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by stephc_int13 258 days ago
I think the question to ask would be about the cost of maintaining that fleet.

Cost of building + launch, per satellite, any ideas?

How much is Elon _actually_ burning here? Is Starlink going to have a positive ROI at some point?

1 comments

Starlink is crazy profitable. Source: Son has SpaceX stock and sees the audited financial reports in a locked room in Redmond.
Simplistically this is likely very true, if they have only 10m customers, that's like 12 billion a year. They can easily launch 12 times a year with 60 per launch, that's 720 replacements a year. Each launch is about 15m, so just replacing them each month they are spending 15m out of the 1b profit. Not bad.

And that's if they only have 10m customers - which I suspect is a lot more considering it's a worldwide service.