SpaceX/Starlink

So, too, will the growing community of globe trotting livestreamers.

Normally satellite links for TV are the preserve of large news organisations that can afford electronic news gathering equipment for their intrepid foreign correspondents. I wonder if this will be good enough to replace all that?

There are likely to be an awful lot of ‘use cases’ that will emerge that were completely unexpected.

The rise of social media as a result of the development of smart phones took the telecoms world by surprise. I can see this revolutionising communications in countries where the telecoms infrastructure barely exists. That is a huge, untapped market and it maybe out of the reach of governments to control.

For the individual RV owner in the US dealing with unreliable 4G services…to whole towns or villages in remote parts of the world being able to use it as a shared backhaul to the rest of the world for their $5 phones? There are a couple of billion people who remain unconnected to the world whose lives would be changed by sharing a small part of one link.

It is infrastructure. Making it work at scale is the challenge at the moment. A lot of companies have tried and failed.

How it will be used and the opportunities that emerge that ride on the back of it, that is quite another subject.

SpaceX software team did a Reddit AMA last night:

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/elon-musks-starlink-will-need-up-to-30-billion-investment

Elon Musk says his Starlink satellite venture could need between $20 billion and $30 billion in investment.

Investment costs before Starlink achieves fully positive cash flow would be between $5 billion and $10 billion, Musk says.

“It’s a lot, basically,” Musk said, according to Reuters, in a video interview from California at the Mobile World Congress, which is the telecom industry’s largest annual gathering.

I guess Elon dropped a zero or two when forecasting his business case.

Stranger

No, it’s always been that much. From May 2018:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/05/block-5-spacex-increase-launch-cadence-lower-prices/

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell stated in a TED Talk last month that she expects the constellation to cost at least $10 billion. Therefore, reducing launch costs will be vital.

They’ve reached the “minimum viable constellation” already–i.e., useful service in a useful band of latitudes. Not clear how much it’s cost already, but it’s probably in the few billion range.

But they want something like 42,000 satellites eventually. That’s clearly in the tens-of-billions range, even if they can get the sat+launch prices down to a few hundred thousand each. On the other hand, that can serve a huge market. Time will tell whether they need that big a constellation or whether they’ll saturate the space earlier.

Incidentally, don’t be this guy:

“Sir I stopped you today for that visual obstruction on your hood. Does it not block your view while driving?” CHP of Antelope Valley wrote in a Facebook post about the incident.

CHP added that the motorist replied: “Only when I make right turns.”

Or, indeed, if a market exists that is willing and able to spend $500 on hardware and $100/mo for speeds that barely meet the definition of broadband sufficient to support the operating and replacement costs notwithstanding capital investment and losses that SpaceX is taking on receiving hardware.

Stranger

Thanks to FCC lobbying, the Federal definition of broadband is so weak that Starlink easily meets it (minimum is 25/3, Starlink generally around 100/15 and getting better). Some people have seen >500 Mbps download speeds, though for now these are outliers. The system’s capable of it but it depends on having optimal conditions–whatever those are.

SpaceX’s position has always been that Starlink isn’t for people that hate their cable provider; it’s for people that wish they had a cable provider to hate. It’s a non-trivial number of people, but I’ll agree that the size of the market is yet to be determined.

That said, there are other revenue sources: namely, large vehicles like ships and commercial aircraft; and the military. Maybe also backup service for commercial installations that need high reliability.

It’s a hell of a lot better than what’s currently available at Mom and Dad’s farm for any price. I’m not sure Mom will be willing to spend that much, but not everyone is an 80-year-old farmer.

Incidentally, this article has more details from the same Mobile World Congress talk (which I plan on watching, but so far haven’t been able to find a good source of):
https://www.fastcompany.com/90651386/elon-musk-satellite-internet-tech

Key bits:

“You can think of Starlink as filling in the gaps between 5G and fiber, and really getting into parts of the world that are hardest to reach … As in, the last “3%, maybe 5%.”
“recently passed the strategically notable number of 69,420 active users.”
“That terminal costs us more than $1,000,” Musk said. “Selling terminals at half-price is not super-compelling at scale.”
Starlink is working on cheaper designs that Musk hopes will bring the cost down to $350 or even $250.
A version 1.5 model will soon add “satellite-to-satellite laser links” to ensure continuous connectivity, addressing another subject of some early complaints;
Musk called a 2.0 satellite design due next year “significantly more capable” without elaborating.
It will have to spend billions more before Starlink can turn cash flow positive … “It’ll be at least $5 billion, and maybe as much as 10,” he said of Starlink’s budget. “It’s quite a lot.”
Starlink will have to spend another $10 or $20 billion later on, Musk added, to stay competitive

And finally, Musk is as clear about the risks as anyone:

“Every other low earth orbit constellation ever done has gone bankrupt,” Musk said early in the half-hour talk, citing such past collapses as Iridium. “Step number one for Starlink is don’t go bankrupt.”

The real problem will likely be all the competition. There’s already a couple-three satellite internet services you can subscribe to, but they mostly use geostationary satellites, which means there’s lots of lag. So those may not be as much competition, but then there’s OneWeb and Amazon’s Project Kuiper and I understand there’s a Chinese satellite constellation in the works too. And probably more I don’t know about.

I won’t say that SpaceX can rest easy, but the competition looks pretty weak to me.

  • HughesNet, ViaSat, etc: As you say, lag is the killer. Their bandwidth capacity sucks, too. I can’t see how they compete without dramatically lowering their prices. They’ll probably survive for a while but won’t be able to launch the next gen.

  • OneWeb: The most serious competitor, since they at least have birds flying. But they already went bankrupt once, and got bailed out by the UK government, which seems to have the bizarre idea that they can retrofit a GPS-like positioning system onto the satellites. I can’t see that going anywhere. OneWeb’s launch costs are around 4x what SpaceX pays, so it’s hard to see how they could ever close the price gap.

  • Project Kuiper: Another weak-ass Bezos vanity project? Seems like it so far. Blue Origin is so far behind SpaceX it’s not even funny, despite having more resources. Project Kuiper just signed a launch contract with ULA (since BO’s orbital rockets are nowhere to be seen), which means again they’ll be paying way more than SpaceX for launch. Of course, they haven’t actually launched a single payload so who knows. Did they choose a tortoise as their company mascot as well? Perhaps a slug instead?

  • Chinese constellation: I doubt that SpaceX was ever going to be allowed to offer service in China due to the government’s inability to enforce content filtering. And probably the opposite will be true as well due to anti-China sentiment (with the justification being that they don’t allow our networks either). So no actual competition there.

I’ve got Starlink. I’m going to replace HughesNet with it. There is absolutely no comparison. Much, much faster. And no download limits. I can now join work zoom meetings with video (not sure if that’s a plus or not :wink: )

And now that I can stream over the net (I’m using ChromeCast) I can drop DirecTV to. This is gonna save me money.

The dish is warm, so snow doesn’t stick to it is another plus. Well, at least so far. My neighbor has had his for a few more months than me, and has not had any problems with snow.

Since you came to specifics, we should nevertheless bear in mind that the players in this market much more. They are not publicized like Musk, but the UK has its Skyrora and the US has its Firefly Aerospace. The latter, by the way, plans to work with the Ukrainian Dragonfly Aerospace. But the dispute decide not big brands, and the technical characteristics and cost. If the topic is interesting, then you can analyze it.

Welcome to the SDMB! This thread is about Starlink and similar satellite constellations, but we do have another thread where we talk about many space things, including smallsat launchers. We should probably continue the conversation there if you want some involved discussion.

Overall, although I am a supporter of these small launch companies, and always look forward to their test flights, I don’t see how the market supports more than one or two of them. Among all of them, Rocket Lab is the only one actually making regular flights. Virgin Orbit has made a couple of flights to orbit, but doesn’t yet seem to be a sustainable operation. Astra and Firefly have both recently made test flights which failed to make orbit. That’s ok–space is hard–but the longer it takes, the less likely they are to succeed as a company.

There are many more prospective smallsat launcher companies out there with an even small presence, and it’s hard to keep track of them. I wish them all luck; they’ll need it.

the [Starlink] satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday…onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.

Preliminary analysis show the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode to begin orbit raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere.

(edited for brevity)

So basically it looks like SpaceX have lost almost an entire launch’s worth of Starlink satellites.

Umm… What? a geomagnetic storm created greater atmospheric drag?

Does a geomagnetic storm make changes to the height of the atmosphere?

It was new to me but it does seem to be a thing:

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/geomagnetic-storms

During storms, the currents in the ionosphere, as well as the energetic particles that precipitate into the ionosphere add energy in the form of heat that can increase the density and distribution of density in the upper atmosphere, causing extra drag on satellites in low-earth orbit.

I’m waiting for Scott Manley to make a YouTube video explaining it this week!

I would have thought they would have factored the potential for increased drag into their launch plans.

I guess they underestimate the height margin they would need.

An expensive mistake.

Love Scott Manley!

Hey, I called it:

Argon is cheaper than Krypton, which is cheaper than Xenon (the usual choice). It’s about 1% of Earth’s atmosphere, and basically a byproduct of O2/N2 liquification (it has other uses, but not so much to drive up the cost).

Good to see them constantly reevaluating previous mass/cost trades. Cheaper launch, cheaper solar, etc. all affect the right choice.

Though interestingly, they’re claiming 50% efficiency, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as Xenon thrusters. They must have made improvements in other areas to keep the efficiency flat.

Only 21 of these per Falcon 9 launch (compared to 50+ for V1). But they have 4x the capacity, so it’s an overall win. Still, clearly they’re depending on Starship in the long run.