This is great for regions that need to be connected and the power elites, but for the rest of us it wouldn't change much.
I disagree with almost all of Elon's "politics" but Starlink still has huge potential. Hopefully, he doesn’t abuse the power too much and focuses on making the world more connected, in the hands of the us government and given away like GPS it could be the way to go to get the whole world connected.
The best possible outcome for Starlink is that he gets distracted with something else and doesn't meddle in it whatsoever.
That's at least a billion people. I don't know what the intersection of that with the affordability is, though.
I'm writing this from an Ayahuasca center in rural Peru connected with Starlink. Before, internet was a ten minute drive into town away. We're now connected when at one side of the center. It would be nice to have it all the way into the jungle. And when you want to be disconnected, just turn your phone off or leave it behind.
My understanding is that the monthly cost for Starlink varies pretty wildly across the world. Presumably the same would be true for this cell service - idle satellites have the same huge fixed cost and don't generate any revenue.
a) Based on what we've seen in China, India etc many of those will shift towards densely populated cities or will stay and those locations will become industrialised, densely populated cities.
b) In densely populated cities it doesn't make sense to use Starlink when fibre is far cheaper, has limited congestion issues and can provide gigabit speeds at a minimum.
c) It's great that you're writing this in rural Peru but that is a declining use case and should not be extrapolated to the rest of the world.
There's just a really strong tendency for people all over the world to focus on their own experience. And you can actually reinforce this by zooming out too far. If you live in San Francisco, this seems like a pet use case and you can be like "What is it, 10% of the population?" But "the population" is quite the fucking denominator.
I mean, it's already happening and obviously Starlink has run the numbers. So I'm largely just reacting to the tone here.
But it will decline such that Starlink is likely to be more of a niche product similar to how satellite internet services are today.
Are you really that ignorant?
By every definition that is niche.
Currently, each launch of 23 Starlink satellites costs SpaceX around $50 million. To get 1,000 direct to cell satellites in orbit, they'll need to launch 44 times, costing them $2.2 billion. Due to the low orbits, air resistance causes the satellites to reenter within 5-10 years, so to maintain the constellation they'll need to spend $220-440 million per year. These costs will be much lower when they switch from Falcon 9 to Starship.
Now let's say only 1% of the population wants Starlink direct to cell. That's still 80 million people. If SpaceX charges cell companies $10/month per user for the service, that's almost $10 billion per year. And that's not counting the money they make from selling Starlink Internet, which currently has over 4 million subscribers. At $100/month, that's $4.8 billion per year in revenue.
So Starlink is profitable without direct to cell technology, but since they're launching the satellites anyway, they might as well collect more revenue by adding cell capability. DTC only becomes unprofitable if the cost of the extra hardware and mass is less than DTC subscriber revenue.
Why not 5%, 10%, 100%. It's just made up numbers.
Will it be a good business for Starlink, sure. Will it change the world, probably not.
Until recently, most of what you wrote applied to us too (our previous options were 128kbit theoretical dsl, 1 sec latency, or extremely flaky cellular).
Now that a double digit percentage of people on our street have starlink, the phone company finally ran fiber to the home.
Being able to make emergency calls from the many dead spots around here would be nice.
Haha, good one.
I think it depends on the application you're using it for.
If you're constantly using the gps - yeah, I'd definitely agree with you.
But if you're using it purely for emergency communication, you can just turn off the cell phone, and it should be fine.
It's also possible to pursue a hybrid approach by bringing a battery to change the phone.
Or, as I have done on multi-day trips, a solar panel and a battery.
Cell phones are far more sensitive to temperature issues than dedicated devices.
And when you do have an issue no external battery is going to help you because they are also sensitive.
And now, other people have some access (if non-optimal) to rescue services, despite the fact that they didn't (or couldn't afford to) pay more for inReach.
I see this as an unqualified win.
At least my work S24 says ~16 days in airplane mode + power saver. Not tested.
Works surprisingly well. You have to be outside and hold iPhone in the specifics position pointed at satellite, it tells you where to turn iPhone to to get signal.
(I’m referring to the "Messages via Satellite" feature that launched two months ago in iOS 18. This is different from the "Emergency SOS via Satellite" feature that has been around since 2022.)
One space based cell plan for the whole world
I'm optimistic.
I think that, once SpaceX starts launch Starlink satellites with Starship, they'll be able to increase their globally available bandwidth by a factor of 5-10x (although it might take 5 years to roll out). A lot of that bandwidth will be eaten up by existing demand. But hopefully some of it will enable novel services like global cell service through a single provider (even if it's limited to low bandwidth applications like text and voice).
However, a Starlink mini dish can let you cheaply make calls from basically anywhere with some minor setup.
Traditional satellite phone corporations used to charge something like 8 USD/min.
But even ignoring that the contention is low in the middle of the ocean and satellites have hardware either way, driving down the market rate for calls at sea.
Calls are ~0.75 MB/minute allowing a 24/7 conversion for for a full month for 250$, or more realistically mostly sending other kinds of data and a sub cent per minute opportunity cost for using that data on calls. The actual hardware installation is relatively trivial compared to operating a boat.
So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and in part it’s a limited customer base for a lot of hardware, but it’s also just what the market will bare.
> Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station
The bandwidth, latency and stability that Starlink has is also leagues better than geosynch based solutions, for a much lower monthly price.
Even without considering the better performance, the price makes it viable now to have a internet connections in places it did not make financial sense before.
It takes a day at most if you want a simple setup.
keeping the close-by phones on 5G to ease congestion and letting the fringe sit on 3G or 4G makes sense
The baseband on handheld devices do not have that much power to transmit and receive from Starlink directly; and hence the partnership with MNOs. With 5G (after Google & Meta got involved, the designs took on a Cloud/Internet-heavy focus), Starlink very well might have "slices" carved out exclusive for its own use world over.
See also: Cloudflare's Zero-Trust SIM (2022), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32982697
That is exactly what this is about, direct from standard handsets to starlink satellites.
It turns out they do.
And a single entity to decide who gets disconnected if they do not behave
Er, if you got highway, maybe? I assure you there are plenty of roads that have poor cell reception.
Partnering with a national carrier handles the licensing aspect and if the tech pans out the economics could shift to allow them to buy national spectrum and offer direct service.
Musk mentions this in the very first announcement of Starlink. https://youtu.be/AHeZHyOnsm4?t=191
I think this is the biggest reason. All nation's governments will absolutely ensure, overtly or covertly, that their national regulators limit any space-based supra-national system from being able to threaten their national telephony and data carriers. Why? Preventing losing national capabilities, government revenue (taxes, licenses & other domestic carrier fees, lobbying, kickbacks, bribes, etc) and, most importantly, losing the ability to snoop at will on calls and data (at least metadata if not full-take). Even in countries where the major carriers are all based in other nations, existing towers being land-based creates jurisdiction for the government to control and tax.
While many westernized democracies like to proclaim their commitment to freedom, rule of law and individual human rights - in practice there are currently zero governments on earth free enough to not consider loss of that absolute control over citizen's private communication an existential threat. Even in places where existing laws don't currently make it illegal, as soon as technology enables it - it will certainly be made illegal (by any means necessary). I assume SpaceX is smart enough to understand this reality.
The ITU is pretty overt about how frequency allocation governance works. Absolutely no one wants a free-for-all frequency regime, for a multitude of reasons - not even SpaceX.
You may recall that Huawei 5G equipment was expunged from domestically-controlled, western infrastructure without having broken any laws, due to fears of future abuse. Your suggestion of a foreign company unilaterally, and illegally[1] imposing it's foreign-controlled, space-based phone network goes much further than whatever fears Washington had over Huawei.
1. Pretty much every country on earth with a government regulates how radio spectrum is licensed for telecommunications, not for the purposes of control as an end, but coordination and preventing interference.
Radio Free Europe has been doing something similar successfully for what, 70 years? Of course being in violation of a given country's laws is a tradeoff.
Well, how did those predictions of the future perform?
- "The Chinese government espionage campaign that has deeply penetrated more than a dozen U.S. telecommunications companies is the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history — by far,” a senior U.S. senator told The Washington Post in an interview this week."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/21/...
Because you need your customers on the ground to run their own pirate transmitter (which can be located and penalized by ground authorities), and your satellites need to receive signals from the ground - which ground authorities from first-world countries can make arbitrarily difficult, deciphering a multitude of <1W transmission from customer cellphones is kinda difficult when a modern electronic warfare radar transmitter is tracking your satellite at the same time.
Agreed on the potential complication if/when I'm in another country, but, well, everything can't be simple...
Some regulation horror: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/space/Pages/API.aspx . Worst case you need to wait 7 years! to get your radio license
Compare this to a 4G modem / smartphone, its amazing that you don't need to file spectrum license to another country version of FCC everytime you travel. It. Just. Worked.
Its too big and power hungry to fit inside 10x20x30 cm cubesat though :( More reason to go bigger
There are millions of cell towers.
During a major event, cellular companies set up portable cell towers (COWs) and even these are not enough.
And a cell tower that is right next to you still pales in comparison to a single cable in bandwidth.
This is a general starlink issue, which is why I don't understand how is it economically or physically viable in crowded areas, such as cities, where the majority of human population lives.
Starlink has 6,426 [2] (Though that number is likely out of date by the time you read this)
[1] https://www.groundcontrol.com/knowledge/calculators-and-maps...
Ah, thanks, I missed that.
Wait another month, there will be at least another ~500 in orbit.
---
1. https://spacenews.com/spacex-deploys-direct-to-smartphone-sa...
2. https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2024/07/03/space...
Oh, no. Apple owns them at this point. 20% ownership, and they have 85% of Globalstar's current satellite capacity for themselves. GSAT isn't really putting new customers on the constellations and Apple is funding all the replacement hardware.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285347/apple-globalstar...
In 5G this is somewhat fixed - the handset uses its Home Network Public Key to encrypt the device-specific IMSI (producing a SUCI) which only the Home Network can decrypt. The MCC and MNC (carrier information) are still sent in the clear to allow the encrypted SUCI to route to the correct Home Network for decryption.
Rockets are a military technology, and are treated as such.
Military tech or not, its just atoms. Very interesting people are quite rich now, they will have access to precision machining advanced materials and chemicals if they have the motivation.
Some bitcoin bro with a net worth in the millions is not building orbit reaching guided missiles in their garage. And if they were the satellites would be the least of our concerns.
not plausible at all. Most /countries/ aren't able to launch a rocket to orbit.
USC students just broke the non-government, non-corporate rocket launch altitude record, reaching 143.25km[1]. But that is still a long way from the ~500km that Starlink operates at.
On top of that the person would have to develop a guidance system and payload capable of targeting and sufficiently damaging one of these satellites - not an easy feat.
Finally, it seems unlikely that a single hit would cause a chain reaction. There aren't that many satellites that are part of Starlink. Imagine 6000 cars spread over the surface of the Earth. Except that they're even more sparse than that because many of them are at different altitudes.
Additionally, SpaceX has already had to deal with the result of the debris field from the Russian Cosmos satellite that was destroyed by a Russian anti-satellite missile.[2]
Starlink has a lot of protection compared to other constellations since the satellites occupy such low orbits that most debris spontaneously deorbits in 5-10 years.
---
1. https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2024/11/usc-student-rocke...
2. https://spacenews.com/starlink-satellites-encounter-russian-...
This is direct from handset to satellite, it’s clearly explained in the link.
Or a directional microwave link to the next station in sight.
No, they claim direct phone to satellite link.
The complication is that the base stations will be moving much more rapidly than traditional terrestrial towers.
1. As others have pointed out, the link budget (how much energy loss a particular radio link can handle before it is broken) for D2C satellites assumes a nearly direct line of sight from your handset to the satellite. This is much easier to achieve with satellites in space than it is with traditional cell towers that might have numerous walls/buildings in the way.
2. The D2C satellites use massive phased array antennas that are able to point a very narrow beam very accurately to the ground. This provides a substantial amount of antenna gain that further helps the link budget. The gain from the antennas allows the satellites to pick up even relatively weak signals from a handset.
There are other tricks as well, but these account for the largest differences. Of course, doppler gets in the way, but it is a solvable problem.
I guess the "narrow" in the current context is the beam widening to hundreds of miles on earth.
It’s going to be unambiguously good for wilderness rescue and disaster response.
But I like camping and hiking in remote areas in order to remove myself from the world. And I think the lack of connectivity discourages unprepared people from taking on more than they can handle in the wilderness. If the wilderness becomes fully connected, will it spoil that feeling? Will it lead to the last few truly remote places in the US suddenly being overrun with TikTok crowds? I honestly have no idea, and it’s a little scary.
But it feels like an anachronism that we don’t already have worldwide connectivity, and I guess this was just bound to happen.
eg. 50.30819551805026, 16.50959758078629
Now we get wilderness livestreams! What will that do?
My guess is there will be some more wilderness livestreams streams, largely made by the people that are already going out to these places to produce content.
Are you particularly worried about a group of people that so far had no interest at all in taking pictures or videos in the wilderness but will now show up in droves to make competing bits of strictly-live content? Who are these users??
My point is that this will allow anyone to be an active content creator while they’re in the wilderness, which makes it quicker, easier, and much more appealing to create that type of content.
Your issue is either not wanting people on their phones in parks — which you cannot control — or not wanting people in parks at all, which not only can you not control but that would also be a downright insane desire.
The reason why parks exist and are maintained is that people go to them. If nobody goes to a park, there is no incentive for upkeep or staff. Much (or virtually all) of the wilderness that you have enjoyed in your life is available to enjoy because people before you enjoyed it and made it accessible to you in some way. That is how parks work
Encourage others to explore the wilderness?
Ever heard of Fossil Cycad National Monument? Designated in 1922, and by 1957 all the fossils had been taken. There was nothing left to see. The national monument was abolished.
That’s what’s at risk from overtourism.
Is it selfish to want to be able to enjoy one of the most beautiful spots in Canada without it being crowded? Absolutely. But the sheer volume of people makes in a completely unenjoyable experience, not to mention the dangers of erosion/wilful destruction/litter/etc that over-toured nature spots eventually succumb to. The nice thing right now is that there are many, many places to go that most people won’t, due to lack of accessibility, lack of cell service, etc. By breaking down barriers, you open the floodgates.
I used to despise gatekeeping, wanting everyone to be able to experience as many joys as possible. But when seeing what happens when the masses get access to delicate niches, my opinion shifts. Maybe I’m just getting older and grumpier though, so take it with a grain of salt.
It would be very interesting to see some kind of diagram depicting all of the corporate entities Musk is involved in and how each entity does business with one another.
xAI just raised billions to help Tesla build out FSD (or at least that was part of the pitch).
His empire is divided into so many corporate entities, but they all cross-pollinate and are clearly under his direct control for the most part.
The closest comparison I can think of is Berkshire Hathaway (one person/group controlling multiple wide ranging private and public companies).
Starlink is not a separate entity — it's a division of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
From Terms of Service[1]:
> Your order for two-way satellite-based internet service (“Services”) and a Starlink antenna, Wi-Fi router and mount (“Starlink Kit” or “Kit”) is subject to the terms (“Terms”) of this Starlink agreement for the United States and its territories. These Terms, those terms incorporated by reference, and the details you agree to in your online order (“Order”) form the entire agreement (“Agreement”) between you (“customer” or “user”) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (known as “Starlink” in these Terms).
[1]: https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1020-91087-64?r...
So the Terms of service is with SpaceX but apparently there is such a thing as Starlink Services LLC, but I'm just going off Wikipedia, all this corporate structuring is opaque to me.
It's slightly more than that: it's a legally recognized nickname for the actual entity, technically called a "Fictitious Business Name" (aka DBA, "doing business as") registered with the state.
> there is such a thing as Starlink Services LLC
One might register a bunch of shell companies in various jurisdictions, holding various assets and contracts during the course of business, for tax reasons, to limit the blast radius of liabilities and facilitate business (for example, retail gift cards, e.g. Amazon, are often issued by a separate legal entity.) I think there's a qualitative distinction there with what Berkshire Hathaway or perhaps Alphabet Inc. do with their separate businesses that are hands-off subsidiaries. It appears at the moment Starlink is very much intertwined with SpaceX and user contracts and the trademark are actually directly owned by SpaceX, so not sure what they are using that particular LLC for.
My understanding is that, given Tesla is a public company, any collaboration between Tesla and other Musk companies needs to be approved by the board (or maybe by other C-suite executives) without Musk in the room. Musk can come up with the idea for a collaboration, but then the decision that it is in the best interests of Tesla and all its shareholders to proceed with the collaboration needs to be made independently of him.
By contrast, I don't think the rules apply as strictly to his other companies since they are privately held. The law cares a lot more about protecting shareholder rights in public companies than in private ones.
If law was applied equality to billionaires as it does to regular people, he would be in jail for fraud.
The other comment saying "the law is above shareholder gain" is kind of missing the point thought--the law in question is specifically to protect the interest of shareholders.
This is true at most companies with a competent CEO.
My uncle had an inimical board that tried to remove him, but he somehow replaced them all one by one before they could. Needless to say he replaced them with people who didn't want to remove him ("buddies"; but what kind of a leader surrounds himself with people that want him to fail?). He's never told me how he did that despite my asking several times.
Still, it's always worth considering these structures before one invests--especially in med-to-large-cap public companies.
Alternatively, in private small-cap and venture-boards, the seats are nearly always filled by founders and lead investors and I would argue that's a "good thing".
No it's not.
Competent CEOs hire boards that align with their world-view but are independent enough to provide useful advice. And almost all startup boards will have investors who definitely will not rubber stamp the sort of thing going on at Tesla.
AFAIK, Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s chair, had no particular association with Musk prior to joining Tesla’s board. She is an Australian business executive with a history of working in senior finance roles in Australian and US firms. She was recruited on to Tesla’s board by another (now former) Tesla director, Brad Buss, who to my knowledge has never been that closely associated with Musk either. Musk obviously trusts and respects Denholm, but I believe their relationship is more professional than personal - Denholm lives in Australia and travels to the US for Tesla board meetings.
Has a court accepted that argument? I mean, you can come up with all sorts of grounds to claim an independent director isn’t really independent, but unless a court with jurisdiction accepts the argument, it doesn’t really count for anything.
My previously-unstated opinion is: remunerating directors like executives blurs the distinction between those 2 roles in ways that are likely detrimental to long-term shareholders.
Yes, a Delaware court. It’s why Musk’s pay package is contested and why Tesla redomiciled.
Musk Inc. is, in essence, a privet equity company. He raises a fund, and invests it along with his own cash into a business he knows well, and with which he believes he can disrupt the status quo.
He's very hands on, understanding all the important core details, setting culture, and pushing hard. But he also delegates to experts he brings in to run his businesses.
It's obviously not the same as PE, but there are distinct similarities. With each of his companies he clearly can't take an active role all the time, but what his team are experts at is identifying the areas he needs to be on top of, and they will quite literally fly him in for it. It seems to me it's always the start of something, be it a new company or project. He will be there 24/7 getting it off the ground, but then hand over to lieutenants to run.
It's a formula that seems to work again and again. We're (well those of you in the US) are in for an interesting time over the coming year as he has a new project to kick start.
Seriously though, if he's primarily in a delegation mode these days, good for him, I think he's earned it
Bias disclosure: I feel like I could be a Musk if I actually had zero laziness and a few extra connections. We are similar in intelligence and interests and worldview (other than his edgy tweets of the last 1-2 years)
He is an investor investing in science fiction. This isn't even implied, he comes out and says it again and again.
I'm reminded of xerox parc's "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and I think that's his philosophy.
As to "businesses he knows well" I do not agree. He didn't go into electric vehicles, rockets, robots or neural interfaces as "business he knows well".
Just read about musk going to russia to try to get a launch vehicle going and coming back insulted and frustrated. So he broke down the problem and learned how to solve it.
Also "Private Equity" has a connotation of rent seeking nowadays, like "buying all dentists and monetizing to extract profit".
I don't see him that way philosophically. I see him as a pure creator, not a rent seeking wealth extractor.
It’s like letting a ten year old have unlimited access to the Halloween candy, except the candy is society.
Both the typical PE scum and lunatics like Musk are the textbook example of why business needs to be on a leash.
What is an example of this non accountability?
Although strangely he destroyed the revenue model at the same time, which is something a PE firm would be careful to avoid.
I don't see what's confusing about it.
It's not unusual for large companies to have a large web of corporate entities, but what's problematic is that they have different ownership rather than the same owners/owned by each other. (I started to say that one is public and others private, but it would be the same issue if two were public, as they would obviously not have the exact same set of owners.)
When xAI makes a deal with Tesla, if xAI is getting the better end of the stick, that is a self-dealing problem that the SEC can investigate on behalf of Tesla shareholders. The assets of Tesla belong proportionally to its owners, so Musk or another large owner can't make deals that give their private company an advantage at the expense of Tesla owners.
If Tesla gets too generous of a deal, that's something the non-Musk owners of xAI if any could raise an issue with, but when the public company is allegedly getting shortchanged, the SEC gets involved too. Moreover, even if you are trying to do it right, there is always the opportunity for someone to challenge you.
And now, he’s becoming some sort of circus act to disrupt the bureaucracy of the Federal government. So I wouldn’t count on the SEC doing anything.
Starship is very close to being able to put next gen Starlink satellites into orbit ("very close" as in most likely within a year or so). Once that happens, it's over, there will not be competition for at least a decade. Before Bezos and others (and/or EU/China) build their own Starship copies (and if you've seen recent EU/China concepts, you can't call it anything else...), it's going to be the 2030s.
The world is continually moving towards being centred around cities where it makes sense to simply rollout fibre.
Especially with gigabit speeds being the new standard.
And even in Australia they are starting to move remote areas onto fibre.
It's a solved problem.
But, there are still niche use cases, like ships and planes, that would pay a premium for fast LEO satellite connections. For people I know who live on islands, going from barely being able to use WhatsApp to entirely using the internet (YouTube / Netflix) is game-changing.
But I assume we are talking about use cases beyond tiny niches.
So far they launched 2 test satellites. They contracted most of the launches to either new rockets or ones in development, like New Glenn, Ariane 6, ULA Vulcan. They actually had to contract three Falcon 9 launches to help out with that. In reality, I think SpaceX will end up launching a lot more than that.
Unless FCC is willing to be lenient, 50% of the satellites will be hard to accomplish by the deadline.
>E-UTRAN Node B, also known as Evolved Node B, is the element in E-UTRA of
>LTE that is the evolution of the element Node B in UTRA of UMTS.
The following is somewhat speculative:
The bearing to the next satellite ahead or behind you in the same plane should be roughly constant; likewise, the bearing to satellites in adjacent planes orbiting in the same direction will change slowly during most of the orbit.
Near the poles the required slew rate will likely be too high to keep the side-to-side links working but that's also a part of the planet where subscriber density will be low so losing that capacity for periods of a few minutes when near the poles likely won't matter.
I assume that if Starlink was trying to do this without agreement, in violation of the interational treaty on radio regulations, the USA would have to prevent them from doing so. If the USA did not, I don't see what would prevent China from shooting down Starlink's constellation.
As a side note on the technology, since Starlink satellites orbit 340km from earth, I wonder if they emit a directed signal. If they don't, I don't see how they intend to respect borders when sending messages down.
Except China, does any other country have the ability to do this?
With US government permission, Starlink could ignore the radio licensing rules of Iran, South Africa or even the EU.
Violating RR is already "soft" warfare.
Any country capable of launching satellites or even sounding rockets could almost certainly do enough damage to majorly disrupt operations. Certainly the EU or Iran, possibly South Africa with the recent resumption of rocket launches at OTB.
They absolutely do not have tens of thousands of anti-satellite missiles, or any other credible (non-nuclear) way to dismantle a constellation of that size. If you look at their own news media[0], they (Chinese defense) consider it a major weakness, and priority.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/chin... ("China military must be able to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites if they threaten national security: scientists")
- "Researchers call for development of anti-satellite capabilities including ability to track, monitor and disable each craft The Starlink platform with its thousands of satellites is believed to be indestructible"
Probably not happening until next year:
> But in September the telco (and Optus across the Tasman and other Direct to Cell exclusive partners) removed “launching 2024″ references from its website. -- https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/commerce-commission-take...
That’s been replaced with corporate libertarians, which are against any government power that could infringe on the rights of corporations. See also Rand Paul, and the corporatist movement (which is sadly mainstream in the US, an offshoot of fascism, and essentially indistinguishable from modern libertarianism).
Anyway, they are many things, but I wouldn’t say they’re hypocritical.
If you take libertarianism to its logical conclusion you wind up with feudalism, which is anything but free.
Whenever libertarians try to take their philosophy through to its logical conclusion in practice they just wind up reinventing government only worse (or reinventing banking only worse in the case of crypto).
You can’t grant absolute power to corporations without also implementing feudalism.
Of course, there are voters that think they are voting for individual libertarianism, but are voting for corporate libertarianism instead.
(Similarly, there are progressives and moderates that end up voting for corporatists.)
Also why does my cell phone not need a clear view of the cell tower? It works in my brother in laws walk in closet just fine. Same frequency.
Direct to cell is only possible because it's an almost entirely unobstructed view.
After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.
I guess they need to contract with businesses or parks? It would be cool to buy a cheap one and just tie it to a tree or something.
Presumably there's a market for this in other niches, e.g. weather monitoring, defense/border monitoring, etc... The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Where's the really valuable data?
Even if you have solar and a fixed platform, you usually want to deploy as little solar as possible. Especially if you need to carry the gear on foot. So minimising power consumption is really important.
Direct to cell bandwidth is obviously very limited.
No new antennas implies we're in the 1-6 GHz region. Should be fine?
Additionally, Starlink was a complete lifesaver during Helene.
Christ what more do you guys need to shoot a rabbit.
In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.
Hoping Apple buys up a competitor and goes above all the carriers with the same and then becomes their own telco. I’d much rather pay them for LTE than any telco or uncle Elmo.
instead of the man who just bought himself a President so that he can direct government spending towards his businesses and away from his competitors while disowning his own child for their sexuality, and whose ambition is to rule the planet.
Maybe its about time people stop mixing sexuality with identity and character.
https://www.t-mobile.com/business/industry-solutions/connect...
so just wait
I hope that they will, but the engineers at SpaceX have made me a believer. If the gen 1 direct to cell sats don’t perform (it seems like they do), they’ll just launch another batch a couple weeks later. I don’t think AST will have this ability, so I hope they get it right.
In the US SpaceX just announced a contract with Tmobile, AST has contracts with Verizon and AT&T
For service it works, and for business viability AST just has to launch more satellites, which they will
for a business case thats their only overhead cost and they dont need cellular partnerships in a bunch of countries to be viable
They have to raise capital for more satellites but it all looks possible
Its time people take responsibility of their actions.
What it would allow however is you to get in-touch with family to come get you should the need arise.
It's not the coverage; that's mostly good. It's not the price; mostly SIM cards and plans are cheaper when travelling than they are at home. It's the hassle of swapping SIMs every time you cross a border.
Which isn't really a negative to this. Indeed, if you have the means, I'd say go for it.
As of this year I ditched my T-Mobile prepaid data SIM and exclusively use prepaid eSIMs (esimdb.com has a great comparison, but Nomad makes it very easy with their app). So I still have to "swap sims" but it's all done on the iPhone itself, no need to bring a sim ejector/paperclip.
What's really funny is that last week my eSIM ran out (I forgot to top up) and my 16 Pro connected to the satellite network (since it assumed no service was available I guess?), where I was able to use iMessage (in the limited way (to individuals, not groups)).
Personally, I still buy SIM cards (or, more recently, eSIM plans). Not so hard, but way cheaper, and you can get a local number and use with local services that require one.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps you missed the irony.
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.
Is that... is that implicitly a problem, somehow?
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.
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.
Hence, the source for articles like this: https://hackaday.com/2021/10/30/cheap-caliper-hack-keeps-em-...
But to answer your question, must they? No. Do they tend to be bad? Yes. Does their behavior get worse over time? Typically.
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.
Pretty soon AI agents could reasonably take a crack at it.
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.
Based on current disclosed plan, they will have same number of LEOs as SpaceX have today by ~2030; and SpaceX is not slowing down either.
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.
Expound more on this please assuming I'm a potential Brazilian South African ,Saudi or Thai client .
[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.
By spending more money in absolute terms to achieve objectives, without a necessitative need of immediate profit?
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.
>We can only hope competitors are half as responsible as SpaceX... about space debris.. and satellite [visibility]
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, not many will volunteer for "the firing line."
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.
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.
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.
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.
And in times of war, things get nationalized too.
Interesting thoughts on the logistics side.
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.
Elon will fuck up and his money won’t save him from what comes after that.
[a] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13175928 ("Trump Names Elon Musk, Uber CEO to Advisory Team – TheHill (thehill.com)", 92 comments)
[b] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14465667 ("Elon Musk quits Trump advisory councils, saying, 'Climate change is real' (latimes.com)", 4 comments)
The nation will mourn his heroic patriotism. Then business will carry on as usual, only more so, with a more compliant leader.
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.
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).
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.
It’s either selling to the whole world or nothing. If you don’t want to go for slow GEO stationary.
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.
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.
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.
Probably they are using GSAT satellites.
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.)
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.
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
Sometimes I come here for a good laugh
You're ranking Musk above Jobs, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Disney, Toyoda, Walton, and Buffett?
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).
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.
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.
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.
If we look at valuations, then yeah. If we look at how much money all of his ventures make ? The picture is very different.
SpaceX - may or may not be profitable in the last year - it's hard to know. Until recently definitely no profitable
Tesla - really profitable since 2021, with great 2022 / 2023. Trending in the wrong direction recently
Twitter, xAI, boring, neuralink - all are money furnaces.
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.
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.
It's like trying to diagnose WiFi next to a radar station remotely when you don't know the user is next to one
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Swansat anyone?
https://web.archive.org/web/20080119080404/http://swansat.co...
I've not seen anyone claim they used to be able to use equipment in Crimea at some point in the past and now it doesn't work.
[1] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/twitter-suspends-journ...
Keffals and Fong-Jones
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIS%C2%B2
https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space/iris2-s...
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.
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.
Remember when the EU wanted to build it's own internet browser? Or it's own search engine? Or it's own sovereign cloud?
None of these initiatives panned out. This is just political posturing when they have literally zero plans on how to achieve that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
China is deftly building something. Russia doesn't have a snowball chance in hell of building something like Starlink.
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.
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.
Don't forget over $15bln of tax money they got for doing barely anything so far.
pLEO, Starshield, SDA, NSSL, Commercial Crew, Commercial Cargo?????
Only HLS is in view. And it's less than 5 billion.
Everything listed above is delivered and has more expensive alternatives.
It's a monopoly engaging in anti-competitive practices, and should be broken up.
There are multiple players working on constellations of low-orbit satellites competing with Starlink
Starlink also has launch priority. Good luck with getting 50 launches a year as a customer...
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.
To be precise: Starlink is a division of the SpaceX corporation, it's not a separate entity.
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.
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.
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
I agree the pace of change is amazing. I marvel at everything spacex does. The starship catch was ridiculous.
But no competition always leads somewhere really bad eventually
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.
But the parent comment was specifically celebrating a long term, unassailable monopoly.
I think your emotions and tribal instinct would be better served towards something more benign, like football or baseball ...
Lest your voting intentions become equally malignant.
...any competitor. It’s over. And IMO it’s awesome.
Could be that the signal strength is really weak so they have to use a very directional antenna to transmit and receive signals. I would bet that receiving a signal from a cell phone is the hardest part. You can always omf up the transmit power, but to receive you really need to have a sensitive and directional antenna
And as such it's an action against every other state. Much like the War on Terror, some NSA activities and so on it's the US making aggressive moves against everyone else.
It seems Musk liked the idea so much that he decided to do it himself.
To me, this (along with Zuck's issues with Apple over the app store) explains a lot about why Zuck 2.0 has been so focused with avoiding platform risk with recent endeavours.