[Pigalowda]

So the starlink simulators its deploying right now are empty platters that will burn up in the atmosphere from what I understand. Next missions they’ll be real statlink sats. Are these different than regular sats? It sounds like they’re able to handle more bandwidth but I don’t know.

[decimalenough]

Starship will be deploying the next gen v3 satellites, which weigh about 2 tons each. A single Starship launch with 60 of these deploys more capacity than 20 launches of a Falcon 9.

[Pedro_Ribeiro]

The figures they've been talking of the ideal cost per launch of starship are even more insane. I'm sure some of it is hype farming on Twitter but if they get the cost to less then $1000/kg it would be incredible.

[xeromal]

Wow, that really puts it into perspective

[geerlingguy]

IIRC the v3 sats can do like 1 Tbps of bandwidth thanks to a larger antenna system?

[kersplody]

Next flight should be a mass simulator of at least 100 tons to orbit. This flight was around ~10 tons to almost orbit.

The economics of Starlink basically require high cadence Starship launches with 50+ Starlink v3 satellites on each flight.

[Teever]

Isn't starlink a revenue generating endeavor already?

[daemonologist]

Yes; I think it would be more accurate to say that the economics of Starship basically require high cadence launches with lots of v3 Starlink satellites (because only the big internet constellations can financially justify launching so much payload to orbit right now).

[jdminhbg]

Yes, they're bigger than the current Falcon 9 rockets can launch and can handle more bandwidth.