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SpaceX satellites have a designed lifespan of approximately 5 years. They'll sustain their launch pace just to keep up the constellation. There's no real vN+1 a

• adolph 2y ago
  > SpaceX satellites have a designed lifespan of approximately 5 years. I wasn't aware of that lifespan but I knew it was finite. Let's say 6k sats at 20/launch is 300 launches to refresh the fleet over 5*12 months makes for 5 launches a month [0]. If the first v1's were launched November of 2019 then they will drop out of orbit later this year. SpaceX started launching the v2 minis about 9 months ago. Wikipedia claims 300/Starship. Let's round down to 200 to account for Elon-time and maybe launching a mix of Starship and F9. That would bring the needed operational cadence down to .5/month [1]. Could a well capitalized competitor start at vN+1 or vN+2, build out while Starlink air-ground combination is stalled at vN due to encumbancy, and make progress in high margin geographies proven out by Starlink already? I think it could look like the cell market with a few major players that either get squeezed out or created during any technology refresh. Would it be more difficult because whatever that gets created is not a mutually supportive vertically integrated enterprise but fragmented? Sure. 0. 6000/20/5/12=5 1. 6000/200/5/12=.5