I've got deep concerns about the politics side of the company, and the future implications of them being able to decide where and who gets coverage. But from a technology perspective it's doing things I didn't really think were possible a decade ago. Having signal in the bottom of the pit, or way out the back of the Pilbara is just crazy.
When most of the Earth's surface has internet, it will be difficult to imagine what it was like when it didn't (or when it did but inoperably slow.
Mining iron ore is presumably nicely profitable and could afford this for routine use. I know people in academic or charity work, and they have Iridium phones but only for emergency use, Starlink would probably make a bigger difference to them.
I recently had a gig collecting soil samples in rural Alberta, and we relied on Starlink to upload the data as we worked.[0]
It was surreal trundling through a remote farmer’s field in a skid-steer with a funny-looking square dish on top, surrounded by a herd of bison or cattle.
Stepping outside of the machine to take a piss on a tree and hearing the motors in the dish whir as it repositions itself to get a better connection was startling and neat. It’s one thing to read about the dishes having that functionality but another to experience it while you’re doing something as mundane as a basic bodily function.
Pulling the dish and the mount off the skid-steer and tossing it in the back of the truck, and seeing the off-the-shelf Ryobi battery and inverter that powered it, all scuffed up and covered in dirt, makes you realize that as magical as it is right now, it’s just a machine. People thought that transistor radios were pretty magical when they came out but eventually they just became an everyday thing.
Soon enough these things won’t be so big and expensive, and there will be a market of providers offering even better service. What comes then will be scary from a privacy perspective, but it may also enable so many positive things that we can’t yet imagine.
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”
There is a certain beauty in these moments, isn't there? Watching the machines do their jobs.
I think we'll miss it. I've known both the "pre-connected" and "post-connected" eras. There's a lot to love about being "connected".. and a lot to not like. Constant connectivity kind of sucks and we'd all do better to detox/disconnect meaningfully every so often.
In general my phone doesn't ring. I respond to written messages every few hours. That works for me but it might not work for you.
Same was true for Iridium and Teledesic as they thought they'd win new Strategic Defense Initiative contacts in the late '90s, but that didn't happen and they all went bankrupt when that gold pot disappeared.
With the midterm election results, the same is probably happening soon with Starlink. Dems won't fund Golden Dome and Starlink satellites only last 5 years before burning up.
Read about Pete Worden and Michael D. Griffin and how they started Mars Society for the history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kidme5
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=georgeg23
Honestly you seem very obsessive. What is your stake in this?
My stake is trying to point out ban evaders. Feel free to audit my comment history if you want, it's pretty banal.
By now, Starlink is profitable even if launched with Falcon 9 - and Starship is coming online.
Starlink could be seen as a 'fire sale' of launch capacity rather than a sound business move.
Claims are based on nonsense.
Launch 20 million satellites at 600k is clear from reading the financials
Starlink's launch costs are not booked as costs to Starlink (nor revenue to Space). They're booked as depreciation over an undefined time period.
The fuel would have to be expensed, but generally speaking its impossible to say how unprofitable Starlink is because they don't account for it that way or break those costs out.
When they swallow Tesla it'll be more of the same, and thats the point. Musk is trying to obfuscate the (poor) performance of his businesses so he can maintain delusional market valuations based of vague promises.
The costs aren't hiding somewhere vague.
The entire "space launch" segment in the red by $1.1bn. Primary driver being the $3.3bn spent on Starship R&D.
How are they "burying it into a different business segment", pray tell me?
If you remove Starship, Falcon launches and Starlink are both independently profitable. And Starship wasn't even used for Starlink until the one test launch this year.
It costs me $5 in labor and $20 in ingredients
My margin is -25%
I account for the ingredients as depreciating assets over a 100 year lifespan
It now costs me $5 in labor and $0.09 in ingredients
My margin is now 74%
You can drop SpaceX's launch revenue to zero, fund all of it with Starlink revenue, and the sum is still profitable.
We know "whether Starlink is a viable business": it is. End of story. You better start pivoting towards "but what if future competition" or "the revenue growth is uncertain", because your attempts to wiggle your way out of admitting that Starlink is a money printer now are weak at best.
You can't just say "they're hiding the launch costs" and expect it to magically make Starlink unprofitable. Starlink has been bearing launch costs for its entire existence, and if anything, the advent of Starship is likely to make them lower, not higher.
The Falcon/Starship distinction actually doesn’t change the financial profile of Starlink as it’s reported today at all because — for the 4th time — Starlink does not pay for launch.
The cost of Starlink launch is absorbed into SpaceX’s “Space” segment as depreciation. It doesn’t show up as a cost in the Starlink segment at all. That’s why you think it’s profitable.
Seems within the realm of possibility at this point in the company’s growth cycle?
There's always people out there to minimize success of others.
It's not first. It's nothing new. It's not innovative.
There's an old article in WSJ that claimed SpaceX told investors that starlink was profitable if you excluded certain costs. We found out from the IPO that that was nonsense. SpaceX was charging starlink the internal cost of launch. Not the public pricing that everyone else charges.
That makes sense if you're not trying to split the company.
Something that makes no sense.
The launch costs for Starlink DO NOT show up as costs that Starlink pays. They show up as depreciation on the satellites themselves.
So is everything, it's an empty statement.
> Starlink is already showing net income and has shown net income for at least 3 years.
This is just BS since they don't break it out as a separate business. There are accounting rules for this and they don't follow them because they are not treating it as a seperate business.
> There's always people out there to minimize success of others.
Oh poor Musk, everyone is always trying to put him down. If only people would leave him alone he only want to save the world from everything. He's a saint.
Nothing hidden
All hail Saint Nutjob
I just hope they're not relying on the internet for anything tactical.