[ctdonath]

Right, it's not about taking a major share & expansion of a trillion-dollar industry with payout starting immediately, it's about staking out a thin fraction of (literally) empty space and waiting decades for others to start needing small portions of it.

Because $99/month * 12 months * 10 years * 1,000,000,000 customers = $11.88T isn't the point to a man who literally needs a trillion dollars to pull off the grandest mega-project ever.

[cryptonector]

It's not clear what you're saying. Are you saying that SpaceX will end up consuming too much of a precious resource? Or something else?

Anyways, I don't buy that SpaceX will end up consuming too much of a precious resource. Even if it were so, what would be a fair way to share that resource, and who even with?! There's only one announced competitor to Starlink at this time, and they're not even remotely close to being operational. What makes SpaceX able to put up Starlink at such low cost (compared to its earning potential) is that SpaceX has lowered launch costs for itself (and others) by a lot, and they're working to lower those costs even more. What is "fair" when a company works so hard to lower costs and increase availability? Is it to punish them so others get a chance to compete at higher costs??

[ctdonath]

Sorry about the mess, that comment was dripping with sarcasm.

1. There's a lot of room up there, and actually claiming & using it is a normal process for civilizing frontiers.

1b. Handwaving about "underappreciated precious resources" is a waste of opportunity. I get the sentiment, but belongs in the 3rd part of the aphorism "lead, follow, or get out of the way."

2. Saying "SpaceX isn't in it for the money" is ridiculous, considering they could gross >$10T in the next decade with it, at ridiculously low expenditure.

2b. In that timeframe, other businesses would be just barely starting to seek out a small fraction of that "precious resource".

[ctdonath]

Additional napkin math:

If we’re going to take the “precious resource” argument seriously, let’s. One Starlink satellite can earn ~$25M/year, setting the value of that slot. This seems a reasonable value for LEO “homesteading”; if someone wants it, that’s a fair price to pay. And I do mean fair, seeing as it’s SpaceX inventing the technology, building the satellites, staking claims, and otherwise being first-mover and pioneer of LEO on a colonizing scale (so to speak). That includes the value of serving 25,000 people per satellite at $100/month. Want that orbital property? pay the trailblazer that made that parcel valuable. (As for “Earth’s population has a fair share” - no, they didn’t do squat for it beyond what one was already paid for to get SX there. Anyone is free to go there now and lay claim. Government involvement should be nothing more than collecting cost of tracking claims and resolving disputes.)

[giantrobot]

The whole "orbital slot" thing is absurd. Space is really big. Like, really big. And orbital mechanics being what it is, you could launch a satellite in the exact same orbit as a Starlink satellite but trailing a few miles behind and they'll never impact one another. If they are using totally different uplink and downlink frequencies they'll be effectively invisible to ground stations of competing services.

That being said, your napkin math is a bit off. A single Starlink satellite isn't all that valuable. It can only talk to ground stations in some region on Earth for a short period of time. It's the dozens of satellites per plane that make the service useful (24/7 coverage). While you can divide total revenue by the number of satellites, the service only works with a complete orbital plane.

[ctdonath]

Agreed. It was an attempt to take the issue as raised and see what the consequential ballpark numbers are.

[giantrobot]

Yeah sorry I wasn't trying to call you out just point out an additional complexity to the numbers. If Starlink was going to sell an "slot" to a competitor (not that they would need to), they'd be selling an orbital plane rather than a single satellite's position. The cost of that plane wouldn't be some fixed value but the gross revenue from all the subscribes covered by that plane.

The planes that cover mostly empty ocean would be far less valuable than ones that covered subscriber-dense populations. But of course that's in a world where somehow a competitor needs to buy a "slot" from Starlink and not just orbit a few miles higher in the same plane.

[cryptonector]

Thank you!

[wmf]

I guess orbital space could be auctioned instead of homesteaded but SpaceX could probably afford to outbid Kepler and OneWeb anyway.

[cryptonector]

Then we get to argue whether they'd pay the U.S., the UN, or... some other entity. Naturally the U.S. gets to tax space access by U.S. businesses, but let's not kid ourselves, it'd be just a tax and wouldn't benefit the public consumer of space-based networking nor SpaceX's competitors. An auction would be a lot like a tax where you can lose the opportunity, and where the tax can be upbid a great deal.

No, sorry, I think as long as SpaceX continues to work to lower costs and increase access then to get in their way would be a terrible mistake.