[rtpg]

This video[0] seems to disagree with this. In particular it seems like there's a lot of recurring costs involved and this infrastructure is not super stable (the video talks about satelites having a shelf life of 5 years. We're not rebuilding fiber out every 5 years!)

The videos "has an agenda" but it seems a bit easy to accept the idea that constantly launching satelites into space is pretty expensive. Infrastructure on the ground is expensive, but most people tend to not move around so at one point just building out lots of wires everywhere can work pretty well.

Having great coverage across the globe is great! But especially after seeing that (super crappy!) satelite internet providers getting the same shit done with 3 satelites.... you're looking at the intersection of people needing access to fast internet who can't somehow take advantage of existing infra, _and_ who won't eventually get covered by ground infra (and I guess don't have trees around their house).

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg

[mdorazio]

Here's the thing - the launch costs are only an insurmountable issue if you aren't SpaceX. The math might not be great if you assume dependence on dedicated Falcon launches, but SpaceX gets a lot of Starlink satellites to orbit by piggybacking on top of contracted commercial launches basically for free. You also need to consider that Starship will likely be orbital-ready next year with a launch cost of only the fuel and parts refurbishment, and a single Starship launch could put an absolutely stupid number of Starlink satellites in orbit.

Basically, cost calculations assuming traditional launch economics are incorrect. That's pretty much the whole point of SpaceX as a company - their business proposition is massive reduction in kg-to-space costs.

[JoshCole]

It is so much worse than that. The video doesn't use SpaceX cost. It uses their cost to others. It categorically rules out using their new rocket, even though their stated plans call for them to use it. It rules out ride sharing, even though they have been doing that. The video creator /knows/ they are doing that. They know they are lying. I can tell, because I've looked at some of the articles they posted screen captures of. They edited the fucking headlines to remove the rocket launch price. The video is absolute garbage. It even posits a government conspiracy, because it has to, because it lied about the speed test numbers that are used to decide eligibility for funding. Yet despite all that when they talk about their choice of numbers they pretend they are being generous to SpaceX by using conservative numbers when nothing could be further from the truth.

[ceeplusplus]

Eh, you can do your own math. 5k satellites / 5 years lifetime = expect to replace 1k per year. Each launch of ~50 satellites costs around $35M (conservative estimate). So overall capex required to maintain the system is $700M/year. SpaceX would need 530k subscribers at $110/mo just to keep the lights on - and each satellite would have to handle ~106 customers concurrently, assuming a uniform distribution (best-case scenario for SpaceX). According to some sleuths on Reddit [1], each Starlink satellite can deliver around 20Gbps bandwidth, which gives each of those customers around 188 megabit speeds, assuming absolute best case geographical distribution. In practice people will be clustered so it won't be that great.

Surprisingly not that bad. The real cost could be double and they would still have enough capacity to serve high speed internet and break even.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l20j2c/total_thro...

[JoshCole]

Just to give a sense of scale, because it is crazy. Your estimate? It is 0.000621118012422 of his one year estimate. You arrived at a figure more than three orders of magnitude lower than his figure. So I hope you'll understand why I have so little respect for his estimate.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

To just restate that to try to get across how extremely different your estimate is from his. If you convert to percentage and round at two decimal places... your estimate is 0.06% of his estimate. To try and make this different a little more real for people lets try to convert it into more familiar figures. If were talking about a house rather than rocket launches and cp thought the price was $100,000 for a house then CSS would have an estimate more than three orders of magnitude different. Something more like $100,000,000. Translating this level of difference in evaluation means the disagreement in 'real object' terms is roughly equivalent to this much difference in cost estimation: $120,000,000 home https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/329-Albion-Ave-Woodside-C...? versus $125,000 home https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/31235-Manton-Rd-Manton-CA...

The difference in estimates is absurd. The reason it is that absurd is that CSS tries to argue that SpaceX couldn't work because it would cost more than the entire economy in the world. It's like a comedy thing where he tries to use rhetoric about how stupid SpaceX must be to strengthen his argument that they could succeed without an overarching conspiracy helping them lie about everything. This is absolutely a conspiracy video, not a factual video.

IIRC, he moves on from this topic shortly after that to talk about how since Shotwell is a woman she isn't worth respect. It hits harder, if you believe him, because he just made a 'strong as long as you are delusional' case that anyone who thinks SpaceX might ever be profitable is insane.

[HALtheWise]

One key factor you didn't include in this calculation is "overprovisioning", the industry term for the fact that you only need to spec your total network capacity based on peak load times, and at peak times it's not actually going to be the case that every customer is using their maximum contractually available bandwidth. The typical industry assumption is that this is something like a 10x factor, although as network connections get faster, this becomes more pronounced.

[JoshCole]

If anyone is about to watch this video, I want to warn you before you do that saying this guy "has an agenda" is like saying that a flat earther "has an agenda" in that they will absolutely be giving you "facts" and whenever the "facts" disagree with reality they will give you "facts" that are designed to make you abandon reality.

If I were to state my actual opinion on him on Hacker News, I would be downvoted. If I were to try and express how I feel about someone else finding him at all reasonable, I would be downvoted. So in the kindest possible way let me direct your attention to the kind of techniques he uses.

At 7:16 in that video he posts a screen capture of an article headline. It is a screen capture? Honest right? Great data. Not so fast. The screengrab was photoshopped. He edited out part of the title. In particular, he edited out the price for SpaceX to launch a satellite to orbit. Why, you might wonder, would he do something like that? Well... he was lying about the price just before that, so it would be kind of inconvenient to let people see the truth, wouldn't it? Here is the article whose title he photoshopped: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...

This isn't an uncommon thing for this liar. He regularly and willfully does things like this all throughout the video. You should be taking every number he gives with an enormous amount of salt. Dump the entire fucking salt container on this meal. He lies about the cost for SpaceX to launch, a material fact, but he also double counts the number of rockets they will need to launch, another material fact. He lies about the speed test results for SpaceX (by using numbers from months before the video, rather than the actual numbers). Since he lied about that, his reported numbers didn't agree with, ya know, reality. In particular they didn't agree with the reality of SpaceX qualifying for various government funding initiatives for rural internet. So if you want to believe him you're going to need choke down a helping of "enormous conspiracy" in order to get onboard his hate train. He also lies about the cost of competitors. And... it's bad. It is so bad that I have 0% confidence that he operates in good faith and I assume anyone who trusts this person is truly lazy, because he isn't trustworthy. Not even close to it, at all, whatsoever.

[JoshCole]

If anyone wants to climb out of the rabbit hole rather than into it, someone wrote a multi-part essay debunking this video. There are /a lot/ of mischaracterizations, outright lies, and deception. It has three parts, because there was so many times that were deceptive as to demand multiple articles.

https://littlebluena.substack.com/p/common-sense-skeptic-deb...

[maccam94]

Thank you for writing this. I thought I had heard of this guy before. I was about to write a lengthy rebuttal myself.

[JoshCole]

It wasn't me who wrote the long rebuttal. I watched this video months back and noticed the same thing I'm sure you did. I ended up finding this rebuttal to it way back then and because of how often a certain segment of the population who is adequately described as "misinformed and full of hate" has this guy as their 'source' for various conspiracies I tend to remember the debunking.

[IMcD23]

I watched the video, and agree with all of your points. He strongly implies that Starlink is no better than existing satellite providers. My parents live in a rural area where the best non-satellite internet is 3mb/s DSL. They subscribe to Starlink, since there are no other viable options that allow things like video calling or HD video streaming.

Viasat offers 30mb/s download for $199/mo with a 150GB data cap. HughesNet offers 25mb/s download for $159/mo with a 75GB data cap. Starlink offers ~100mb/s download for $110/mo with no data cap.

Viasat/HughesNet have geostationary satellites which results in almost unusable ping (300-600ms), compared to the 50ms ping from Starlink.

[tbran]

I don't have a dog in this fight.

But, hilariously, despite the channel being called "Common Sense Skeptic" (thought it might be a science-y channel), every video is an Elon Musk takedown.

"Has an agenda" indeed, haha!!

[rlt]

There are a bunch of reasons to believe this is wrong, in addition to the things other people have pointed out:

- Starship will further reduce SpaceX's already low launch costs.

- Economies of scale by producing 10,000+ satellite.

- Industries willing to pay a lot for truly global coverage (maritime, aviation, oil, military)

- With the laser network, high frequency traders willing to pay a massive premium for the lowest latency connections between financial hubs.

- A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship, if achieved, will change the economics even more. Not only will it further reduce the initial launch cost, but you could imagine potentially servicing/refueling or recovering aging Starlink satellites.

- Starlink (plus increasing work-from-home opportunities) has the potential to (slightly) redistribute where humans are willing to live to more sparsely populated areas.

[vimy]

> The videos "has an agenda" but it seems a bit easy to accept the idea that constantly launching satelites into space is pretty expensive.

The idea is to use starship which should be really cheap.

[rtpg]

I believe during the video he uses pricing offered by Tesla(EDIT: SpaceX rather) as the optimistic pricing for Starship! So taking the "cheap" numbers!

[maccam94]

Tesla doesn't have anything to do with Starship launch prices. Let's look at costs to SpaceX for launches, since those are the most relevant numbers:

Reused Falcon 9 launch: $15M[1] in the best case, but let's double it just to ballpark the average, so $30M. Falcon 9 can loft around 50 satellites per launch. 30M/50 = $600k/satellite.

Starship: Aspirational goal of $2M cost to launch. Let's just round that up to $10M for whatever might be more expensive than expected. Starship has been predicted to be able to launch around 400 Starlink satellites at a time, the last figure I saw was that Starship launches would carry "100 plus" Starlinks[2]. $10M/100 = $100k/satellite. This is assuming Starship is launching v2.0 satellites though, rather than the current v1.5, which are way heavier (1 metric ton vs ~290kg)[3].

1: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9...

2: https://spacenews.com/ksc-to-study-potential-new-starship-la...

3: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-wit...

[rtpg]

OK, yeah so the video mentioned an optimistic price of $250k/satelite. $100k is definitely better! It sounds like $250k would be matching the v1.5 satelite cost.

I guess the overall thing would be to break things down and figure it out. I'm skeptical mainly from a "possible market share" perspective ($99/month works well for some, way less for others, and honestly the competition is not wired broadband but cell networks). But I am here to be proven wrong!

[charcircuit]

>you're looking at the intersection of people needing access to fast internet who can't somehow take advantage of existing infra, _and_ who won't eventually get covered by ground infra (and I guess don't have trees around their house).

Ground infra can suck. It will probably be stuck at 6Mbps down forever since it is not economical to upgrade it. I would literally cut down trees by hand if it meant I could have fast internet.

[toast0]

> Ground infra can suck. It will probably be stuck at 6Mbps down forever since it is not economical to upgrade it.

Having competition changes the economics, at least somewhat. Look how fast AT&T rolled out fibers to all the cities Google announced they were going to do fiber in. It's still expensive to do new runs everywhere, but it may be worthwhile to keep some business. In some areas, as some customers leave, staying customers may be able to have better access to bonded lines. In other areas, the carrier just needs a kick in the pants to use more flexible/generous profiles to let customers use the speed that's available.

[mlindner]

Common sense skeptic is a "hit channel" dedicated to producing and monetizing anti-Musk-related fake news. He has a captured market in a similar vein to anti-vaccine propaganda. So you should watch anything produced by him with that idea in mind.

The videos produced as a general rule will cherry pick information and also use outdated pieces of information and then mash them together to produce the illusion of something being much worse than it is.

[frankfrankfrank]

Not to mention that (someone can fill in the accurate numbers) some rather significant number of satellites are expected to be lost every year due to various factors at a rate that will require several rocket launches just for maintenance of the current state. My understanding when I was reading about that, is that it did not even consider the "shelf life" issue.

[rtpg]

It's possible that "shelf life" is shorthand for that. I watched the video a while back but only skimmed it to remember the details.

[JoshCole]

He doesn't just include those calculations in. He overcounts them to a pretty large degree. He also photoshops screengrabs of articles and lies about launch prices and lies about the number of launches and lies about the speed of SpaceX service and lies about a government conspiracy because the speed test numbers were too low, and he is a misogynist towards Shotwell, mocking her for being female, and he lies about the cost of the competitor services.

You don't need to worry. Every angle for making the comparison unflattering to SpaceX, including taking screen grabs of Elon Musk with funny faces and making character attacks on him on the basis of his face looking funny, are more then covered in that cesspit designed to radicalize and monetize the gullible.

[ecpottinger]

But as I use my internet, I never worry about what the CEO looks like, I never worry about if there is a male or female controlling matters. All I am concern with is the speed of my connection and the uptime. Keep the costs in check and those are the only things that matter.

[JoshCole]

I completely understand your point; a reasonable video author would have stuck to the things that matter. This person isn't reasonable. As the GP put it he "has an agenda" but as the GP didn't warn you he has no issue with lying when the facts disagree with him.

To get a sense of the scale for overcounting elsewhere in this thread someone pointed out we could do the calculation ourselves. They determined a reasonable number of satellites. Their estimate of the needed number of satellites was 37,000 less than CSS's estimate.

Whatever lie, whatever unflattering take, whatever deception - this video tries every angle. If you want to be delusional, this is your video author. He will help you get there.

The video lies about the connection speed. The video lies about the latency advantages. The video lies about the costs (by several orders of magnitude). The video lies about a government conspiracy (claiming one exists). The video lies about the ability of women to make effective decisions (implying they can't).

[tragictrash]

This comment isn't going to age well.

[darknavi]

I think their commercial business will be plentiful as well.

[kcb]

Military too.