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I think it might be comparable. It's really hard to estimate since we don't know their satellite costs, but $100 million per satellite (launched) is probably a
by gibybo 10y ago
I think it might be comparable.
It's really hard to estimate since we don't know their satellite costs, but $100 million per satellite (launched) is probably a good starting point. That ends up being $13k capital cost per customer. If they can borrow capital at 5% or less, that works out to ~$55/month.
But if they succeed with reusable rockets (and it sure looks like they will), they can probably drop the launch cost from $60m to $10m in the near term. If we assume the satellite still costs $40m, that still cuts the total cost in half to ~$27/month @ 5%. Maybe they can mass produce these satellites and get them to $10-20m each, which would reduce it to more like $15/month.
Again all these numbers are pretty rough/best case scenarios, but even if we multiply them by 10 we could be looking at 1 gbps connections for $150-500/month. That could be cheaper than fiber infrastructure in a lot of places and still immensely useful in applications where fiber isn't possible (in a car, plane, or boat). That's also assuming 1 TB/customer. In many cases you may just buy the bandwidth in smaller increments at $1-10/gigabyte which is a few orders of magnitude cheaper than current satellite internet and comparable with LTE cell coverage.
- Symmetry 10y agoThey're only going for 51 orbital planes and it's fairly simple to spread out many satellites from a single launch if they're in the same orbital plane. And a Falcon 9 can carry 20,000 kg to orbit whereas each satellite is pretty light. Some people on /r/spacex calculated that the binding constraint is actually the volume of the Falcon 9 payload fairing and they'll be able to launch 20-25 satellites at a go. And I would expect that mass produced satellites to be far cheaper on the margin than bespoke ones. All of which is to say that it's probably more like $10 million per satellite launched.