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1.5 million subscribers, $150 per month, 4400 satellites, 5 year lifetime, that makes pretty much 3 million dollar for building, launching and operating one of

1.5 million subscribers, $150 per month, 4400 satellites, 5 year lifetime, that makes pretty much 3 million dollar for building, launching and operating one of the satellites. That seems not much.

HPsquared 3y ago
They do send up 50-60 of them per launch, there are big economies of scale.
- danbruc 3y ago
  Buying a launch used to cost around 60 million or so, that would still leave you with only 2 million dollar to build and operate one satellite. The costs to SpaceX are certainly lower, especially for reused ones, but still makes me wonder how cheap the satellites are.
  - ericpauley 3y ago
    Allegedly[1] the satellites themselves are quite cheap. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/qurjn7/cost_to_build_starlink_satellites/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/qurjn7/cost_to_bu...
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    The cost of the sats on a launch is about the same cost as the launch itself I suspect. Probably about 20-25 million for each.
panick21_ 3y ago
I mean its still growing, not limited to 1.5 million people, and some of them also pay more then $150 per month. Ships, planes and the military. If we assume cost of launch being 20-30million $ per Falcon 9 and an avg of 30-60 sats per launch. Launch is maybe 1 million per sat. Earlier Starlink 1 sats were likely less, the Starlink 2 might be higher. Production 1 million per sat doesn't seem impossible given the vertical integration and large production numbers. Life time operation cost are likely below 1million given how few people SpaceX actually has to manage the whole fleet. The economics will look much better once Starship is operational. If you can cut the cost of launch by 10x. SpaceX is also doing a lot on the sat front. For example, switching from Kyropton to Argon. Next generation processors and so on. SpaceX has set it up in way where their cost will continue to come down and their revenue will continue to grow as they sign up more people. And they have many more years before the competition Amazon will come online. So I think this is a pretty good business for SpaceX. Building up a sales, distribution, regulation around the globe is a challenge but worth doing. Unlike Amazon they wont have such a structure already in place.
- danbruc 3y ago
  But they also want to increase the number of satellites three times, maybe 10 times, that will lower the budget per satellite proportionally. And how many more subscribers can they realistically get? They are not only competing with other satellite services, they are also competing with copper, fiber and cellular networks in many cases.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    I think there are way more subscribers they can get. In terms of the largest industries, shipping and planes they are only at the very beginning of their role out. There are also currently regions that are over capacity where they can sign up more people as soon as they have more sats. In terms of geography they still have a huge amount of capacity in lots of places. These are currently hard to connect because of the requirement for ground stations. Once they have deployed a whole layer all with the laser capable sats they will have a much easier time to expand into truly remote regions. There are also major use cases like using this for other government. Japan might very well use it for example. And other US allies might well adopt it too. That's a lot of money. It might even get NATO adoption. So in my mind there is a huge amount of additional potential revenue for this system. Scaling up production of sats, terminals, ground stations and rocket all at the same time is a pretty monumental task. The first version, Starlink 1, Ground Station and Falcon 9 was more of a proving ground that can break even in cash flow terms. Starlink 2+, Lasers, Starship is really where they will really start to make serious money. SpaceX is basically creating global infrastructure and they are doing it mostly vertically integrated. It shouldn't really even be possible for one company to build something like this.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    They can and likely will get many millions, perhaps tens of millions of subscribers. This is a build out. Once the build out is complete, it'll be maintenance at lower costs. Starship launching v2 and v3 sats with increased capacity and ever increasing value as a second internet backbone will assure they have more than enough business to keep this all going -- probably better and longer than Comcast can keep it's tens of millions of cable internet users.
jccooper 3y ago
It's not, but SpaceX is very aggressive on cost control (it probably costs them less than $3M ea bird right now, which is amazing for space stuff, and the cost/capacity is only going to get better) and more importantly there's a lot of headroom for growth in the subscriber base.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  Less than $500K per sat (well, at least the v1 sats). I suspect their goal is about half that and then maintaining that cost but increasing capacity as the tech marches forward on commodification and miniaturization.
deleted 3y ago
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the_duke 3y ago
Their satellites are sort of mass produced and really cheap compared to regular sats. The remember something like 250k per sat.

1.5 million subscribers, $150 per month, 4400 satellites, 5 year lifetime, that makes pretty much 3 million dollar for building, launching and operating one of the satellites. That seems not much.

HPsquared 3y ago

They do send up 50-60 of them per launch, there are big economies of scale.

danbruc 3y ago
Buying a launch used to cost around 60 million or so, that would still leave you with only 2 million dollar to build and operate one satellite. The costs to SpaceX are certainly lower, especially for reused ones, but still makes me wonder how cheap the satellites are.
- ericpauley 3y ago
  Allegedly[1] the satellites themselves are quite cheap. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/qurjn7/cost_to_build_starlink_satellites/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/qurjn7/cost_to_bu...
- asadotzler 3y ago
  The cost of the sats on a launch is about the same cost as the launch itself I suspect. Probably about 20-25 million for each.

panick21_ 3y ago

I mean its still growing, not limited to 1.5 million people, and some of them also pay more then $150 per month. Ships, planes and the military. If we assume cost of launch being 20-30million $ per Falcon 9 and an avg of 30-60 sats per launch. Launch is maybe 1 million per sat. Earlier Starlink 1 sats were likely less, the Starlink 2 might be higher. Production 1 million per sat doesn't seem impossible given the vertical integration and large production numbers. Life time operation cost are likely below 1million given how few people SpaceX actually has to manage the whole fleet. The economics will look much better once Starship is operational. If you can cut the cost of launch by 10x. SpaceX is also doing a lot on the sat front. For example, switching from Kyropton to Argon. Next generation processors and so on. SpaceX has set it up in way where their cost will continue to come down and their revenue will continue to grow as they sign up more people. And they have many more years before the competition Amazon will come online. So I think this is a pretty good business for SpaceX. Building up a sales, distribution, regulation around the globe is a challenge but worth doing. Unlike Amazon they wont have such a structure already in place.

danbruc 3y ago
But they also want to increase the number of satellites three times, maybe 10 times, that will lower the budget per satellite proportionally. And how many more subscribers can they realistically get? They are not only competing with other satellite services, they are also competing with copper, fiber and cellular networks in many cases.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  I think there are way more subscribers they can get. In terms of the largest industries, shipping and planes they are only at the very beginning of their role out. There are also currently regions that are over capacity where they can sign up more people as soon as they have more sats. In terms of geography they still have a huge amount of capacity in lots of places. These are currently hard to connect because of the requirement for ground stations. Once they have deployed a whole layer all with the laser capable sats they will have a much easier time to expand into truly remote regions. There are also major use cases like using this for other government. Japan might very well use it for example. And other US allies might well adopt it too. That's a lot of money. It might even get NATO adoption. So in my mind there is a huge amount of additional potential revenue for this system. Scaling up production of sats, terminals, ground stations and rocket all at the same time is a pretty monumental task. The first version, Starlink 1, Ground Station and Falcon 9 was more of a proving ground that can break even in cash flow terms. Starlink 2+, Lasers, Starship is really where they will really start to make serious money. SpaceX is basically creating global infrastructure and they are doing it mostly vertically integrated. It shouldn't really even be possible for one company to build something like this.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  They can and likely will get many millions, perhaps tens of millions of subscribers. This is a build out. Once the build out is complete, it'll be maintenance at lower costs. Starship launching v2 and v3 sats with increased capacity and ever increasing value as a second internet backbone will assure they have more than enough business to keep this all going -- probably better and longer than Comcast can keep it's tens of millions of cable internet users.

jccooper 3y ago

It's not, but SpaceX is very aggressive on cost control (it probably costs them less than $3M ea bird right now, which is amazing for space stuff, and the cost/capacity is only going to get better) and more importantly there's a lot of headroom for growth in the subscriber base.

asadotzler 3y ago
Less than $500K per sat (well, at least the v1 sats). I suspect their goal is about half that and then maintaining that cost but increasing capacity as the tech marches forward on commodification and miniaturization.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

the_duke 3y ago

Their satellites are sort of mass produced and really cheap compared to regular sats. The remember something like 250k per sat.