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Comment Re:Synergy (Score 1) 138

Agree... The world was apparently not waiting around for cheap rockets to start some kind of "Space Age 2.0". Sure, cheaper launches are great, but maintaining the manufacturing base to build rockets is hard. When said rockets are re-usable, at some point you have all this manufacturing capacity sitting around with nothing to do but build a few spare parts. You would need to have demand so high that the rocket replacement rate was enough to keep your manufacturing at a break-even point. Starlink was SpaceX's answer to its problem, but it would be foolish to believe that Starlink can compete head to head with fiber or even cable. It's a minor product destined to hit a wall; 80% of the world's population lives in urban areas where Starlink just can't compete on speed. You'd need a hundreds to even thousands of satellites visible at all times over every city just to offer service comparable to shitty cable, and not even close to fiber.

11k Starlink satellites currently in orbit, if each was the "future" V3 satellite it could support maybe 2k customers at decent bandwidth... That's 22 million customers worldwide. More if you're fine paying 2026 prices for 2005 speeds. Comcast has more than that in the USA.

Comment Re: sounds like bad accounting... (Score 2) 51

Their launch costs might be great, but there just isn't any demand. Without the starlink launches, the business would not be able to sustain itself. Reusable rockets is a catch-22 because the demand isn't high enough to keep a fleet of rockets with a replacement rate that makes maintaining the complexmanufacturing pipeline viable.

So without starlink, spacex is a dead end. And without spacex, starlink is a dead end. It's a very circular dependency, and they aren't profitable. Starlink will plateau in users - they can never hope to compete with fiber. Most of the world's population lives in cities, not rural areas. The satellite density needed to be a true cellular network is prohibitive. How many satellites would have to be over New York City to provide competitive service?

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