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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
by 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.