6 ms·

SpaceX wins first Pentagon contract for Starshield

54 points by perihelions 3y ago

saaspirant 3y ago
[flagged]
chasd00 3y ago
So they’re just creating a vlan named “starshield” and then depositing $70M in the checking account? Must be nice. ;)
- bob1029 3y ago
  The announcement article linked within discusses imaging and other hosted payloads.
  - Ajedi32 3y ago
    At only $70M it's doubtful this specific contract includes any dedicated satellites. A single Falcon 9 launch is close to that price.
    - nordsieck 3y ago
      > At only $70M it's doubtful this specific contract includes any dedicated satellites. A single Falcon 9 launch is close to that price. While I broadly agree with you, if SpaceX is selling a service and not a launch, I think the proper number is the internal cost to launch which probably sits around $20m-$25m.
      - agloe_dreams 3y ago
        You are about right on cost. Elon stated that a full reuse of a first stage + new second stage is about $15m, adding in the Elon-number correction and 20-25 feels right.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        IIRC the $15m is the per-unit costs (booster refurb, second stage production), the rest are the costs that can be divided up by increasing flight rate (launch pad operations, staff and other infrastructure).
      - IvanMilatForPM 3y ago
        SpaceX has a very large fixed cost base, wages and facilities mostly, and an infinitesimally small variable cost for a rocket launch. Things like RP-1 fuel, catering, aluminum coil, actuators, valves, boards, wiring, connectors, airfares, hotels, taxis, etc. The upper stage construction line and launch facilities are fully amortized by now and from the outside seem like highly efficient operations. Given that their launch cadence has doubled since people started throwing around $25m estimates and fairing and first stage inspection and reuse is now routine it's probably a bit lower.
    - ooterness 3y ago
      Why would this need a dedicated launch? Starlink satellites launch in a stack of up to sixty at a time. Starshield probably just swaps one or two of these for an alternate configuration (i.e., same bus, different payload).
- dotnet00 3y ago
  IIRC one big feature of Starshield (compared to the source of much of the drama and false reporting regarding Starlink in Ukraine) is that the buyer (ie the DoD) controls the cells it's active in.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > So they’re just creating a vlan named “starshield” and then depositing $70M in the checking account? It's always difficult to price products and services with high fixed costs and low marginal costs (like bridges). The best estimates I've seen are that Starlink costs $1B+ to operate. It sounds like they're finally profitable (at least on an ongoing basis); we'll see what happens when Kuiper finally comes online.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    I'd say Kuiper is still firmly an "if" right now considering how long they have left to put up the constellation and the cost+potential flight rate of Vulcan and New Glenn. They have a much higher bar to clear in terms of costs before they can be profitable, and especially with the lawsuit about that, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they decide to cut their losses and settle for a smaller constellation and restricted user base like OneWeb.
    - nordsieck 3y ago
      > I'd say Kuiper is still firmly an "if" right now considering how long they have left to put up the constellation and the cost+potential flight rate of Vulcan and New Glenn. I think there is pretty broad consensus that they won't make their deadline. But I also see pretty broad consensus that, if they make a strong effort, that a variance is pretty easy to get. I'm not really in the industry, so I don't really know what to believe. > They have a much higher bar to clear in terms of costs before they can be profitable, and especially with the lawsuit about that, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they decide to cut their losses and settle for a smaller constellation and restricted user base like OneWeb. I always saw Kuiper as a strategic move by Amazon to attack SpaceX. IMO, they'd probably scrap the whole thing rather than settle for a OneWeb sized constellation. More broadly, I think satellite internet is a natural monopoly business. There's no reason for customers to go with the 2nd best service[1], so even though it costs more to launch the best constellation, it ends up being a better investment. Because of this, I don't really see OneWeb or Telesat's upcoming Lightning LEO constellation surviving longterm. There's just no good reason for their existing customers to be loyal to them. And the cost to maintain their constellations will be ongoing. --- 1. Obviously globally available bandwidth affects this, so there's probably room in the market right now for multiple providers. But as companies continue to invest revenue into improving their capacity, those conditions may go away. At which point, my original point stands.
- thatsagreatcomm 3y ago
  I think creating then launching thousands of satellites cost-effectively is pretty hard
pupppet 3y ago
Anything preventing Musk from building these for other countries?
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  The fact that he's domiciled (and seems to enjoy his life) in the US, and that the government has the ability to take everything you own and lock you up if they so decide. Probably.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    The $5 wrench can be a pretty big motivator
  - pohl 3y ago
    That works so long as the government still has more power than a gang of bajillionaires with similar interests. Does it? Seems like we're near a tipping point in that regard, if we haven't already crossed it.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      Yes, it does. The government, indirectly or directly can indefinitely owe any entity money, or even print money on demand if really necessary and ultimately, Musk is just a person.
    - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
      I think US defense blob is actually the entity at the top of the entire global power food chain. Probably the actual last entity you'd want to meaningfully fuck with.
    - lm28469 3y ago
      > Seems like we're near a tipping point in that regard, if we haven't already crossed it. Sure... As long as the army is following the government it's a non-issue. Billionaires are political/industrial/&c. power if you want but they're one "go get them" order away from disappearing forever. It just so happens that for now their goals are somewhat aligned with the gov's. And even if the gov falls a lot of US three letters agencies are already semi or fully autonomous, and from the few things we know about them they don't fuck around. Corruption exists, probably on a large scale, but it's not a single coordinated effort, it's more like an army of rats fighting for the crumbs. If even Mexico didn't completely fold against their drug cartels it's not the soy boy Musk & lizard man Zuck dream team who'll destroy the USA
xoa 3y ago
I'll be somewhat curious to see exactly what this entails, at least to the extent we ever get any details. One aspect could be another facet of Starlink that I think still hasn't gotten enough appreciation: the possibilities opened up by a heterozygous orbital mesh network. The orbital mesh of course is primarily first order about making service available from LEO worldwide, including areas too far from any possible ground station to allow a simple bent pipe. Second order is more redundancy and load balancing, lower latency for long enough distances vs terrestrial networks, etc, which has all gotten discussed. But the physical nature of it means that once tech and protocols are there for the laser mesh, that acts as a standardized interface that any satellite could "plug into". They're of course needed to do have this in mind from the start due to how fast they've been iterating, with laser v0.9/1.5/mini-2.0 and full 2.0 once Starship is going sats all needing to talk to each other. But that means SpaceX could also easily mix in some percentage of Starlink sats that do other stuff entirely. They could have optical or radio bridge sats facing "up" for example, so that other higher satellites, space stations, probes and so on can talk directly into Starlink from medium/high Earth orbit or beyond. That could be an alternative to the Deep Space Network that could be quite attractive particularly as the DSN has been getting seriously overloaded [0]. Which also means it could be an important thing for SpaceX in driving cadence for Starship, all the stuff they want to launch and open up with it will need a lot more bandwidth back to Earth. But they could also potentially have dedicated ground facing sats for a customer like the US DOD. Just spitballing, but perhaps ones that use broadcast frequencies forbidden to commercial providers. Or even ground/space optical (at least for aircraft, clouds would be an issue below), which would offer tens of gigabits to terabits of bandwidth and be unjammable. That would offer a range/reliability boost in a remote theater for the 1st Earth <> LEO leg of things, then plug right into the overall mesh for comms back to the US via the normal sats, so it'd be cheaper, lower latency and higher bandwidth then military trying to do their own completely physically separate thing. Distinct capability for less. ---- 0: "NASA officials sound alarm over future of the Deep Space Network" https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-mission-nearly-broke-the-deep-space-network/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-missio...
madspindel 3y ago
One step closer to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32839690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32839690
baq 3y ago
That this will happen was obvious in March 2022, the only unknown was price. Starlink has proven itself to be unjammable, resilient, low-latency, high-bandwidth, reliable, easy to setup and all that confirmed in a real kinetic war. Basically everything any Pentagon official could have dreamed of, for $70M? Probably the fastest check ever written there (yes yes it's just the beginning but you get the idea.)
- Gooblebrai 3y ago
  Do you mind to clarify what do you mean with "real kinetic war"?
  - baq 3y ago
    Whatever is going on in Ukraine for the past year and change. As opposed to trade wars or cyber warfare.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    Ukraine, this isn't a cold war — but a "real war" with munitions (kinetics) exchanged
  - pm90 3y ago
    Its a fancy term for a hot war in meatspace.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    A war where the bullets fly.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - waihtis 3y ago
    Yes, Elon has a secret laptop in his bedroom with backdoor access to the entire Starlink fleet of satellites. Or perhaps you should develop critical thinking skills and not read the "rocket man bad" takes on Elon.
TimMeade 3y ago
Interesting its per year. Elon did a tweet a few weeks ago that said it would be "owned" and "controlled" by the DOD. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1707149214701019392 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1707149214701019392
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Owned and controlled probably just refers to the DoD being allowed to do practically anything it wants with it and having the controls to enable/disable cells. So no restrictions like "don't mount the antennas to drones" and no need to request SpaceX to enable/disable cells.
koromak 3y ago
DOD must have plenty of assurance that Musk isn't a significant part of the equation. The dude brings so much risk with him.
- etimberg 3y ago
  Maybe this is the way they can nationalize spacex once Musk does his next stupid thing
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    This is such a weird obsession you guys have. Notice how the US government has never commented on any of his "stupid things" (with most of the Ukraine related ones turning out to be either lies or misleading reporting). Hell, US policy on that front has until extremely recently with the supply of ATACMS been fully in line with the restrictions placed on Starlink by SpaceX. The government is not going to nationalize SpaceX for such basic reasons. Defense contractors and other large companies regularly go against the government with much larger sums of money involved without any of this delusional thinking getting involved.

54 points by perihelions 3y ago

saaspirant 3y ago

[flagged]

chasd00 3y ago

So they’re just creating a vlan named “starshield” and then depositing $70M in the checking account? Must be nice. ;)

bob1029 3y ago
The announcement article linked within discusses imaging and other hosted payloads.
- Ajedi32 3y ago
  At only $70M it's doubtful this specific contract includes any dedicated satellites. A single Falcon 9 launch is close to that price.
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > At only $70M it's doubtful this specific contract includes any dedicated satellites. A single Falcon 9 launch is close to that price. While I broadly agree with you, if SpaceX is selling a service and not a launch, I think the proper number is the internal cost to launch which probably sits around $20m-$25m.
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      You are about right on cost. Elon stated that a full reuse of a first stage + new second stage is about $15m, adding in the Elon-number correction and 20-25 feels right.
      - dotnet00 3y ago
        IIRC the $15m is the per-unit costs (booster refurb, second stage production), the rest are the costs that can be divided up by increasing flight rate (launch pad operations, staff and other infrastructure).
    - IvanMilatForPM 3y ago
      SpaceX has a very large fixed cost base, wages and facilities mostly, and an infinitesimally small variable cost for a rocket launch. Things like RP-1 fuel, catering, aluminum coil, actuators, valves, boards, wiring, connectors, airfares, hotels, taxis, etc. The upper stage construction line and launch facilities are fully amortized by now and from the outside seem like highly efficient operations. Given that their launch cadence has doubled since people started throwing around $25m estimates and fairing and first stage inspection and reuse is now routine it's probably a bit lower.
  - ooterness 3y ago
    Why would this need a dedicated launch? Starlink satellites launch in a stack of up to sixty at a time. Starshield probably just swaps one or two of these for an alternate configuration (i.e., same bus, different payload).
dotnet00 3y ago
IIRC one big feature of Starshield (compared to the source of much of the drama and false reporting regarding Starlink in Ukraine) is that the buyer (ie the DoD) controls the cells it's active in.
nordsieck 3y ago
> So they’re just creating a vlan named “starshield” and then depositing $70M in the checking account? It's always difficult to price products and services with high fixed costs and low marginal costs (like bridges). The best estimates I've seen are that Starlink costs $1B+ to operate. It sounds like they're finally profitable (at least on an ongoing basis); we'll see what happens when Kuiper finally comes online.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I'd say Kuiper is still firmly an "if" right now considering how long they have left to put up the constellation and the cost+potential flight rate of Vulcan and New Glenn. They have a much higher bar to clear in terms of costs before they can be profitable, and especially with the lawsuit about that, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they decide to cut their losses and settle for a smaller constellation and restricted user base like OneWeb.
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > I'd say Kuiper is still firmly an "if" right now considering how long they have left to put up the constellation and the cost+potential flight rate of Vulcan and New Glenn. I think there is pretty broad consensus that they won't make their deadline. But I also see pretty broad consensus that, if they make a strong effort, that a variance is pretty easy to get. I'm not really in the industry, so I don't really know what to believe. > They have a much higher bar to clear in terms of costs before they can be profitable, and especially with the lawsuit about that, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they decide to cut their losses and settle for a smaller constellation and restricted user base like OneWeb. I always saw Kuiper as a strategic move by Amazon to attack SpaceX. IMO, they'd probably scrap the whole thing rather than settle for a OneWeb sized constellation. More broadly, I think satellite internet is a natural monopoly business. There's no reason for customers to go with the 2nd best service[1], so even though it costs more to launch the best constellation, it ends up being a better investment. Because of this, I don't really see OneWeb or Telesat's upcoming Lightning LEO constellation surviving longterm. There's just no good reason for their existing customers to be loyal to them. And the cost to maintain their constellations will be ongoing. --- 1. Obviously globally available bandwidth affects this, so there's probably room in the market right now for multiple providers. But as companies continue to invest revenue into improving their capacity, those conditions may go away. At which point, my original point stands.
thatsagreatcomm 3y ago
I think creating then launching thousands of satellites cost-effectively is pretty hard

pupppet 3y ago

Anything preventing Musk from building these for other countries?

itsoktocry 3y ago
The fact that he's domiciled (and seems to enjoy his life) in the US, and that the government has the ability to take everything you own and lock you up if they so decide. Probably.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  The $5 wrench can be a pretty big motivator
- pohl 3y ago
  That works so long as the government still has more power than a gang of bajillionaires with similar interests. Does it? Seems like we're near a tipping point in that regard, if we haven't already crossed it.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    Yes, it does. The government, indirectly or directly can indefinitely owe any entity money, or even print money on demand if really necessary and ultimately, Musk is just a person.
  - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
    I think US defense blob is actually the entity at the top of the entire global power food chain. Probably the actual last entity you'd want to meaningfully fuck with.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    > Seems like we're near a tipping point in that regard, if we haven't already crossed it. Sure... As long as the army is following the government it's a non-issue. Billionaires are political/industrial/&c. power if you want but they're one "go get them" order away from disappearing forever. It just so happens that for now their goals are somewhat aligned with the gov's. And even if the gov falls a lot of US three letters agencies are already semi or fully autonomous, and from the few things we know about them they don't fuck around. Corruption exists, probably on a large scale, but it's not a single coordinated effort, it's more like an army of rats fighting for the crumbs. If even Mexico didn't completely fold against their drug cartels it's not the soy boy Musk & lizard man Zuck dream team who'll destroy the USA

xoa 3y ago

I'll be somewhat curious to see exactly what this entails, at least to the extent we ever get any details. One aspect could be another facet of Starlink that I think still hasn't gotten enough appreciation: the possibilities opened up by a heterozygous orbital mesh network. The orbital mesh of course is primarily first order about making service available from LEO worldwide, including areas too far from any possible ground station to allow a simple bent pipe. Second order is more redundancy and load balancing, lower latency for long enough distances vs terrestrial networks, etc, which has all gotten discussed. But the physical nature of it means that once tech and protocols are there for the laser mesh, that acts as a standardized interface that any satellite could "plug into". They're of course needed to do have this in mind from the start due to how fast they've been iterating, with laser v0.9/1.5/mini-2.0 and full 2.0 once Starship is going sats all needing to talk to each other. But that means SpaceX could also easily mix in some percentage of Starlink sats that do other stuff entirely. They could have optical or radio bridge sats facing "up" for example, so that other higher satellites, space stations, probes and so on can talk directly into Starlink from medium/high Earth orbit or beyond. That could be an alternative to the Deep Space Network that could be quite attractive particularly as the DSN has been getting seriously overloaded [0]. Which also means it could be an important thing for SpaceX in driving cadence for Starship, all the stuff they want to launch and open up with it will need a lot more bandwidth back to Earth. But they could also potentially have dedicated ground facing sats for a customer like the US DOD. Just spitballing, but perhaps ones that use broadcast frequencies forbidden to commercial providers. Or even ground/space optical (at least for aircraft, clouds would be an issue below), which would offer tens of gigabits to terabits of bandwidth and be unjammable. That would offer a range/reliability boost in a remote theater for the 1st Earth <> LEO leg of things, then plug right into the overall mesh for comms back to the US via the normal sats, so it'd be cheaper, lower latency and higher bandwidth then military trying to do their own completely physically separate thing. Distinct capability for less. ---- 0: "NASA officials sound alarm over future of the Deep Space Network" https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-mission-nearly-broke-the-deep-space-network/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-missio...

madspindel 3y ago

One step closer to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32839690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32839690

baq 3y ago

That this will happen was obvious in March 2022, the only unknown was price. Starlink has proven itself to be unjammable, resilient, low-latency, high-bandwidth, reliable, easy to setup and all that confirmed in a real kinetic war. Basically everything any Pentagon official could have dreamed of, for $70M? Probably the fastest check ever written there (yes yes it's just the beginning but you get the idea.)

Gooblebrai 3y ago
Do you mind to clarify what do you mean with "real kinetic war"?
- baq 3y ago
  Whatever is going on in Ukraine for the past year and change. As opposed to trade wars or cyber warfare.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  Ukraine, this isn't a cold war — but a "real war" with munitions (kinetics) exchanged
- pm90 3y ago
  Its a fancy term for a hot war in meatspace.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  A war where the bullets fly.
candiddevmike 3y ago
[flagged]
- waihtis 3y ago
  Yes, Elon has a secret laptop in his bedroom with backdoor access to the entire Starlink fleet of satellites. Or perhaps you should develop critical thinking skills and not read the "rocket man bad" takes on Elon.

TimMeade 3y ago

Interesting its per year. Elon did a tweet a few weeks ago that said it would be "owned" and "controlled" by the DOD. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1707149214701019392 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1707149214701019392

dotnet00 3y ago
Owned and controlled probably just refers to the DoD being allowed to do practically anything it wants with it and having the controls to enable/disable cells. So no restrictions like "don't mount the antennas to drones" and no need to request SpaceX to enable/disable cells.

koromak 3y ago

DOD must have plenty of assurance that Musk isn't a significant part of the equation. The dude brings so much risk with him.

etimberg 3y ago
Maybe this is the way they can nationalize spacex once Musk does his next stupid thing
- dotnet00 3y ago
  This is such a weird obsession you guys have. Notice how the US government has never commented on any of his "stupid things" (with most of the Ukraine related ones turning out to be either lies or misleading reporting). Hell, US policy on that front has until extremely recently with the supply of ATACMS been fully in line with the restrictions placed on Starlink by SpaceX. The government is not going to nationalize SpaceX for such basic reasons. Defense contractors and other large companies regularly go against the government with much larger sums of money involved without any of this delusional thinking getting involved.