Musk, who lost his briefly held title of the world’s richest person last month, has seen his paper fortune drop by $7.5bn so far this year to an estimated $162bn.
America is now a better place, right? Because it is inequality that makes it a bad one, less inequality makes it a better…..
Mr Musk might dramatically increase inequality once his Starlink service goes mainstream.
Starlink won’t ever make any money, really. It’s still ( and probably will always be ) too expensive to get a set of the things up in VLEO for a bit to ever be commercially viable. Their lifetime is simply too short in that orbit.
Even if they piggyback as part of a launch cargo, it’s still many-dollars/kg to get them up there.
What the things do make is a very handy test platform for design/test/durability issues in satellite technology. Which is, with all things Musk, where the real money is.
He can, after all, test stuff in Real Life™ having it piggyback or be part of a cluster of his interconnected cubesats. That’s at least a factor 10, of not 100 faster test iteration speed, while doing away with a lot of the very expensive earthside simulation lab work…
That his experimental platform also can do satellite internet for who may need it is a nifty way of getting some of the development costs back. Won’t pay the entire bill, but it certainly puts something in the black column..
Fascinating stuff. Musk’s money making is complex. There’s nearly a billion dollar subsidy for Starlink plus military interest. With it, he’s also created his own customer for his rocket program.
Their lifetime is simply too short in that orbit.
They’re not all in that orbit. Not sure what the higher ones do.
The messed up thing is, to a Bernie or AntiFa bro, yes, this does make the world a better place.
Not because there is any actual benefit when the economy loses money, but simply because “fuck him, he’s rich.”
Starlink will create new markets, especially in the military and emergency services. It will also kill of all the existing satellite TV and phone companies as it can replace them with standard kit rather than expensive stuff and the cost per connection will be lower too. One market I can think of is cruise ships (when they get going again) – being able to provide cheap WiFi to all the passengers without paying a bomb for dial up internet speeds will really go down well. And for all the people who are from a major city or have to use mobile phones for their internet, Starlink will really change them.