I've been using Starlink since March 2021 and am very grateful for it. But the US service has gotten a lot worse since they chose to oversell their capacity. I'm glad to see that has consequences.
Also a little sad; I'd hoped that 100/20 RDOF standard would mean Starlink would have someone keeping them honest. They seem to be in a race to the congestion bottom right now.
You should be careful about being too glad. Starlink is a money sink and won't even have positive cash flow for many years.
SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Considering the expenses of Starlink and Starship, both big money sinks, it's entirely possible for Stalink to get scrapped at some point if investment money dries up.
Probably unlikely, since they could stop launching and keep the service running until the sats decay, but still possible.
I don't want Starlink or SpaceX to go broke. One of Musk's great strengths is balancing companies right on the edge of financial catastrophe. Partly with the help of government subsidies. Looks like they screwed this one up.
OTOH $900M is a lot of money to give to a company. And there's no guarantee that if they survive they won't just keep overselling capacity.
Starlink is mostly a bet on Starship. If they can actually get big reductions in cost to LEO, the cost of maintaining a large satellite constellation goes way down —- the capital cost of building each satellite is in the five-figure range, and the really expensive part is launching them. (Which, as you mentioned, they need to keep doing constantly as the older satellites are de-orbited.)
> You should be careful about being too glad. Starlink is a money sink and won't even have positive cash flow for many years.
> SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Takes like these make no sense. They assume some kind of lack of intelligence among people at SpaceX. As if they don't know how economics work. Rather than assuming stupidity, maybe you should rethink your premise?
Starlink may just be a run of the mill Musk fraud like FSD - entirely about raising investment or stock values. Yes, they ship something, but they may not ever get to the promised end state.
The math doesn’t work out for starlink and people have noted this for years at this point.
> Starlink may just be a run of the mill Musk fraud like FSD - entirely about raising investment or stock values.
Believing that FSD is a fraud in the first place is where you go wrong here. Frauds generally require something to not work at all or not exist. FSD works and exists, just not on the timelines promised but continued to be refined.
They're already more than half way to a billion a year in revenue from only ~2500 of 12000 satellites so far in orbit. Hopefully this will make its continued support financially plausible.
Also a little sad; I'd hoped that 100/20 RDOF standard would mean Starlink would have someone keeping them honest. They seem to be in a race to the congestion bottom right now.