perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
Exactly. The business isn’t remotely sustainable. All that money being invested into new satellites will, by next year, need to be invested constantly to keep the network at the same size.
Starlink needs run as fast as it can, just to stay in the same place, and the investment money is finite when people see it’s not going to grow.
Starlink is already making more money than it costs to expand and operate, you are wrong. This is sustainable (financially) and counter to your beliefs over the next 10 years I’d wager the starlink network will balloon to many times its current size, 20,000 plus satellites in orbit.
SpaceX is the most successful company/entity in history that does space launch, it doesn’t cost them a whole lot of money to launch new batches of Satellites and that cost will continue to decrease as the Falcon 9 program continues to improve and as starship becomes operational over the next few years.
What was the life expectancy of each satellite? I think I read something like 5 to 7 years. If we were talking about dozens of satellites I would say no problem, but thousands?
On https://satellitemap.space/ you can see the numbers pretty accurately under “status over time”. The current launch cadence is steady since mid 2022, and the burn rate is climbing to match. It seems to have a 5 year delay, but it’s possible the new satellites will last a little longer.
Which means that by mid 2027 earliest and mid 2029, the current “investment” in “growth” will have become the regular maintenance spending. And up to that point, maintenance costs will continue to climb to consume the entire investment budget.
well it might’ve worked if he didn’t turn out to be a fascist… but since most people don’t want to support that, kinda fucks up the business model.
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
I literally canceled because of his fucking nazi salute. Not giving that pos any money
Exactly. The business isn’t remotely sustainable. All that money being invested into new satellites will, by next year, need to be invested constantly to keep the network at the same size.
Starlink needs run as fast as it can, just to stay in the same place, and the investment money is finite when people see it’s not going to grow.
Starlink is already making more money than it costs to expand and operate, you are wrong. This is sustainable (financially) and counter to your beliefs over the next 10 years I’d wager the starlink network will balloon to many times its current size, 20,000 plus satellites in orbit.
SpaceX is the most successful company/entity in history that does space launch, it doesn’t cost them a whole lot of money to launch new batches of Satellites and that cost will continue to decrease as the Falcon 9 program continues to improve and as starship becomes operational over the next few years.
What was the life expectancy of each satellite? I think I read something like 5 to 7 years. If we were talking about dozens of satellites I would say no problem, but thousands?
On https://satellitemap.space/ you can see the numbers pretty accurately under “status over time”. The current launch cadence is steady since mid 2022, and the burn rate is climbing to match. It seems to have a 5 year delay, but it’s possible the new satellites will last a little longer.
Which means that by mid 2027 earliest and mid 2029, the current “investment” in “growth” will have become the regular maintenance spending. And up to that point, maintenance costs will continue to climb to consume the entire investment budget.
There’s a bunch of technology problems that make it undesirable, like the light and projectile pollution in leo