(www.zdnet.com)
In a functioning economy he’d have faced criminal charges for knowingly misleading investors and customers about a dozen times over by now. It’s one thing to set lofty goals internally to keep your workforce motivated and innovative. It’s something else entirely to state things publicly with a targeted date when you know there’s absolutely no chance it will ever happen.
I worked on technology for years that the FCC effectively killed for stupid reasons. So it’s heartening to me that someone can still just do stuff and build things. It’s amazing. If you asked me 10 years ago I would have thought that getting something like Starlink off the ground would’ve been impossible due to red tape.
And because it's so flexible, in states like California where we have aggressive environmental laws, it's leveraged as the NIMBY trump card. When it can't block a project, the process is used to make it inordinately expensive and take decades. One example would be the environmental studies for the CA High Speed Rail.[1]
[1] - https://ifp.org/fast-track-democratically-approved-transit-p...
I live in upstate NY, the rebuild of the GOP here is around hyper local issues, mostly apartments and solar. MAGA changed the discourse and allows the rabble rousers to say the quiet part out loud. (Ie bike infrastructure and apartments will bring poor black people to rape and pillage)
That's why the cost estimates for CA HSR jump a bunch every time an administration hostile to it enters the white house.
A very good point.
I don't agree we can blame Trump for HSR though. 2/3 of the time that has passed have had Democrats in the white house. HSR is nearly all pure-California-style self-inflicted wound. And honestly it's just the most visible project California has failed with, there are many others. The one I'm personally angry about is Prop 1. We're now 12 years after, and have no additional water resources even broken ground. It's shameful.
Yes, having a data center that raises your utilities costs by 300% jammed down your throat because the local mayor got blatantly bribed shouldn’t be a thing, especially when it’s powered by mobile gas turbines that stink up the entire area (note: I’m not against data centers on principle, but there are many ways for ultra-wealthy interests to leave people hosed). But things like faintly visible mini-sats don’t seem like a big deal, subjectively, unless you work at an observatory.
Wow it’s like when I move some pieces of wood or other items near my shed outdoors and I see a bunch of activity that I never knew existed.
Don't want to doxx myself but no outdoor ads on the main street here.
Maybe Stockholm has some.
Me, I just do what I can and at least trash the ones covering the windows on public transport here.
Elon doesn't own space, he just happens to be the one who is currently best at making it reachable. There is plenty of space for everyone else, and others will get there, eventually.
I could eat myself up with envy over the money he's making from it... or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward (while also being an asshole), rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...
It's just the money.
If we were actually going to Mars, then yes, but somehow he made himself the 'First Trillionaire' - without even so much as getting out of Earth's orbit.
This is NFT progress, in that, there is some plausible economic value in NFTs, but in reality, it's just a hustle.
The problem is not 'space' - it's getting ourselves sufficiently organized.
You get what you pay for and the service got paid for ultimately.
If it was important enough, it would have been paid for.
Please just stop this thing you're doing. It's nakedly markedly dishonest
It's the same neo-liberal aggression couched in rhetorical trickery.
The problem is that nobody asked the other 8.3 billions people what they think about seeing stuff in the sky. For the benefit of 1/1000th of humanity (~10 million starlink users).
We will be investigating him for decades and he deserves every second of it.
Kind of fucked up lol
> rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...
Your moral and ethical bar is Trump?
Forward back to fascism. No thanks. He already caused astonishing harm.
Earth orbit is more constrained, but it's very far from full. Geostationary orbits are about 20% full, but the rest is practically empty still.
The 1 I suspect is some other satellite
SpaceX has many owners, especially post-IPO. You, too, can buy the sky and sell the sky.
Perfect, how can this not be a win win for anyone not involved?
An opportunity for everyone to become wealthy and scale our riches together.
Without Elon, how would so many of us .. “ever have made it”?
SpaceX utilizes a dual-class share structure where CEO Elon Musk retains between 82.4% and 85% of the total voting power, despite only owning roughly 42% of the company's actual equity.
Starlink have already put a lot of effort into their satellites being much less bright than most satellites, including tilting their PV away from earth during the terminator crossing, so from what I've read you'll mainly see them while they're being deployed and while de-orbiting.
(Part of my still-expanding draft blog post about space data centres is to work out how bright a million much larger objects would look. If they were in the orbit with the most sun, that's a terminator-following sun-synchronous orbit, which is maximum brightness).
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The compute part may be a rack or a cabinet worth of GPUs (though TBH the public designs are currently vague to the point of being artistic impressions), but they also need to come with a PV array big enough to power that, plus a cooling array that's going to be close to 25% as big as the PV array regardless of what unit size they go for in the end.
If they settle on making e.g. 120 kW satellites, that would be about 400 m^2 for the PV and another 100 m^2 for the radiator.
I still cannot believe it's economical to have "data centers in orbit" but I guess the truth will be seen in whether or not it actually happens.
The FCC has regulatory jurisdiction for communications on US objects in space, regardless of distance from earth.
Even very optimistic estimates (by people who aren't Elon Musk) say it will take a decade to get the costs low enough to be worthwhile for LEO; higher orbits are much more expensive.
You can see that SpaceX (and probably other LEO operators as well) are already doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJWli7YKPw
This video is a good visual illustration of that effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw
Maybe we could just blast Anish Kapoor into space on a one-man prison vessel instead?
I thought a good example of the pinnacle of government bureaucracy in action acting undemocratically both undermines your position and, secondly, might have you alter your opinion a bit.
You've, essentially, just appealed to authority to justify your position.
Actually many forms of government mandate and authority are generated by marketplace mechanisms, many of which are actually more true to desirable marketplace dynamics than those we see in private marketplaces, due to concentration of power, which is a known failure mode of marketplaces in general.
The idea that “government” is some mysterious mythical entity that just exists outside of people’s input and outside of marketplace forces is juvenile.
Neither government nor private market outcomes are intrinsically more legitimate than the other.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/gx04-who-owns-the-most-s...
* Most satellites were private owned, for communications or resource.
* Most government owned satellites have military use, the people that is trying to spy or nuke you or your neighbor.
* A small part is used for science and altruistic activities.
They're such an enormous part of the problem that it does a disservice to the problem to not metaphorically shine a spotlight on them.
I had trouble finding another source that summed up the data so nicely, but other sources did corroborate these figures: https://satfleetlive.com/blogs/how-many-satellites-in-orbit/
>They're such an enormous part of the problem
What an incredible life of privilege you must live to perceive a few glints in the sky as a huge problem.
But really, what point are you trying to make? I don't need to think that satellites glinting in the night sky are the literal worst problem facing humanity for that to be a valid topic of discussion.
This has been approved:
* https://ca.pcmag.com/networking/16760/fcc-approves-reflect-o...
Edit: A 5km diameter spot illuminated from 600km altitude.
Plants can absorb some more CO2 and it improves their growth slightly but saying they LOVE CO2 is an exaggeration.
Did you actually check with a satellite tracker, maybe show your kids and inspire them with what humanity can accomplish?
What we're seeing is humanity managing to become a space faring civilization. I look up and yearn to be up there as well. I'll never make it to space, but it would give me such joy if my children's children had the opportunity to.
Or basic locations in Europe, that can be as close to 20km from a big city. There are a ton of spots where you have at best spotty 4G coverage or no coverage at all.
Used to live where we had 1Mbit ADSL, and no cell ... Trust me, you feel the limitations of that. Keeping your PC running 24/7 to download/buffer, so you can use your day traffic for more important stuff.
Starlink is a insane deal in my eyes. Sure, it uses a lot of power but your paying the same as typical vDSL in Germany. And ironically, ... Starlink is faster then the fixed lines we have here in the "3th" biggest city in Germany.
People really underestimate how much underinvestment there has been in Internet connectivity even in rich countries.
Maybe some day we'll be mining asteroids near Earth or something. Maybe we'll mine the moon. Going to/living on different planets is pretty much science fiction though. It's hard enough to live on the earth, it's gonna be 1000 times harder to live anywhere else.
The US has tons of spy satellites, why not make some for the folks paying taxes? Why do we have to sell our firstborns (data) to Google for maps etc?
Social welfare is the top local spending category in many local/state governments
I believe some functions are simply best performed by non-profit-motivated government agencies. However, I would usually prefer an actual unregulated or black market over the corrupt frankenstein of private-public partnerships
Disinformation on the Internet? Never seen it before.
The contracts are not just publicly bid but paired.
Come off this nonsense.
Space is the sphere of government and the launchers and satellites have always been built by companies and SpaceX is very visibly cheaper.
There are plenty of solid reasons to despise Elon - no need for counterfactuals.
There really aren't that many. He's kinda a dick and briefly supported the president very publicly.
Most of the other reasons are just as fatuous as this.
As a broad generality, governments are utter crap at inventing/building/operating bleeding-edge technologies at giga-scale. Exceptions are generally narrow-focus military hardware, plus flood control, aqueducts, and other "obviously needed for the nation's welfare" stuff.
It is harder to break satellite constellation in a concealed way.
Come off this nonsense.
The alternative is some company charging the government for the same exact thing.
It disgusts me that now, at all times, I can see strings of man made objects polluting the skies.
Starlink satellites have low orbits and only reflect sunlight around sunrise and sunset.
They are not overwhelming, mind you, but I did notice them immediately. They stood out enough that I wondered what they were and started researching, that alone says something about the prevalence.
Edit: An LLM tells me that this is partly unique to how far South Australia is and the positioning of the sun in Australia's Summer. But I lack the physics knowledge to confirm that.
Unfortunately you need a government that cares for the whole; in the USA oligarchs rule, so the general public are treated as paying slaves.
You are emotionally disregulated and unable to think critically.
This is such a weird framing, as if Starlink was a frivolous project for some rich person's fun.
There is genuine demand for orbital ISP from people, including people in poorer countries whom a better connectivity may help improve their incomes and lives, where an alternative is basically impossible (you won't get optic fibre in the Himalayas or Papua or the Andes anytime soon, if ever).
20 million people are now using Starlink and that number will almost certainly grow to maybe ten times as many, eventually. Ukraine uses Starlink to defend itself from being devoured by an aggressor. Sailors and other people in far away places use Starlink to keep in touch with their families.
Did you know that before Starlink, the South Pole Base had just 2x256 kB connection for everyone?
I get the "pollution" angle, but not the "hey, one guy is ruining the planet" angle. At the very least, all the customers are complicit, and I would add all the governments that don't seem to be able to build terrestrial connections for their own population.
I’m an occasional astrophotographer, and the baseline of photos you can took are absolutely breathtaking now. Seeing this destroyed in real time is depressing.
I used to see a rare flyby of a satellite in the complete dark, but now it’s much more, and besides my personal annoyance, many people much more serious about sky and space are rightfully angry. Maybe you can ask them to grow up, too.
Not every progress is good progress. We should understand that by now. You should understand that better than all of us combined, since you’re apparently grown up, way more than us.
And you're the judge of this based on your likes and hobbies?
Anyway, I agree. Just ask the people blocking the HS2 or CaHSR about how sad the train plowing through their communities makes them feel. We need to tear down all trains, not every progress is good progress
The top comment here is someone lamenting how depressing it is that supposedly a single person owns the night sky.
Another one is asking if we will be the last generation to see the night sky.
Yet with how political and dramatized the discussion around this is even on this website here, I fear that any opportunity to block or delay more SpaceX satellites will be used to the fullest.
I am concerned that this might hinder innovation. If you involve other countries, would this not be likely to become an extremely hard and slow regulatory process?
I understand that SpaceX's mitigation methods have been effective, and that the current satellites are on average around the limit of being visible to the naked eye under a very dark sky.
Personally I am eager to see more of these satellites enable 5G like cellular coverage outdoors in rural areas.
Perhaps I am more open to change in the appearance of nature than others. Some oppose also wind turbines in our mountains, where I usually think that they look cool and typically make the landscape more interesting.
With that said, I think we should have honest conversations about the benefits vs. the impacts, but also realize nothing is stagnant, not even nature.
The impartiality of those processes is a bit in question when the prime mover here is so far in bed with the executive that he gets to go up on stage during inauguration to sieg a few heils.
(And is then given a free hand to fire whomever he wants from the federal government.)
The ITU has also approved SpaceX actions.
And yes progress is good progress.
Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.
Haber, on chemical warfare: “The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing.”
Do you think the world would be better off if we still killed ourselves with swords instead of drones? The result is the same. A death is a death. The real cause of wars is not "better weapons".
https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
Was it not a big issue for you that aeroplanes were flying overhead?
Whos responsibility was it that you were living were you lived?
I guess there is a small difference between being able to choose or parents have choosen for you vs. everyone on the whole planet needs to endure it.
A lot to unpack
/s - obviously
A lot of people get upset about such things, even those are rather more important than just adding to the world's existing widespread internet access.
Starlink is cool, and has some niches, but this is a fairly limited argument in its favour.
The level of servility of some people never ceases to amaze me. This sentence is viscerally repulsive to me.
People can acknowledge a difference of values and recognize what they consider a destruction of the commons without their stance being distilled to simply being a hater.
Would you also considering people who bemoan the degradation of Lake Erie by industrialists of the last century as “crab mentality”?
Similarly, people at the time took what may be closer to the opposite stance: “Fundamentally this level of environmental degradation was accepted as a sign of success.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
Mostly, Kessler syndrome isn’t something to worry about at all; there are just a lot of orbital planes available. But in LEO, the mechanics don’t even apply.
First graph is a list of deorbit times: https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/deorbit-syst...
As expected, higher altitudes, higher mass, and lower surface areas correlate to longer deorbit times. It looks like altitude has an extreme effect on deorbit times, as you can see the 100 KG satellite (solar min) deorbits in a little under 2 years at 400 KM, but over 15 years at 500 KM. So 1.25x the altitude results in 7.5x the deorbit time.
Stuff at 800-1000 KM can take centuries to deorbit, and that's within both NASA's (under 2000 KM) and the ESA's (under 1000 KM) definitions of LEO. There is a definition for VLEO of under 450 KM, which would have fairly short deorbit times, and therefore a relatively mild Kessler Syndrome.
For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change?
I look up at the night sky and i want to see stars and the endlessness of the universe and don't want to be reminded that Elon Musk will poisen our atmosphere.
Yes. The only way to truly solve these issues is technological progress.
It's not technological progress we need; it's cultural progress.
IIRC no place in the world which has hard-paved highways has ever seen a peacetime famine. That's almost exclusively the domain of mud road territories. Of course, this is partly a correlation (mud road territories have worse governance and more banditry), but there is causality as well.
So clearly you are in favor of starvation and human suffering due to climate change because of your irrational distaste for seeing satellites in orbit.
I suspect the root cause is you've overdosed on propaganda on the internet.
life for our kin will only be better.
we will have space stations where you can visit and see all the stars you want.
there will be space tourism and that will be pretty cool.
that’s what i wanted as a kid and its cool to see it play out irl.
edit: dang didn't expect so many negative people
Not only you didn’t get the point, but you still hold on to your delusions:
> life for our kin will only be better.
Right? In this subscription economy? Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved? You can’t afford to rent the house you loved let alone buy it? (previous generations could afford) the list goes on and on.
Maybe stop spreading lies and see things more objectively?
> Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved?
You know how many movies the average peasant watched in the 1800s? 0. The closest equivalent was live theatre and that was an expensive luxury. You'd also likely get see one or more of your children die to diseases that are trivially treatable or preventable today.
edit: not LCD the screen… if you thought thats what i meant then… nvm… not even gonna say it lol iykyk
EDIT: You edited your comment after I submit my response. You cannot put arbitrary abbreviations and expect people to read your mind. Anyway, there is no point in arguing with you.
For a planet which gets warmer and warmer.
When did you became that compliant?
A lot of progress has externalities and the benefits and downsides of progress are rarely equally distributed.
> A lot of progress has externalities and the benefits and downsides of progress are rarely equally distributed.
The vast majority of humanity has benefited from progress, compared to most decades and certainly centuries in the past. So I don't really know what your point is here?
But do you really think life has been getting better in the last 10 years say?
Do you think trickle down economics works?
Are you happy with the way things are going under this administration, which favours those BILLIONAIRES you mentioned, but couldn’t really give a damn about the rest of us or the commons?
Are you OK living in a future where there are zero checks and balances and the .1% fully controlling and owning the political and policy space, i.e. the return to the Robber Barons era?
Uh, yeah. My TV's much better, my video games are better, programming is easier and more fun with these new AI options added on top of better frameworks than we had in the past, there are way more restaurants serving better food, way more great shows and movies, there's mainstream awareness of the ills of social media, I can take driverless taxis around my city, I can tap to pay pretty much everywhere, wayyyyyy more of my friends work remotely. I'm 40 now, and myself + most of my friends + family are making more money now than we were at 30.
> Are you OK living in a future where there are zero checks and balances and the .1% fully controlling and owning the political and policy space, i.e. the return to the Robber Barons era?
You sound like you've been reading a bunch of gloom and doom scenarios. Get offline. Go outside. Touch grass. Breathe. People are still going out to eat at restaurants, they're still playing intramural sports, they're still going to the beach with their friends, they're still watching plays, they're still visiting family and hosting movie nights. Stop reading so much negative news that's telling you the sky is falling and that everything is going to shit.
Of course there are massive problems and inequities we're solving, of course! But that's always been the case. Relax. Breathe. Put it in perspective.
Your response is basically 'Works on my machine!'.
And speaking of touching grass; what do you think the recent change of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) under this administration will mean to our commons?
I'll tell you, it means the new rule will make it easier to legally destroy wildlife habitats. And this on top of all the climate protection policies this administration is eagerly rolling back, because solar is woke or something. I guess you're OK with that too, since it doesn't impact you (yet).
Even though living standards have improved in the last 100 years overall, it's not a guarantee it will continue like that, if we let the Robber Barons take full control again.
You're just not someone who has to deal with these problems. Are we solving them? Not sure what you're being that of.
> Get offline. Go outside. Touch grass. Breathe. People are still going out to eat at restaurants, they're still playing intramural sports, they're still going to the beach with their friends, they're still watching plays, they're still visiting family and hosting movie nights.
I suggest you stop touching grass and go and talk to a few less fortunate people. Maybe that can broaden your perspective
Almost every major measure of human progress and prosperity over time?
What are you basing your doom and gloom beliefs on?
> I suggest you stop touching grass and go and talk to a few less fortunate people. Maybe that can broaden your perspective
I would wager my perspective is much broader than yours. Being so anxious and pessimistic that you only focus on the negative, to such a degree where when people point out real positive progress you feel COMPELLED to say something negative, doesn't mean you have a broad perspective. It just means you're miserable.
But I'm not talking about luxuries like super cars that most people couldn't afford.
I'm talking about the necessities of life. Food, shelter and energy have become more expensive and under this administration's policies it's not getting any better.
Poverty rates have barely improved and under this administration desire to reduce SNAP budget heavily, what do you think this will do to child poverty rates?
A significant portion of the human populace still lives like this in various degrees today. You are just blind to it because you'd rather live in your delusion for comfort.
I believe it should’ve been possible to not leave so much people behind and so much behind. Requiring those at the front to not leave people so far behind (and forcefully funneling away their riches if they do) would’ve been enough.
I don't think this is true. Of course, rich people will always benefit the most from any technological advances. But there is no indication that the average Joe will be worse off in say, 20 years, compared to today. Medical advances alone coming down the pipeline will likely tip the scales towards future average Joe being better off compared to today. If I have to make a choice, for example: do I want to cut the deaths from diseases by half and fill the sky with Starlink satellites, or do nothing? I am picking the better medicice and Starlink-filled sky.
I don't need a space station with space tourism only the richest can afford and will be still very dangerous to see the stars right now.
What you will see is how Starlink satelites will poisen our atmosphere at re-entry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s...
This vision is absolutely horryfying, yet at same time incredibly interesting.
You are seeing this in this thread. I doubt anyone likes to be described as contra-progress. But nevertheless people would rather conserve the current night sky than see it transmute into a shimmering sea of a million artificial satellites. It's not really obvious to me why one state should be preferable to the other.
Also let me guess, you have high speed internet avaiable at your house so starlink isn't your only high-speed option right now?
I’m not against advancing in this area, but there is nuance. Progress can be short sighted.
We need to ensure our progress is balanced taking into account the whole system instead of just one part.
For what it's worth, this also happens with printed books.
I wasted the latter half of my teens taking New Age occultism and magical powers as a profound topic rather than a literature and culture topic, thanks to a combination of a bookstore chain near where I grew up and a mother who also took this all very seriously.
Starlink is a global phenomenon, good ISPs were at best a local phenomenon.
The US spends up to $4 billion a year just to keep a few people alive on the ISS. And they can’t stay there too long because it’s too dangerous to their health. The idea that we’re going to “colonize space” in the foreseeable future is laughable.
I have no love for SpaceX but at least I can take a subscription or invest and the stock and pretend that those satellites are beneficial to me.
There isn’t a single US government owned satellite that is not actively harmful to me at the moment.
While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.
However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
India is rapidly expanding fiber internet connectivity, even in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network
In addition, 4G/5G coverage is extensive: https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2...
See India in this 5G global coverage map: https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026
The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).
People vastly overestimate the purchasing power in places like India. Most of the purchasing power is concentrated in the top 1% of the population and most of that 1% lives in urban areas with fiber connectivity. The bottom 90% don’t even make $1K/person/year. Even a $10/month subscription (1/5th of what it costs right now) would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.
People vastly underestimate the subjective importance of the Internet for people. 10-20% of the total income seems like a very realistic figure, even if it means spending some days hungry.
I don't doubt that similar schemes will be used in Africa or India.
BTW Median income in India is about $3K a year.
I explicitly mentioned income per person. This is household income, which obviously will be higher than individual income.
And as far as connection pooling goes, India already has 88% 4G and 80% 5G coverage in the villages. Far cheaper connections are already available that are already being leveraged in a way that you describe. The market where Starlink is appealing is much smaller.
Lack of sufficient population density and political instability is what would stop this.
And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.
I suppose they will likely start putting cameras and other data sensors on the satellites so they can sell other data for mapping, positioning services, agriculture, weather, etc. The incremental cost to add this to the platform will be almost nothing compared to existing systems.
And Starlink already increased prices again.
And without Sparship and prooving that they actually can reuse it, they can't hold the price point.
Starlink satelites do not scale very well. They need v3 and even with v3 this doesn't scale efficently.
I don't see a reason why countries with existing carriers would allow that, given the owner's stance about political meddling.
Right now we do not even have the antenna technology in current high end smartphones for 'easy to use, normal speed' mobile to satelite communication.
And funny enough, the more local mobile phones you would have, which want to send data to a satelite, the harder the problem gets due to interference.
With 5g we do already a lot of beam forming etc. Try beamforming into 500km space with uncoordinated random amount of mobile devices with very very little sending power and one satelite 'beamforming' its a few hundred square miles.
Phone > Satellite connection cannot happen indoors directly, whereas 3-4-5g can, today, not 10 years and billions of R&D into the future
It's been broken/unavailable on maybe 6 of my flights out of hundreds.
And this is all before they launch a phone or something, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative, replace all forms of space based telecommunications (TV, Satellite Radio, etc). Starlink is a $1T+ business without even getting creative.
And we must remember that 6G is in the final stages of development, which has peak speeds of 1 Tbps.
This is not a problem in Africa and India.
https://www.google.de/maps/place/Nairobi,+Kenya/@-1.2745409,...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/29/spacex-secret-laun...
It's billed at cost. Not at price.
They need Starship to be able to send v3 up, without v3 it doesn't scale well enough.
Starship still hasn't proven it can actually bring up the relevant payload high enough and they need it to be reusable otherwise costs will increase.
And they already exist and only have 10 Million customers. They need to get countries on their side like India but these countries are not stupid. Elon Musk showed them very clearly what he can do like his statements he did when Ukraine war started.
EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.
My informed opinion says that you are wildly wrong.
(Also don’t forget the Starlink related military contracts that SpaceX has.)
Well, my informed (I guess? it's first hand) opinion says exactly what the PC said. And no the plan has been underfoot for so long that it really pretty much has nothing to do with the current regime even though I am sure like any regime they'd say they did it from the scratch.
I'd say we are getting really great at getting broadband to everyone than giving enough bread and education and healthcare to everyone :D (ignore the smiley, this sucks)
Starlink increased prices just a fwe weeks ago.
So whats stoping the future starlink explosion?
Constellation numbers are still below the Kessler syndrome threshold?
cant' steer without a helm
Many flag and port states already allow One Man Bridge Operation (OMBO) in many circumstances. This means there's basically on person on the bridge, and maybe one other person down in the engine room keeping an eye on a floating city block moving through the water at 15 knots
The same bosses will pay multiple security guards, in addition to staff, to guard <$10m in goods at a Walmart. But when 50x the goods are in the ocean, suddenly the staff is the limiter?
Now the crew will be very pleased if they get a Starlink connection rather than the ridiculously small crew connectivity allowance Inmarsat et al will give them, but that all depends on shipping companies not having to pay premium prices for maritime connectivity.
Salt water, is nasty, it gets everywhere, the environment on boats is damp. Ships are complicated and require constant effort to keep running.
Any sort of "automation" you build in is subject to those same environmental conditions, and wont last long.
On top of that add the reusability stunt streamed in 4k making them extrapolate a not well defined pivotal leap for ROI....and there you have it , it's the Apollo sinkhole all over again with money being lit on fire an essentially no quality of life ROI for society.
At least the Apollo mission got us the ability to deliver nukes to Moscow in 30 minutes or less. This will be a total sinkhole.
All the while we are held hostage by a Nation with consumption rates which are a thenth of ours and we still have the audacity to reject nuclear fission because it's "dangerous"
It allows technical folk to live wherever they’d like as long as they’re working remotely.
The mobile applications, particularly in the case of airline aircraft, have also been compelling and worth a lot of money to SpaceX.
Starlink has also brought broadband Internet to a vast number of people that would not have had it otherwise. This will boost the worldwide economy by an enormous amount.
Starlink brought internet to a lot of people who had it before already but made it easier for them.
Its still quite a interesting technology, given, but for the fact that he destroys potentially our atmosphere, has control over war critical tech, can do survailance and wants to send out A Lot MORE into our space, its a net negative for at least 7-8 BILLION people while 10 Millionen people benefit from it.
And they even increased the price just a few weeks back...
Turns out a simple water cooler technology is enough. We are all back to office because of efficiency.
I’m not joking.
There’s billions of dollars in monitoring and maintaining remote sites / handling remote connectivity, doing bespoke SaaS tools, etc. Like, literally high hundreds of millions or low billions.
To the extent that they're not actually wrong about that TAM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market#/medi...
Note that I am not claiming they'll get sales anywhere near to close to the TAM. It's not like Wikipedia's market value is even close to {peak price of Encyclopedia Britannica} * {number of people on the internet} even despite it no longer being generally contested which of Wikipedia and Britannica is now better.
I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)
Starlink is just a re-skin of the "Wireless optic" thing a lot of ISPs are pushing because they would prefer not having to lay cables and instead have everyone use 5g routers. Of course, the service isn't comparable, but regular people don't necessarily know it. Fiberoptic is still king, and probably will be for a long time.
There's nothing comparable to direct fiberoptic cable, and anyone who says otherwise immediately outs themselves as being a sellout or having anti-consumer motives. In 100 years it may be different, but I'm probably not going to be around in 100 years, so...
Maybe neutrino comms for long distance? :)
Which meant shitty speeds and if you have a problem with billing/service you cannot complain to anyone. Their service would go down for days and there is nothing you can do besides rely on shitty 4G. When Starlink became available in Brazil this was the lifesaver for my family
Also you could install it in things that don't look like it since it only needs an mostly unobstructed view in a cone to the sky. For example I could se an installation in a fake rain barrel, old bathtub inside a stack of firewood. some cloth coverings also would work so it doesn't have to be open either.
The only way to find the actual installations would be survey flights that take pictures and compare the data. Then send out inspectors to see if changes on buildings hide starlink antennas.
I think the only effect will be that the scheme will go away. Alternatively they could just improve their service so it competes on performance and price with starlink.
Finding it would be very easy as these houses are not huge houses, enter the house, snip the cables.
Besides that, its all hypotetical. Just because in some random shitty neigherhood this issue exists, doesn't mean anything anyway.
Very fitting.
Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.
I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.
But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
The economics of laying fiber to the premises are heavily driven by density of potential customers * probability that a potential customer will sign up if you run fiber down their street. You can get reasonable intuition by focusing on the density alone & ignoring the competition / pricing side of things.
I'm not familiar with current US construction costs to install fiber but have some intuition from Australia.
With Australia's national broadband network project from a decade or so ago, it'd cost in the ballpark of $100 AUD per meter to run fiber down the street in an underground trench - most of the capex is digging the holes in the ground etc, the cost of the cable itself is essentially free. The construction budget for a suburb would be something like $2000 / premises. To give a ballpark estimate, suppose 25% of your budget is the premises-specific work to connect the house to the cable running down the street, if they choose to sign up for your broadband plan. That leaves at most $1500 / premises for the rest of your capex budget, so the economics only work if you've got a neighbourhood with a density of least one house every 15 meters. Those numbers aren't exact but they'd be in the ballpark.
There's a bit of variability in the cost per meter to install, if you can reuse existing poles & run the cable aerially that might be only 30%-40% of the cost of digging holes, so you might be able to support a lower density suburb that way & still stick to your construction budget.
In Australia for the lower density rural / semi-rural areas they'd use fixed wireless, & finally satellite for the remote extremely low density areas where it didn't even make sense to build a wireless tower.
it is well known that Australia has an extremely lazy workforce that refuse to put in any real work.
the best example here is the stupid residential building cost. nowadays it costs over $1m AUD or $700k USD do a first floor 2bedroom 1 bathroom extension for an existing house in good condition. That is significantly more expensive than building a big house in the US.
let's don't even start on the quality of those new builds, that would be the laughing stock of the entire world.
> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?
It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
AI data centers in space, of course!
That is very valuable.
The payload we send to space is very limited and the 300% increase in the few last years was ONLY starlink itself.
Thats the issue Musk has to sell it to the investors and his idea is datacenter payload.
Just that he would need to send 300 Starships up there to even install a smallish datacenter like his own colossus 1.
Starship is not done yet, we have not seen it fly up there and return for 300 times at all.
Sad to see this place becoming a normal web forum.
Is your position that _you_ can make assertions without evidence but that lesser mortals may not contradict you without writing a paper on the subject?
I’m convinced that a large part of the user base of this site is genuinely, literally, solipsistic.
So not a problem
There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.
To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.
They just launch those sats, and straight up serve Internet illegally. Those are the bonkers parts.
To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.
Well doing it decades later than others did help with that.
And how does it matter why they succeeded when the question is "are they capable of doing a Starlink?"?
1. The answer is 3.: USA, USSR, and the European Space Agency
Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)
Why? According to Wikipedia they spend like $1.4b annually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO That's like an extra $10 for each of these citizens living in "extreme poverty".
And what's the cutoff? Like 10% of the US population is under the poverty line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States. Is NASA "obscene" too? Granted that's not the same as "extreme poverty" but it's still a bad look in the richest country in the world, right?
> unless it provides significant economic value
Investments in science and technology generally do. Rich countries are advanced in science and technology.
Your argument is all over the place. This thread is about if India could tackle LEO comsats, but perhaps you're seeing it through a lens of prestige/success.
> Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene
You'll love Gil Scott-Heron's classic that wrestled the same ideas in the 1960s USA, titled Whitey on the Moon
India may not be a poor country, but GDP doesn't capture the real state of india's wealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
…which lists India as #148, below countries like Zimbabwe, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Palestine.
I don't know about the rest, but Russia started working on its own Starlink well before the war. We have the North and Siberia where satellite internet is the only option. Another target market is Russian Railways which would love to have internet in the trains not only when they pass areas with mobile coverage.
(Only being snarky, obviously as a consumer it's great to have an option like this)
With their current pricing, they can't compete with local vendors. These local vendors charge like $10/month for 100-200mbps (vendor/bundle dependent) speeds, with no data-capping. For just $5 extra, they also bundle 20+ OTT channels, including netflix and prime video (HD only).
And yes, fiber connections are everywhere here for past 5 years... and I'm from a very small town here.
(I know you said you didn't select that option, but just the idea that it's even offered to residential units is mind blowing).
In any case even 50Gbps likely a huge part of their total throughput and you wont be abble to use it at full speed. So its pure marketing.
The rural & underdeveloped area and the niche applications (ex: ships and planes) will bring-in some cash.
And in addition, the US Army will pretty much guaranty it to be in the green: it wants this capability plus some control over it.
If it was civilian only, I doubt the economics would make much sense, specially given the amount of satellites and their short lifespan combined with the overall shrinking market (rural flight to cities + fiber deployment on land).
I live in India and have used 1Gbps Fiber since almost 10 years and pay only 40$ for it. Internet access in India is quite cheap and fiber is quite easily available
Rural communities in the US should have high speed internet, just like efforts were made to give them electricity back in the day. But the layers of politics and dysfunction in the way are deep.
I realize Space X "pollutes" space and astronomy is also important, but it's not more important than communications and information for people on earth.
You’re presenting a false choice. It isn’t “Starlink or no internet”, it’s “why not other internet options?”
On the other hand there are currently $63 billion (22.5 years of Starlink cost) of rural broadband subsidies active in the US and it hasn't come close to running all that fiber. So $63 billion to not even finish the US vs $2.8b / y to provide service to the entire world. I think it's safe to conclude that the satellite option is in fact much cheaper.
If the entire world used Starlink it would grind to a halt. They’d need to spend exponentially more to have more satellites to provide that necessary bandwidth.
All the investment in Fiber and mobile towers are long lasting investments.
Starlink NEEDS v3 to scale because they already have scaling issues. They need Starship, which doesn't work yet, to work to even send v3 up there.
And while Spacex has some first mover advantage, other companies start doing the same which will eat their margins. Makes it even more complicated to run all of it.
They have to do 300k orbit correction already last year, kessler syndrom can happen which will block access to space for all of us.
We don't even know yet how dangerous the poisoning of our atmosphere will be.
You still need a powerline to your house, sewer and water.
There are plenty of fibers and dark fibers on power pools.
Starlink doesn't 'just' pollute the night sky for EVERY SINGLE HUMAN (8 Billion people) it can also poisen our atmosphere when they re-enter and burn up.
if the incumbent(s) don't invest in infrastructure (which can actually be cheap) and start losing customers at 3mb to starlink, they can justify the expenditure.
But you're also showing a lot of bias and ignorance towards Africa and India and their financial means.
In my country today the people who use it the most are in northern cities that don't even have roads going to them.
I've had to reset the router 3 or 4 times in two years. I don't suffer outages even in thunderstorms.
It may be slow compared to fiber or something, but it's the fastest steam game downloads I've ever had personally (no big city life).
But reliability has been almost 100%
Many in Canada have no broadband options. My gf has this because otherwise, no internet access. Even cellphone reception is spotty where she is in rural Canada.
They can’t remotely repeat with local ISPs now that fiber is being rolled out.
Starlink: I have spent 4-5 days debugging cables because in some ketamine fueled manic episode, elon thought he could do better than RJ-45.
Local ISP: “We’ll be happy to run fiber and new ethernet through your existing network conduits, trench to the curb, and help bodge in active poe ethernet repeaters for runs that are too long.”
Edit: As for satellite light pollution, yeah, that sucks, but it’s something like 0.001% (if that) of the problems we have because Silicon Valley tech campuses stay lit up like Christmas trees all night. (And those are probably dwarfed by porch lights, street lights, etc.).
We’re in one of the darkest spots in the region and can pretty much always walk around without lights at night. Seriously, how bright do you need unoccupied spaces in the cities to be at night?
I live in a major metro with a half a dozen apartments constructed within a block of me while I've lived here and this is very much not the case. I call them, they say they'll be happy too and then they ghost me. Of course I also can't get Starlink.
Good chance Starlink (or any satellite-based internet for that matter) probably won't do well for you either tbh. Too many clients in too tight of an area all fighting for such a small slice of bandwidth and birds overhead.
My neighbor has starlink. Very weird.
At what ever unit economic price... That is not exactly massive market globally.
Awesome!
The backups are sadly becoming trickier, as fewer and fewer carry SSB radios or operate shore stations.
And yet we do have SSB, and also an Inreach as backups. You never know when Elon wakes up and decides he doesn't like sailors.
India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.
Now, 99% of these areas have electricity from the grid and analogue phone lines, so there's no reason why we couldn't also run fibre out to them, but for political reasons that's fairly unlikely to happen anytime soon.
[0]: https://assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/science/esd/eo/i...
You just said it yourself:
> Then, only months later, but after years of planning:
Starlink is no replacement for fiber, but even all across the EU and the US there are many places without fiber access.
Starlink has a Military arm called Starshield. If strategically important to US military and other militaries who are partners of the USA, that will be many millions/billions.
The first time I experienced it, I could not believe what was happening. I messaged my nerd friends with screenshots of https://speed.cloudflare.com/
Also, their required zero-friction UX is the shiznit.
Then, I fell asleep as I finally had theoretical time off.
I also use Starlink at my house in Italy. I'm in a decent sized town, but there is no fiber available. It has worked great, and more importantly took about 10 minutes to setup.
If you are churning plans anyway, and that's the speed you want, you should have starlink in the mix.
I fully expect the NBN wholesale to keep getting more expensive, while I expect satellite providers to get cheaper.
But then again, I never thought WiFi would take over wired network cables, but now even my desktop is connected with WiFi.
I also didn’t think cellular would be a replacement for copper or fiber, but now my modem for the apartment is 5G.
Both ended up being good enough, easier and cheaper (!)
There are many parts of the US that are very spread out, and thus running wires to every home is expensive without subsidies.
Musk isn't pushing Starlink for "upside" for the people or your "central EU", or Africa, or India, or the moon (let's just assume for the time being), Musk is hoping to saturate the market and remain the only player or only major player, and Musk wants that perceived dependency as a weapon, as a tool of control. I won't be shocked if Musk later lobbies for "ah, too many satellites up there already.. it'd be dangerous to send more… ". In fact I am counting on that.
> where they have <.1% the money
That's another part where, again, I'd agree with the last part of your comment. That country has so many people that just from one region if enough rich people (and sadly with the great divide there are way too many), if they need it, it will outspend too many countries from Europe single-handedly when it comes to Starlink or satellite Internet access.
Having said that, these things are not this black and white… but I've tried at least one part, or rather a fraction of one part I'd say.
Satellite Internet is one of the best things I'd say but I'd bet my spare kidney that not in the hands of Musk and Musk is trying hard that he/Starlink becomes the almost single player, first mover etc etc.
The specifics of an implementation of this are objectively absurd. Power requirements alone make this a non-starter. If that weren’t enough, it would be a declaration of war.
I'm sure they are experimenting with directed-energy ASAT technology though, because why wouldn't they?
We have a smaller number of ISPs due to the cost of submarine cables, and ISP prices were high due to profit-seeking. After Starlink came, the incumbent ISPs started to offer unlimited packages for the first time.
Also, Starlink is good as a backup connection for rural areas too.
Starlink isn't wildly expensive, nor is it unreliable or slow, but it loses the comparisons.
Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.
We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.
So far, Starlink is the win.
(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)
[1]https://ctcommunications.co.za/blog/south-africa-fiber-rollo...
[2]https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/us-pushes-nations-fa...
Having lived in Central America, imagine all the workers that are laying the internet cables going back at night and digging them up to sell. A government that, 50% of the time, won't actually build anything when given the funding, and usually can't get the funding anyways. Plus, in some parts, weather can result in internet going out and, given the government, staying out for quite a while.
It's a fair point that those in poorer places will have less money, but for instance, Mexico's Starlink pricing is pretty standard, it's like 50-100 EUR per month. They pay it anyways because they need it, and because it's the best option.
Starlink is a great decentralization for anyone living under corrupt dysfunctional governments, where they can't rely on that centralized system.
Except there's rich parts like Germany or Austria where internet infra is poorly run due to monopolistic telco capture and regulations keeping infra upgrades costs high, and so have slower and more expensive internet than Starlink in some areas. Poorer nations of EU often have faster internet than the richer ones so poverty is not a reason.
So Starlink is definitely still relevant. I've seen several small/medium businesses here in Austria that have a starlink terminal as a backup.
At where we are building our cabin, it’s infinitely cheaper than the alternatives lol.
So Starlink in flights seems like a perfect fit.
However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizens' data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.
Meanwhile, the free speech absolutist is focused on breaking up the ~5.4% of the globe, (EU) where Starlink is legal.
No, I disagree, maybe. The terrestrial Internet was literally designed to route around a nuclear war. That was its initial purpose, was it not?
Starlink needs ground stations, which are visible from orbit, and can be Shaheded... unless every Starlink terminal can also become a down-link.. which would be cool. However, then it all still relies on terrestrial fiber, right? Or, then that would be a Starlink-only WAN?
I don't want to call out a specific HN'er, but he is an HN hero. Years ago, in person, he told me he was bored. I tried to convince him to work for Starlink in Redmond, as what could be cooler than working on an entire new satellite laser-based Internet 2 backbone?! This was back when GMaps labeled that office "A Place of Worship."
I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable. My point here is that this is all very complicated, and while Starlink is the coolest tech in my lifetime, it still relies on terrestrial fiber in the end.
Please, help me work through this. I am likely very confused.
In which case, yes, SpaceX can also spin up new makeshift ground stations using off the shelf user terminals.
The current ground stations use specialized transceivers, but that's an efficiency improvement, not a fundamental limitation.
> I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable.
There's a lesson there: if you think you understand a bleeding edge emerging technology better than Musk does, think again. Think for a long time - maximum reasoning effort.
It's not impossible that you truly are, but it is unlikely.
In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.
Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.
Regarding latency, starlink satellites are low enough that it just isn't an issue.
He was a line tech and was fully aware that my slowness wasn't related to the line, and as he replaced all the lines to my house he enthusiastically recommended that I report the company to the FTC and demand a refund for the service degradation which wasn't meeting their advertised speeds. He actually gave me great advice for getting my case escalated and I was refunded for several months on my service.
They eventually got the node upgraded (I was once struggling to get 60Mbps down on the same line I'm getting >1G on today), and they're upgrading everything to DOCSIS 4.0 currently. I'm not trying to sell you on them, just saying they'll likely work their problems out in the long run. Fundamentally, coax line connection's floor is Starlink's ceiling as long as the nodes are able to keep up.
Though all these satellites might give fixed-location folks higher bandwidth, they could also service many more concurrent mobile customers. Connectivity would probably be better too because more satellites would be in view.
Also, don't underestimate the benefit of robust competition, even if you don't use starlink.
Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's immensely valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.
WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.
I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few very reliable low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.
Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.
Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.
So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.
Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.
Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.
Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.
Even starlink only makes sense if you ignore the absolutely immense capital investment in it. And they're probably hiding losses in the launch division considering it's losing money despite 80% of its business being launching starlink satellites (they blame starship but that was supposed to be funded by NASA).
They are paying for HLS.
You can't (according to old space companies) build a lunar lander and its launch system for under $10B
The S1 says they SpaceX is providing launch to Starlink at cost. ~$20MM per Tim Farrar and Lionett Pierre. Two industry analysts.
So is the nuclear reactor business but at least with that you gain independence from Iran whereas the satellite dog business gives you independence from the tyrant T-mobile or Verizon...
It's not even a choice because "skymuster" (the satellite option) can't even be considered internet. I remember him taking about getting 7 seconds of latency at one point. It's actually impressive how terrible it is.
Yes, boondoggle subsidies allow you to un-economically bring fiber to a subset of random places. I say this as the beneficiary of one such boondoggle. It doesn't scale well
Also just because FTTH exists does not mean it's reliable.
Which together have four times more people than the EU. Needs of the many outweigh, you know
Reddit is overflowing with threads where people are getting AT&T to give them 1gbps for $30-$35 per month. Comcast has repeatedly offered me 1gbps for ~$50/m for five years locked-in. I have no practical use for it.
The US has more broadband than it knows what to do with at this point. Somebody needs to figure out a mass public use for home 1gbps+.
This makes starlink tempting but for that I'd have to run cabling 50 plus. M to get the this where it has a clear view of the sky...
(Edit) A nearby small town is installing municipal fiber right now, which is great, but that's half an hour away.
So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.
So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.
(Citation: lived in Gurugram for a few years where I witnessed the same 100ft of sidewalk get rebricked and torn up monthly at least 20 times)
Or in cities where fiber gets blocked by cable providers bribing corrupt local officials.
you’ll have similar throughout and latency direct to your phone
but since this dream has been mired by delays, the starlink base station is still convenient
lots of people that would otherwise be stationary for reliable internet can go on the road
week long festival campsites have lots of people who aren’t taking any PTO that connect to their teams during the day time, while everyone else has nonexistent cellular service solely due to the overloaded networks
I would wager that most don’t unsubscribe to starlink in between time they just increase their mobility since its suddenly practical
speaking of PTO, if they are accumulating it but now travelling and never using it then its functionally a raise, all because they keep a starlink subscription
bigger satellites will bring that to everyone
I'd really love to hear it. Obviously you aren't obligated to provide an explanation but if someone else does it, I'm all ears.
> Also, those towers have no ROI because they only serve poor people
So why are they being built at all?
Starlink short circuits that process. It means newly minted middle income people my dad’s village in Bangladesh can get broadband now instead of in 2050. Replicate that story all over South and South East Asia and Africa.
I'd love to see the sky. Actually see it. Even the most remote places have light pollution, so it's impossible and likely will be going forward.
Maybe it's silly, but it makes me sad.
Alas, Not In My Low Earth Orbit.
And besides:
> Progress should be for all, not just the developed elite hanging out in tech circles.
That's... that's basically been the start of every generally available technology that exists today, to benefit of "all."
That's why we don't deny some access because we can't give everyone. Especially if the dispute is about method
It's important not only for individuals but even more for businesses. Despite cell phone company ads with handsome celebrities in the desert, cell phones actually do not work in many places. But people do need to live and work in those places.
What an argument.
Internet access is good.
You can call your relatives and check in. That has been huge. My relatives traveled the US in the 80s and could call home maybe once a week? Month? Now intl calls are free.
You don't need to check everything everyime like social media apps brainrot.
Just like once people didn't use electricity or vaccines or indoor plumbing. For all its minuses the internet makes these long trips 10x easier.
What it does do, for sure, is encourage people with no proper grounding in multi day off road adventuring to have a go and die through lack of prior experience and skills.
Whether you like it or not, Starlink being an easily-accesible internet service has likely saved dozens of noobs from certain death by offering emergency eSIM services, GPS navigation, or communciation systems that they wouldn't otherwise have. Can I prove it objectively? Likely not (outside of forum anecdotes), but I wasn't the first to make a claim with the burden to do so.
Sure - West Australian newspaper pretty much any week of the year - tourists come from all over the globe to visit the vast untamed outback, rent a 4x4, head out, and get into life threatening (sometimes life ending) trouble despite having a phone connection via either mobile towers or starlink. You know, no charge, no backup, no paper maps, no experience, etc.
Whether you like it or not, ePiRBs being an easily accesible service has actually saved dozens of noobs and experienced personal from certain death by offering emergency service alerting - Fact! (and no internet required)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...
You could do that, or you could do the 21st century thing, and put up enough satellites to have emergency-grade LTE coverage across the entire country. Compatible with any smartphone.
Like Starlink? Glad we agree.
> to have emergency-grade LTE coverage across the entire country.
Literally does not stop people dying and is not a substitute for knowing what you're doing in remote areas.
The claim was:
For all its minuses the internet makes these long trips 10x easier.
A big issue with yelling help! from a remote location rather than having the skill set to self rescue is that now third parties (rescuers) are putting themselves at risk and using their time and resources which may or may not be reimbursed.
May I remind you what world are we living in?
Denying emergency comms to people who didn't buy specialized hardware because "they should have prepared better" sounds like social darwinism to me.
Especially in an age when everyone has in their pocket a smartphone that's crammed full of advanced RF tech. Starlink has Direct to Cell on new sats, iPhones can use GEO satcom - what's your excuse?
All part of the adventure!
SpaceX spend a few billions on StarLink. But if you look at how much network operators have spent over the years on cables, base stations, etc. it's not all that much for a network that offers high bandwidth access all over the planet.
Adding 100K more satellites is going to make Star Link a direct competitor to many of these operators.
I’m writing this from a small island in a remote country using Starlink, and it’s very popular over here for people that want reliable internet.
One days work for one house. Multiply that across an entire nation, and work out how much diesel is burned for that. Where they live you can't get cable (not very common in the UK), but if it was available I guess there would have been another digging day in the 90s.
To know when a asteroid is on its way to us.
All that satellites make discovering them more difficult.
The new constellation will be physically closer, with much larger antennas and a much larger number of satellites with a much higher capacity per satellite. It will also use dedicated spectrum with no terrestrial interference. Coverage and speed will be improved tremendously.
Yes, the Gen3 Starlink Direct-to-Cell constellation won't replace cell towers in urban or suburban areas. But I believe it could replace them in rural areas.
I think you misunderstand the maths a bit. If the goal is high bandwidth, which requires high density, for specific, randomly distributed, parts of the earth, then, by the fundamental laws of gravity and orbits, you'll also have coverage over the rest of it, whether you like it or not.
The more you know.
Sure, it’s just “fear mongering” now, just like digital ID, digital currency, mass surveillance, and speech police were 30 or so years ago, but what happens when terrestrial cable internet gets too expensive and everyone’s subject to Elon’s space internet?
It’s basically the similar playbook as the cable/copper phone network giving way to the internet and wireless and … whoopsie … you also have a tracking and permanent surveillance device on you with no ability to keep thousands of corporations harvesting your body for data and information.
Case in point, are you aware that the whole 2+2=5 line was a deliberate falsification of a perfectly sound and even healthy statement that Orwell stole and perverted, i.e., 2 + 2 + the people's enthusiasm = 5 ???
Then, when you start finding out that the CIA, at the same time that it was conducting its MKUltra "experiments", was aggressively buying up all the rights to 1984 and then pushed them into schools and made the movies in close collaboration with Propagandawood; you have to at least start asking yourself extremely uncomfortable questions about whether 1984 was actually a warning or preconditioning, aka grooming.
As another person mentioned, radio crosses international boundaries, but it is regulated by regulating ground equipment and people and organizations on the ground. You'll see some countries on https://starlink.com/map that are greyed out because of regulatory issues... for example, some countries such as India heavily control the use of satellite comms
I think the hypothesis this leads to is that the "don't shine" techniques Starlink is using are working. I'm guessing the ones I see are either not Starlink or are Starlinks transitioning to their working orbit (they don't do full "dark mode" until they are in place.) If in place units shown I'd see a lot more.
So at least, maybe it won't all be gloom and doom. But if it is all gloom, at least it will have little sparkles floating around it.
Equally sucks for radio astronomy where the bloody things leak into spectrums they (Starlink) pinky promised to keep clean. And successive generations have worsened the problem, again despite promises to improve.
Yes they do talk about working to avoid causing interference.
That's been ongoing since before the first Starlink went up and has been ongoing as later generations haven't improved.
Second-Generation Starlink Satellites Leak 30 Times More Radio Interference, Threatening Astronomical Observations https://www.astron.nl/starlink-satellites/
Observations with the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope last year showed that first generation Starlink satellites emit unintended radio waves that can hinder astronomical observations. New observations with the LOFAR radio telescope, the biggest radio telescope on Earth observing at low frequencies, have shown that the second generation ’V2-mini’ Starlink satellites emit up to 32 times brighter unintended radio waves than satellites from the previous generation, potentially blinding radio telescopes and crippling vital research of the Universe.
~ https://www.space.com/astronomy/scientists-analyze-76-millio...
and several other papers over the past half decade.
It's old news that they leak, and old news that F-all gets done about it.
Back to you.
Sounds like not transmitting but just electronics existing in space.
This is directly the opposite of the implication of using Ku/Ka bands they shouldn’t have (which is what the agreements were with astronomy groups - aka “pinky promise”).
> Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong.
Might be time to make global regulations on spectrum usage in space? That could take a while.
There are many past examples of companies "not violating current regulations" despite leaking toxins and other now recognised violations of the commons.
But sure, the FCC might take it seriously.
The night sky has, until recently.
And?
* https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Like travel less, spend less on technology
You're part of the problem. It's not just you but it is you too.
So what I will tell my grandchildren is "The old Geezer Americans are fucking losers who fucked you over before you were born. You don't owe them any respect."
The night sky will be unaffected by satellites for the foreseeable future.
eg: Scientists analyze 76 million radio telescope images, find Starlink satellite interference 'where no signals are supposed to be present' (2025)
~ https://www.space.com/astronomy/scientists-analyze-76-millio...
and the topic is Starlink (and other sat constellations) and their impact on the sky (visible and non visible).
"Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?"
100k... how much can we keep putting up and let keep falling around the world? Multiple other companies and countries want to do the same as SpaceX.
Or were you not responding to the argument that avoiding pollution is typical degrowth talk?
Which requires a massive jump in labor productivity, mind. But if the optimistic takes on AI are right, such a thing is not impossible.
Abundance, friends. Nothing stops us.
Anchorage metro is ~15/sq. mile; Yuma, AZ is ~36. The Nashville metro is ~250.
Also, Starlink satellites spend ~70% of their time over the ocean. This will impact the utilization ratio of their gear and force them to launch still more satellites.
- Having slowly-increasing pressure on those often-monopoly broadband/fiber carriers because people have the option to swap to Starlink, adds competitive pressure for them to improve their service, reduce prices, etc
- The remaining 20% of the population that lives on the 60-80%+ of the land who currently have terrible options, but fit well within the density restrictions of current-gen Starlink satelites, suddenly have options
Musk has acknowledged withholding Starlink Service to thwart Ukrainian attack on Russia. Musk had conversations with a Russian official that led him to worry that an attack on Crimea could spiral into a nuclear conflict, so he made the decision to thwart Ukraine.
Right or not, such decisions should be made by elected representatives, not an eccentric trillionaire.
I am rooting for Blue Origin's Terawave: https://www.blueorigin.com/terawave
And variable, no less due to the high differential speed of the satellites. And the signal conditioning is much more involved than on the ground.
Those numbers are fudged of course, I don't remember exactly how long ago or from what to what I was upgrading. My point is that we've always been having people say you don't need faster internet. And yet, I still want, and use, faster internet. 200mbs I would consider fine. But I'd still feel the difference at 500mbs or 1gbs.
I remember watching hours pass uploading files on my 200 mbit. Still take time but much faster with gigabit (measured at 940 bmit, so not the full 1gbit)
At the same time, I do kind of want more bandwidth just so I can download massive files like model weights quickly, host a web service out of my own house, seed torrents, etc. What might cryptocurrency look like if typical residential internet speeds were measured in gb/s? Perhaps bitcoin might be capable of more than 7 tps!
But to be fair, I am a nobody.
Basically I would hate to see HN become Reddit.
"A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde":
https://theins.press/en/inv/294635
Basically Russia and China are collaborating in taking down Starlink. Leaked documents showing the plans.
They don't mention social media opinion shaping, but then again the leaked documents are from 2023.
I don’t think it’s wise to pollute all of low earth orbit with Musk’s satellites, that area belongs to all of us collectively.
I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.
I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.
i just read somewhere about spacex slowly destroying our dark night skies due to their satellite constellations. Thoughts?
Why do we think the human made world is out of our control? Learned helplessness? We could stop this. We do not need Satrlink.
Starlink will fail. And this will be more likely the more satellites they put up[1][2]. Or the more wars we get in. It will not be hard to cause a major destruction of all Starlink satellites [3].
[1] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/ [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock [3] https://gizmodo.com/russia-is-developing-orbiting-clouds-of-...
Is it really just too hard to put enough satellites in orbit to be competitive with Starlink?
If that understanding is correct it means the addressable market is countryside and transportation (planes/ships/RV). Which necessarily makes starlink at most a fairly modest size ISP in terms of valuation?
starlink are too low to cause kessler syndrome... but his starmind might
I wonder it's possible for Starlink to attach small telescopes on each of these satellites, and if so, if this could lead to a massive PR win for them and a science win for humanity, while at the same time helping to combat any genuine concerns from the public about Starlink harming astronomy. Just an idea (again I don't know if it's possible).
You'd need micro-meter alignment accuracy across the constellation for optical observation. For radio observation it might be possible - but I'm not sure if it would be useful.
Launching complimentary ordinary space-telescopes would also be good PR.
I wonder what the negativists will say about Reflect Orbital, which uses their Eärendil space mirror to light the world.
"University of Surrey is developing Vantablack as a coating for satellites in earth orbit, to reduce encroachment upon ground-based optical astronomy."
I’ve seen it in the Canadian Arctic, remote Australia, right around Africa.
Before starlink these places had dialup, or nothing.
How did we collectively accept that it's ok that a private company can forever change how our sky looks like (especially at night) for the generations to come?
This is so dystopian but it seems nobody cares. The most important thing is to have fast internet to watch cool AI-generated videos.
So depressing.
If I were to ask my relevant government regulator if I were allowed to burn the equivalent of a few electric cars every day without capturing/scrubbing the pollution they would laugh me out of the room.
But ”in space” nobody can hold you accountable, so burning an order of magnitude more like this is somehow on the table.
That's less than maintenance opex for mobile networks operators in the US alone.
In rural areas you can put up isolated 5G towers that have their own dish connection to starlink, no need to string a line to the towers anymore...
Competition is going to be grand!
But at the same time I think the low-earth-orbit is pretty nice in terms of latentcy, it's a pretty innovative approach.
I just don't get the idea behind AI datacenter sattelites and moving all this non-comms equipment up in space.
Your experience doesn't match most of the world.
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:57vlzz2...
It’s frustrating because I often come to HN for the smart contrarian takes. But now I have to search really hard to find the opposite.
There’s a lot of Elon haters here;
Anything related to Elon will always have the dumbest comment section.
You know it’s dumb when they say things like “it’s not needed. We already have this. i don’t see the point in this new tech” .
Elon really needs to drop some cash on Iain Bank’s family, if he’s going to keep stealing ideas/names for his empire.
Are there additional terrestrial signal propagation modes that could solve for the same needs as satellite data?
- dollars/gigabit/time
- dollars/bits/distance/time
Win-win-win?
I guess some things do not scale. The only thing that humans are good producing, is garbage.
But that would be a mistake of course. Low earth orbit is three dimensional. Star Link uses several altitude bands of about 20-30km each. It's 330-360km for the v3 satellites. The volume of that is about 17 billion cubic kilometers. About 13x the volume of all the water in the oceans. Accidental collisions are not going to be a frequent thing. These things are going to be many kilometers apart.
This is not a spatial problem. It's an intersectionality problem.
make them pre-pay a multi-trillion cleanup and cancer fund for all the toxic waste, not just the launches but pollution burning up in the atmosphere
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
EDT: I should have clarified I'm not only talking about incumbent satellite companies because people are replying about the launch volume. Think about pollution from oil companies and coal plants and consider how that compares to an aerospace company. How much have polluting companies been fined relative to multiple trillions of dollars?
Unrealistic, I know, but one can dream.
You are clearly not grasping the magnitude change in how many satellites we used to launch vs how many we are launching nowadays.
In 2026, we are putting 10x as many objects in space as we did just 8 years ago, with Starlink being the bulk of it: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-....
Starlink has 12.5k satellites in space and looking to ramp up massively, the biggest "multi-decade incumbent", oneweb, has 5% as many, about 600.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
"Elon Musk's company has now lofted more spacecraft than the rest of humanity combined — and its lead is likely to grow over the coming months and years."
(And most of the other providers don't plan for theirs to burn up within a few years. Giant disposable LEO constellations are new.)
no more, it has to end immediately
they aren't just silo-ing their wealth, they are leveraging against societies, funding far-right violent politics against society
even the evil Koch-brothers have cancer wings in hospitals around the country, Musk doesn't give a dime to charity, just his own foundation which he controls to only do what he wants to manipulate
pre-pay costs to society before damaging society
I just don't understand why, killing one person is murder, but killing hundreds over many years is, "just the cost of doing business."
It has not been a major problem so far because in its entire history humanity has only launched around 35000 rockets that have reached the stratosphere. Ramp that rate up significantly and it comes something we serious need to worry about.
(That's not to say that space debris reentering the atmosphere isn't bad. It also unfortunately deposits various things in the upper atmosphere that we really do not want to put there).
https://research.noaa.gov/noaa-scientists-link-exotic-metal-...
> Niobium and hafnium do not occur as free elements in nature, but are refined from mineral ores. They are used in semiconductors and superalloys.
> In addition to these two unusual elements, a significant number of particles contained copper, lithium and aluminum at concentrations far exceeding the abundance found in meteorics, or ‘space dust.’ “The combination of aluminum and copper, plus niobium and hafnium, which are used in heat-resistant, high-performance alloys, pointed us to the aerospace industry,’’ Murphy said.
investors provide infinite capital to nonsense projects so that the showman can create an endless show that will attract new nonsense capital.
sorry but already in rural morocco they have 200 mbit internet for 20 bucks a month. Yes there are some 6 wheeled vehicles roaming the planet that might really benefit from these 100k satellites. but for 99.9% of everyone else? we're good!
In a short time, Starlink proved to be that disruptive "invention" that changed everything. There are already millions of users. Nobody is forced to use Starlink. Yet here we are.
Whether there are investors or not, a positive cashflow and the millions of users prove that Starlink is not just valid to our society at large, but wildly so. My opinion is that it is almost as disruptive as cell phones when they became affordable.
Current number of paid subscriptions: 12 million +. So, actual users is many times that, if subscribers generally represent multiple users per account. Think "Household". And then, if one extrapolates users under institutional, municipal, state or military, the numbers are astronomically increased. Just, individuals walking around inside a Dollar General store...
Well Starlink has 12 million subscribers, which is already more than 0.1% of the population, so clearly you are incorrect that 99.9% of people don't want it...
And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless.
I too plan on increasing my revenue 100-fold by 2030.
First scalable launch system and scaled LEO constellation are more than promises.
You can certainly have a problem with Elon Musk, but the people who have invested money with him over the years have done quite well for themselves.
Must be the most unsustainable way to provide internet
My provider took 3 years from the signing for fibre to the actual delivery. But I still had internet before. Worse but internet.
If SpaceX stops, internet is pretty quickly gone.
And it seems SpaceX is its own best customer when they need to put up and replace so many satellites.
I wonder what spacex will be worth when launching satellites is impossible for a couple hundred years.
starlink satellites are in low orbits and will deorbit in a few years at most if bricked; to stay in orbit, they use ion thrusters to counter drag from the very uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.
https://ai-solutions.com/newsroom/why-starlink-is-lowering-s...
Orbits are about speed. Two things colliding cannot have debris coming out at a faster velocity than either of them.
1. Orbiting objects never try to avoid each other.
2. They're in high enough orbits that atmospheric drag is not a significant factor such that debris can last decades or centuries.
Starlink fails both as they constantly maneuver and they're in low orbits that are constantly cleaned by the atmosphere.
And I'd add that "kessler syndrome" is actually a statistical process, not a rapid sudden cascade of satellites crashing into each other. It takes years to decades for it to actually "happen". It's not something that can be caused by military action either.
It is just pearl clutching by those too afraid of modern life. Gravity wasn’t a documentary.
And overall, today's space powers are much more careful about not making messes in orbit.
let's see how well the freeways work once we stop cleaning up after the accidents.
Starlink's target market is limited. It is very good for ships, remote area, but not necessary in cities where most people live.
I am not sure whether the launch and maintenance cost of another 100k satellites is necessary for such a limited market, unless the cost of launch (Starship) and the satellites themselves drops greatly.
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Connectivity_and_Secure_Com...