And the real global growth will start when the satellite-to-satellite links finally allow coverage away from SpaceX's teleports. So coverage in the middle of the seas and in the middle of Africa or South-America.
The global angle is interesting; but I don't think Africa will be as simple as people make out - there is a lot of corruption around telco contracts there and they won't just allow SpaceX to turn on all of Africa and bypass it all.
In addition, with laser links and improving routing software they still have a ways to go in optimizing the whole network.
The global shipping, flying and remote industrial use-cases are significant and pay a premium. In addition there are still a huge number of rural people in the world, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America. Then there are all kinds of mobile use-cases as well.
Starlink will also be used on things like rockets (like Starship) and all kind of military aircraft as well. Such usecases will also pay a premium.
Then there is global low latency backhaul as well.
I think if you really go threw it there is plenty of markets to service, even if you assume fiber is gone continue to roll out.
https://www.businessinsider.com/liquid-oxygen-shortage-covid...
Surely it pays for itself if they can sign up users as fast as they can scale? But if capital is the problem, maybe Starlink should be IPO'd the old fashioned way, to raise capital rather than cash out investors.
Well, not with that attitude >:(
Mars is wholly unsuitable as a place to colonize, and Starship would anyway be far from adequate to attempt it, by at least two orders of magnitude.
Starship might suffice to maintain a moon base, after the model of McMurdo Station, albeit radically more expensive. But that would be an end in itself, not any sort of staging point. There is noplace to go from there.
O'Neill cans make better sense. After aneutronic p-11B fusion is mastered in some future century, O'Neill cans out in the Kuiper Belt will be a place for humanity to expand. The inner solar system is a dump, Earth excepted.
Keep in mind too that each year average internet consumption rises so the existing sats can service fewer and fewer users.
I am personally surprised they have reached capacity so quickly - I thought they would have fit more users per sat on by aggressive traffic shaping/data caps.
Starlink will only be a niche service imo, FTTH/cellular will continue to roll out to more and more rural locations. It's a great niche service but the capacity really constrains it.
I also wonder how long SpaceX can afford all these falcon launches for starlink. I think the plan was spaceship would do huge deploys at a way lower cost per sat, which would increase capacity much quicker. But it seems spaceship is understandably delayed?