Musk Says Total Investments in Starlink To Reach $20-$30 Billion (reuters.com) 42
Elon Musk said on Tuesday that total investments in Starlink would reach between $5 billion and $10 billion before the satellite internet venture achieves positive cash flow. From a report: Over the lifetime of the project, total investments could run to $20-$30 billion, the Tesla CEO told the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "It's a lot, basically," Musk said in a video interview from California.
$20-$30 billion for global satellite internet (Score:5, Insightful)
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$15 Billion in replacement costs while providing service to China.
Re: $20-$30 billion for global satellite internet (Score:2)
If they would send my equipment, that would be a $100/mo toward the goal.
Got to love Musk and Bezo. (Score:3)
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Re:Got to love Musk and Bezo. (Score:5, Insightful)
So many billionaires in this world and only a few in America are really making a difference. Musk and Bezo have changed society, overall, for the better. Others just sit on their $ and manipulate politicians to get them to do the most for them, such as trying to fuck up these 2.
Some may, others have done a lot as well. Some we have heard of such as Buffet and Gates, others have done a lot but eschewed publicity, such as Chuck Feeney.
Sure they have extra money, but a lot of us do as well. How often do we forgo a new toy and instead give the money away? we may not have the impact of a billionaire; but can still make a difference in someone's life.
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Re: Got to love Musk and Bezo. (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid people do much more harm than good in society. Now please step into the harmless IQ test booth and relax.
If we start drawing arbitrary lines in society to decide who has more value, it never ends well.
Re:Got to love Musk and Bezo. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Got to love Musk and Bezo. (Score:2)
Musk is too.
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Others just sit on their $ and manipulate politicians to get them to do the most for them, such as trying to fuck up these 2.
Re: Got to love Musk and Bezo. (Score:2)
I've been driving a Tesla for a few years now. I'm pretty sure all that gas I haven't burned and all the emissions I haven't spewed out my tailpipe hasn't been a hallucination, lie, or con job.
I wish the same could be said of the crap posts you spew here.
Re:Got to love Musk and Bezo. (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny how many people out there love to criticize when it doesn't appear they've done a single significant thing on their own to change society for the better.
IMO, Musk is certainly a bit of a dreamer and prone to exaggerate both the scope and time-frame of his ideas. But he's out there building real companies to tackle large-scale challenges that don't necessarily have quick pay-backs. This is exactly the problem with most people motivated to start new businesses. Their focus is on turning a short-term profit and taking small, incremental steps to minimize any losses while building things up. That's great when you want to sell commodity goods that have been manufactured by others before, or when you just want to offer another alternative for an existing service. But that mentality will hold people back from taking the bigger risks required to launch big initiatives. Until recently, things like "space travel" were deemed too big and risky an undertaking for the private sector to accomplish. It was just assumed only government could handle it -- hence NASA. Now, we have at least 3 billionaires willing to take a stab at it. Does that mean they're going to have some funding intertwined with Federal government interests or initiatives? Well, yeah .... but that's predictable when you're first changing the paradigm of who can build rockets to go into space.
And as another Slashdotter posted already, Tesla has been a very viable company, producing real products since 2012. Musk may be more of a figurehead for Tesla vs the engineers he hired who really design the guts of the vehicles and developers who write the software code for them. But it still wouldn't exist if Musk didn't take an interest in making it happen. I think Starlink is going to be absolutely huge, too. (You can poke fun at Musk's "Boring Company" for being a failure or even a con job -- but again, it's kind of amazing he even had the time and energy to create it, with all the other things he's got going on. There's an article out there about a new type of brick he was able to create from the material they were digging up and removing when boring tunnels, too. It sounded to me like that could actually be a bigger deal than his tunnel digging business, if it was mass-marketed correctly.)
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im still waiting for the bit where he changed society. his best conjob of all is to have people think hes invented all these things
Does anyone believe Musk personally invented all of these things? I've never met anyone who believed that. He's a visionary CEO, not the guy designing and building the rockets / cars / satellites / solar panels / batteries / boring machines / whatever else. He's a CEO that's a little more deeply engaged with his engineers than most, but he's still just an executive, not the one doing the work.
As for changing society, I'd say he already has, at least once, arguably twice. Tesla has made EVs practical and p
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Oneweb are farked (Score:1)
How to keep costs down (Score:1)
The easiest and most effective way to keep costs down with space/satellite launches is to minimize launching cars into space. Each lb/kg launched can cost $10k or more. YMMV
Re:How to keep costs down (Score:4, Informative)
Costs have come down quite a bit. It's about $2500/kg to get to LEO on a Falcon 9, $1500 for a Falcon Heavy.
The Shuttle was more like $25,000/kg which is probably what you're thinking of, about $10k/lb.
Re: How to keep costs down (Score:2)
And the expectation for starship is that itâ(TM)ll only cost $10 per kg to LEO. Itâ(TM)s amazing what reusing the entire ship does for you.
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I dunno. I watched a clip about the new Fast and the Furious movie, and it sounds like all you need to launch a car into space is a couple of rockets and some street smarts. I don't see how that can cost much at all.
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Yes and no (Score:5, Interesting)
Global commercial satellite communications is $10-15 billion USD per year. It varies, last number I recall was $12B for 2016. It varies a lot more than you'd think. In-Flight entertainment, satellite phones, satellite internet, satellite residential TV, satellite video content (think movie theaters, TV stations, etc), telemetry from planes, telemetry from ships, telemetry from shipping containers (yep), telemetry from remote weather stations. Backup enterprise internet links. Dedicated VOIP links.
Mind, that is for existing business. I don't think Starlink will (or should) eat all of them. I do think Viasat and Hughesnet are done, and that's around $3B/yr. Residential customers are nice and pay the bills, but I highly expect Starlink to make massive profits off business, enterprise and government customers. I plan on buying 40+ terminals to replace my LTE secondary or tertiary internet. Enough that I am working with my vendors to ensure we go to yearly LTE backup internet contracts instead of normal 3 or 5 years contracts. Starlink is not viable at the moment for a lot of enterprise needs, but it easily could be in another couple of years. We'd probably pay a lot for a dedicated low latency link to APAC. A lot of other folks will as well.
I'm not overly fond of Musk, but it is a lot of solid enterprise networking potential. $20 or $30 billion is a rounding error. The United States alone has provided hundreds of billions to telco providers who often pocketed the money or skimped on their obligations to use said funding for installing more residential fiber. Mind, this was over decades, but the point still stands. $30B over X years could be easily funded solely with the already existing US broadband subsidy for rural internet, let alone other countries pitching in. Starlink got $900m this year alone from the US FCC.
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I highly expect Starlink to make massive profits off business, enterprise and government customers.
Only if they start to support static IP addresses so that one can run servers with globally routed addresses. My understanding is that that is not the case at the moment.
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I highly expect Starlink to make massive profits off business, enterprise and government customers.
Only if they start to support static IP addresses so that one can run servers with globally routed addresses. My understanding is that that is not the case at the moment.
Businesses have lots of Internet needs that don't require hosting servers.
Re:Yes and no (Score:4, Insightful)
If a server can be placed anywhere, in a VPS or hosted by any of the cloud service providers, it likely should be. If it absolutely must be in a location that can only be served by satellite internet, it probably doesn't require much bandwidth.
Of all the businesses I work with, none host any kind of on-site server that needs to be globally accessible and requires much bandwidth. Just VPN concentrators and security camera systems.
Viasat and Hughesnet... (Score:2)
... need to get their butts moving to compete.
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Starlink got $900m this year alone from the US FCC.
They did not. The $885.5 million FCC award to SpaceX is a subsidy to be delivered monthly over 10 years. And in an astonishing twist, there are actually performance requirements tied to it. SpaceX has to file paperwork showing improvements in coverage for specific areas. If they don't meet the requirements, they don't get the money.
The US government is incredibly slow to learn, but it does learn eventually.
Funny that is exactly the $ USsubsidy available (Score:1)
Sounds good to me... (Score:2)
SpaceX has persuaded the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to propose a rule change that would allow the company to compete for subsidies from the US government ($20.4 billion over ten years) to provide rural internet service.
If that is so, I will cheer - because unlike everyone ELSE that has taken subsidies to provide internet for poor rural areas, StarLink will actually have the effect of providing truly fast internet to ALL rural areas.
It would be great to see government money going to something
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Considering what Starlink [youtu.be] is doing vs the ancient technology the incumbents are using I can see why they need several billion.
Re:Sounds good to me... (Score:4, Informative)
I agree. I live in a rural area where good internet is hard to get for many people (mountainous, forested, low population density). While the majority of Americans live in denser areas, there are still a lot of people in rural areas who I think would be very happy to get Starlink because at the moment they really don't have any viable options for broadband (other than geostationary satellites with 1000 ms ping). If SpaceX can deliver the service, they should collect the money rather than Hughes or Comcast or AT&T or whoever.
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I agree. I live in a rural area where good internet is hard to get for many people (mountainous, forested, low population density)
Yes this is the other way my mom is going to have good internet ever, I've tried helper her with a lot of options but speed and reliability of everything I have tried is all terrible. I have a StarLink on order, no delivery set yet but hopefully this summer or fall.
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Ditto. I just wish they had better communication. I put a deposit down several months ago and haven't heard bupkis from them about when I might actually get service. There's no cable service, I'm outside the reach of the local terrestrial fixed wireless providers, and geosync is essentially unusable for VPN to work. I have good cell signal, fortunately, but none of the actual carriers sells residential internet service in this area. I'm going with a cellular reseller that doesn't seem too shady. I'd sure