctions because effectively it isn't under PRC.
> Indeed, it looks like you're shooting into the wind here
I am just trying to reduce you some confusion by explaining some basics. Starlink was not yet in Ukraine when Crimea was annexed and the world mostly sat and just watched it happen. Therefore the musk-man could not "cut out crimea". There's nothing to argue about. Just don't spread misinfo please, there's enough of it.
Of course, you can always find people who say something wildly at odds with the overwhelming international consensus, and in any case completely lacking in any intrinsic substance.
But that doesn't mean what they're saying is even potentially valid, and that the matter "depends" on what they say.
I replied to a guy who said Musk turned off Starlink in Crimea. Which is false. If we are not talking about that then I don't know what we're talking about.
> That's objectively just not true at all.
I'll clarify. For the purposes of doing business there no one cares if it's legally Ukraine.
> Of course, you can always find people who say something wildly at odds with the overwhelming international consensus
Yes I can find a Crimea full of them and probably half the world at large who will say it is legally Russia now.
I properly talked to one Crimean only in my life and he voted for Russia in referendum. he said most people did because higher salary etc. When war began he left the country tho. Maybe he realized his mistake but probably just didn't want to get killed.
International consensus is fluid and ephemeral (maybe even precisely because people like putler)
You don't need LEOs to have text direct to cell. You can cover with a lot fewer satellites in higher otbits. China had this since last year, though through special protocols, not LTE, so you need new hardware. But the hardware fits into a regular cell phone.
You have it reversed. It’s fair, it’s hard to tell if you haven’t worked in the launch industry. But drive out to Mojave and go talk to the dozens of companies out there. Many of them have reusable designs. But also if you look at the financials, I think many would laugh at the funding many of these companies get when you compare to Silicon Valley. Clear vaporware frequently gets bigger investing.
The problem with launch companies is that you have nothing to launch. It’s a vicious coupled system, because it also means you can’t bring prices down to increase the number of launches. You need scale to bring prices down. You can’t implement the Silicon Valley model of run all your competitors (ULA) without dumping 10x down the drain compared to your Uber or Netflix.
So the reason it works is because SpaceX is its own customer. You are bootstrapping. The satellite internet idea isn’t even new. I was pitching this to a company I worked for in the early 2010’s (inspired by the brand new planet labs), but what helped was I even found white papers by Qualcomm and others that clearly had the exact same idea. My boss dismissed it because the failures of Celestri, Teledesic, Iridium, and Globealstar. I’m sure this is why I was able to find those white papers too, and very clearly so did SpaceX.
The difference here is that SpaceX is a launch company AND has the funding of a billionaire that is willing to take the risk [0].
Imo, the real question is who pitched Kuiper and did they do it before Starlink? It’s a good and obvious idea, so I’d put money down that someone did. I’m pretty sure they’re fucked now as there’s legitimate reasons you want LEO satellite mega constellation to be handled by a monopoly. You just can’t have a dozen of those companies running around.
[0] side rant: why the fuck are more billionaires not willing to take big risks. Especially those with at least a billion liquidated from their stock. What’s the point of that money? You’re so wealthy it’s effectively impossible to go broke. The real exception is if your wealth is mostly paper and you’re defrauding people. At 10 billion it basically will not happen even then. If you can stash (not even) 50 million, you never have to work ever again to live in high luxury.
Yeah but if they were like, "Lemme tell you how to provide Internet for boats and Iranians in the most expensive way possible," it doesn't sound like that exciting of a business anymore now does it?
And you’ve already had comms in most places in the world including the polar regions for some time now. This is about lower cost and ubiquitous access.
There’s little to no authentication on filing flight plans which makes this a potentially bigger problem. I’m sure it’s fixed but the mechanism that caused the failure is an assertion that fails by disconnecting the critical systems entirely for “safety”. And the backup failed the same way. Bet there are similar bugs.
This resonates with me. I think configuring Linux for on a Raspberry Pi for a specific task that includes network IO, storage and compute is a light version of the Askesis he describes. And absolutely a worthwhile exercise if nothing more.
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