I'm not sure this is the correct forum for StarLink discussion. Admins, please move if appropriate. Gwen Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, has said SpaceX is "likely" to spin off StarLink to become a stand alone business. This business would then IPO.
The air Force tested StarLink during a live fire training mission, a couple of days ago. This could be musks biggest success. Tesla could be a trillion dollars company and so could this. Meanwhile, the boring company seems poised to obsolete all other tunneling companies with the third version of their boring machine operating at roughly 10x the speed of commercially available machines.
Recently, Elon has said they are in no rush to IPO. I think he sees no need to IPO until he needs the money to fund the Mars shot. Meanwhile, Starlink-5 is scheduled to launch tomorrow morning with 50 more satellites. Nobody is close to catching up to SpaceX on this. Starlink will have a several year head start when the constipation goes live before it has competition. The launch can be viewed both live and recorded here.
SpaceX currently has a constellation of roughly 1300 satellites. They have launched well over 1400 satellites but the first two tranches did not feature the space bus so they have been deorbited. Also, there have been a handful of failures that have also been deorbited. That puts the number around 1650. Experts indicate, that is quite a few satellites. These satellites have a design life of 5 years. SpaceX probably won't push that a lot, because they want to de-orbit the satellites while they are still operating under their own power and control. The initial constellation was planned to have about 4000 nodes. With a design life of 60 months, that means they will have to launch 67 per month, indefinitely, to keep the constellation viable. If they can trim that down to 60 per month, perhaps by stretching the design life a very small amount, that would be one Falcon 9 launch per month. It costs about $20M to launch an F9. If a StarLink satellite costs roughly $300K, that comes to about $18M per month. The expectation is the third gen satellites will be substantially cheaper. I believe they are evolving the satellite hardware in house, so costs will be low. Still, cheap satellite is a relative term. That brings us to about $40M per month to keep the constellation healthy. That means they need 40,000 customers paying about $100 monthly, just to support the constellation. That doesn't sound bad. Longer term, the goal is to launch with Starship. Apparently, Starship should be able to launch 400 satellites at a time. That would keep the constellation healthy with a launch every 6 months. We have no idea the cost model of Starship launches. SpaceX has indicated there are too many variables to have an accurate cost picture, at this time. Imagine the cost model for competitors? What would it cost if someone were using a commercial launch service? Even if that service is SpaceX, they are going to pay $45M per launch on used rockets, $60M per launch on new ones. It's difficult to imagine anyone can, or ever will, be able to compete with SpaceX on Satellite communication. The only potential competition I see is Blue Origin, once they get their own rocket program operating smoothly. That has yet to happen and we don't know when it will. Blue Origin has a long way to go to catch up to SpaceX on Rockets, never mind satellites. Imagine the strategic advantage of having Starlink to hone rocketry? SpaceX has their program ticking along like a watch with dozens of launches per year. They don't need to fly blocks of concrete to test rockets with fully wasted missions. SpaceX was the cheapest ride in the game before they had the learned how to refly boosters and fairings. I've heard Rocket Lab is cheaper than SpaceX, but only in corner cases.
Starlink satellite version 1.5 will be deployed with the first polar orbit launch, whenever that happens. This mission is queued for the next launch but, for some reason, no dates are attached to any SpaceX missions, at the moment. Something is afoot. Perhaps SpaceX is having a tilt with the FCC. Starlink 1.5 will feature laser born spacebus for inter satellite comms. All communication currently traverses terrestrial links.
I'm beginning to think there is an issue with the v1.5 satellites. I now doubt the launch delays are any sort of political statement.
What I've seen of the design looks like a cellular network core. At the very least, it seems to be MPLS based, extrapolating from the specs. I assumed they intended to disrupt the cell industry, over a year ago. Big cells. Ultra low latency. Low power. It seems ideally suited for self contained cell tower with satellite backhaul. A cell tower could be provisioned with a concrete base, solar power, battery pack, two satellite uplinks, and a sector antenna. No power. No fiber. Just an auger, a piece of sonotube, and a concrete mixer. Elon has every piece of that puzzle, on the platform side. A few days ago, Elon was talking about selling backhaul to existing cell providers. Maybe he has an idea to start buying cell providers. It might be faster than boot-strapping his own network and he can certainly do it. That would get him spectrum, trained human infrastructure, customer base, billing systems, etc. This might be a good time to start loading up on cell providers. I was shunning the idea but perhaps I should be jumping on it.
I dont trust that Elon Musk has done enough to cultivate a protege or leadership team to keep pushing his ambitious projects if something were to happen to him. God Forbid. If something did happen, more so than with any other companies perhaps, I really fear the ability of these companies to carry out his visions.
