Elon Musk Says SpaceX's Starlink Achieves Breakeven Cash Flow (cnbc.com) 155
There's now two million subscribers to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, with CEO Elon Musk announcing Thursday that it has "achieved breakeven cash flow..."
Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from CNBC: Musk did not specify whether that milestone was hit on an operating basis or for a specified time period. Earlier this year, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink "had a cash flow positive quarter" in 2022, and the overall SpaceX company reportedly turned a profit in the first quarter of 2023.
SpaceX's valuation has soared to about $150 billion, with Starlink seen as a key economic driver of the company's goals. Two years ago, Musk emphasized that making Starlink "financially viable" required crossing "through a deep chasm of negative cash flow."
Musk has discussed spinning off Starlink to take it public through an initial public offering once the business was "in a smooth sailing situation." But timing of a Starlink IPO remains uncertain. Last year, Musk told employees that taking the business public wasn't likely until 2025 or later.
Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from CNBC: Musk did not specify whether that milestone was hit on an operating basis or for a specified time period. Earlier this year, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink "had a cash flow positive quarter" in 2022, and the overall SpaceX company reportedly turned a profit in the first quarter of 2023.
SpaceX's valuation has soared to about $150 billion, with Starlink seen as a key economic driver of the company's goals. Two years ago, Musk emphasized that making Starlink "financially viable" required crossing "through a deep chasm of negative cash flow."
Musk has discussed spinning off Starlink to take it public through an initial public offering once the business was "in a smooth sailing situation." But timing of a Starlink IPO remains uncertain. Last year, Musk told employees that taking the business public wasn't likely until 2025 or later.
Wow.... who are the customers? (Score:2)
Obviously there is a need for global IP access in general but I didn't realize enough of the paying world has shitty enough local net that paying for Starlink made sense in enough cars for them to become profitable.
Well, congrats to them but I do wonder who it is that's paying that much and how much is just the government buying up customer data.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Wow.... who are the customers? (Score:4, Funny)
No, like most slashdotters, my mom just tosses a few stale Cheetos bags down the basement stairs and quickly re-locks the door from the outside.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Wow.... who are the customers? (Score:2)
Re:Wow.... who are the customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, ok, that makes sense. Thanks.
Re: Wow.... who are the customers? (Score:5, Informative)
You donâ(TM)t even need to get to island communities for it to be useful. There are plenty of places in mainland western countries that are just too sparsely populated for decent internet to get there.
The highlands of Scotland, pretty much anywhere in the area between Seattle, and Salt Lake City, absolutely anywhere in Australia that isnâ(TM)t a major cityâ¦
Re: (Score:3)
The outfit I work with now is a customer. Right in the heart of Los Angeles, you can see the high rises downtown standing in the parking lot. Right about at the I5/I710 interchange, in case you know the area.
The building is a temporary location, with 13 units (Commercial condominium). When it was built, none of the providers ran anything to the building, making it an unserved island in the area. As a result the choices we faced when we moved in were cellular (cheap, unusably bad signal strength, we trie
Re: (Score:3)
I'm sure island communities are big users.
Islands don't benefit from Starlink as much as you might expect, not yet, not unless there is a bigger and more-populated landmass nearby. The problem is that Starlink only works if a satellite is within range of a user's dish and a downlink station at the same time, and that downlink has to be located somewhere it can get a terrestrial network connection.
This is changing slowly as the number of V2 satellites rise. V2s have lasers for satellite-to-satellite links that route data to one that has a downlink
Re: (Score:2)
> The problem is that Starlink only works if a satellite is within range of a user's dish and a downlink station at the same time
Is that a hard requirement or just a best practice?
I thought the satellites could relay traffic to one another. Obviously you would want to limit intra-satellite communication to minimize bandwidth. Therefore if a user and base station are in the same zone the problem is solved. However, in the case of an isolated island where there is no other option, can't they relay the s
Re: (Score:2)
> The problem is that Starlink only works if a satellite is within range of a user's dish and a downlink station at the same time
Is that a hard requirement or just a best practice?
I thought the satellites could relay traffic to one another.
Your questions are answered by the post you replied to, just read the whole thing.
Re: (Score:3)
Never forget the dirty way SpaceX stole Starlink. See my other comment on this article for context.
Re:Wow.... who are the customers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Elon Musk stole his tricycle 30 years ago.
Dude he's the richest man on earth (Score:2)
You might think these are good things if you're on the far end of the right wing but if you're not t
Re: (Score:2)
Even while he forced his failing company to stay open during covid and hundreds of his people were out with the virus, he took millions in government money while saying people shouldn't receive a penny.
He's a typical grifter.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Wow.... who are the customers? (Score:3)
Dude, outside of cities, the internet sucks. Most places get something like 30 down/10 up. Starlink far outperforms that.
Around here, the biggest problem is that starlink is not priced for the market. £25 a month gets you that 30/10. Or £75 a month plus £500 down to get Starlink. Yes, Starlink is faster, but not faster enough to justify triple the price.
Priced for markets worse off than yours (Score:5, Insightful)
Around here, the biggest problem is that starlink is not priced for the market.
You're probably right that Starlink isn't priced for your local market. It's priced for other local markets where the alternatives are geostationary satellite (with its harsh monthly caps and far longer pings) and cellular (also harshly capped). Or it's priced for other local markets where the cable company holds a monopoly because there's no FTTH competitor.
Re: (Score:3)
For that matter, at £75 you could just buy 3 of those terrestrial links, have way more consistent speed, and not have to worry about trees in your skyline. You might get 100Mbps or 150Mbps on Starlink but once every DSL user signs up you no longer get that. Low earth satellite Internet is just a really big cell network where the towers move instead of the phones. Once your "tower" is full, speeds start to suffer.
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, outside of cities, the internet sucks. Most places get something like 30 down/10 up.
It's not just the speed. It's the latency. Stuff like Hughesnet is absolutely horrible. Average latency around 680ms.
Re: (Score:2)
i live in rural western oregon, and up until we were able to get fiber -- starlink was heads and shoulders above the competition (i'm still surprised they ran fiber all the way out here, there's no way it can be economically viable given the prices they're charging and the population density, but not going to omplain)
That said, our options were limited to:
viasat (vilesat): $175 a month, 100 gig cap, 600ms latency ( best case), frequent throttling, horrible performance in inclement weather. LoS to sat would
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The Pentagon, re-selling to Ukraine.
Re: (Score:2)
"Obviously there is a need for global IP access in general but I didn't realize enough of the paying world has shitty enough local net "
There lots of places without any net, the poles, the pampas, the tundra, the deserts, the jungles, the off-grid community, the campers, the boaters, the fishermen, ferries, cruise-ships....
Re: (Score:2)
I can think of a lot of potential uses. The big one (commercially) would be fleet communications. Pretty much any large company with a fleet of vehicles has a system for communicating with the vehicles, but it either depends on cell networks or uses a slower satellite system. Cell networks are non-existent in much of the country and definitely bad in the mountains.
I used to work for a company that provided remote health care to people who couldn't get in to the clinics. We mostly dealt with the VA providing
Re: (Score:2)
How much bandwidth do fleet vehicles really need, and how up to date does it really have to be? If it's just sending back telemetry, that should be quite low bandwidth and tolerant of queueing up deal with dropouts, and probably within the capabilities of the direct-to-cellular Starlink service, which will be a lot easier to work with than the full phased array antenna setup.
Re: (Score:2)
in Crimea
I think I can see a fundamental problem with that idea (Section 1 (a) (iii)). [federalregister.gov]
The subject of the lede is "subscribers." (Score:2)
"Subscribers" is a plural noun.
That means the state-of-being verb you're contracting should be "are," not "is" - which, in turn, means that sentence should read "There're near two million subscribers to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, with CEO Elon Musk announcing Thursday that it has "achieved breakeven cash flow..."
I'm not one of your haters, but, c'mon. This is grade school grammar you're dealing with. It's simply not all that difficult to get it right ...
Re: (Score:2)
I'm doubtful that the verb form used with "there is" would be covered in grade-school grammar; it's a very peculiar construction in English, where the subject comes last and determines the copula verb form.
Cambridge grammar states that "there are" is technically correct, but "there is" is commonly used:
In speaking and in some informal writing, we use there’s even when it refers to more than one. This use could be considered incorrect in formal writing or in an examination:
There’s three other people who are still to come.
There’s lots of cars in the car park.
https://dictionary.cambridge.o... [cambridge.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I'm doubtful that the verb form used with "there is" would be covered in grade-school grammar; it's a very peculiar construction in English, where the subject comes last and determines the copula verb form.
It's actually taught in second grade [k5learning.com].
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Who does he think he is?
He thinks he is a genius but he's just rich.
Re: (Score:2)
Who does he think he is?
He thinks he is a genius but he's just rich.
Agree he is not a genius. Agree he should not be emulated. But I think this kind of reductiveness is hard to maintain when you look at SpaceX's success. As of today, SpaceX have launched 77 rockets in 2023, and the year isn't over. It's so far beyond the capacity and cadence of any other provider on the planet it's completely bananas. You can dismiss that as mostly being Starlink, but that's the whole point: Starlink only makes sense if you have that kind of efficiency within reach.
So, yes, Twitter man is
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>Agree he is not a genius. Agree he should not be emulated. But I think this kind of reductiveness is hard to maintain when you look at SpaceX's success.
How much of that is because of Musk, though? It looks more like he bought a successful venture than anything else. They had the right idea and it is paying off, that's all we are seeing.
Re: (Score:2)
He didn't found Tesla, but SpaceX was him from the start. Yes, the company wouldn't have gone anywhere without people like Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell, but he's the one who built that initial team.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can't take him out of the equation and still have SpaceX.
You swap him out for a different money bag with the idea of reusable rockets, which isn't a new idea.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you never invented anything?
Re: (Score:2)
Who does he think he is?
The edgiest of edge lords. He recently posted instructions for making cocaine on twitter. Like a teenager just discovering the anarchists cookbook.
If he actually invented something (Score:2)
I mean yeah that's what venture capitalists do but let's not pretend they are making the world a better place for anyone but themselves.
For Elon Musk it's a little bit worse. He started out by using his father's money and connections to get a phony
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
His lawyers would say he only nearly executed those employees. If they choose to work themselves to death, that's on them. He's not Amazon.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Right now the people most interested in ovens to shove people into are the people chanting from the river to the sea.
Re: (Score:2)
Right now the people most interested in ovens to shove people into are the people chanting from the river to the sea.
Interesting that you've been modded down.
Re: (Score:2)
Think bigger. Accelerate global warming and then fly to Mars.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
SpaceX's first employees were rocket scientists and figured out how to contain Elon. Tesla he purchased, and there's some containment there. He appears to run the show at Twitter though.
Which is going about as well as dusting off the business plan that got you kicked out of PayPal would be expected to.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you in favor of strong intellectual property laws?
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm in favor of good copyright and related rights laws. There ain't no such thing as "intellectual property".
Re: (Score:2)
Are you in favor of copyright and related rights laws that would have prohibited, say, Linus Torvalds from creating the Linux kernel?
Re: (Score:2)
No, why would I be? Whose copyright did Linus violate?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, that would be IBM, not Linus :)
Re: (Score:3)
Are you in favor of strong intellectual property laws?
No.
Re: Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:2)
Ah yes, thatâ(TM)s right - the ideas are what matter, not the implementation. Thatâ(TM)s why everyone knows that when some guy comes to you and goes âoeIâ(TM)ve got a great idea for an app. Iâ(TM)ll split the money 50/50 with you. You implement it, and Iâ(TM)ll tell you the idea.â You should absolutely jump at the chance! Their contribution is *easily* as large, if not larger than doing the work to implement it.
Re: (Score:3)
On top of that, saying Musk stole the idea for SpaceX from Blue Origin is like saying he copied a race car off a snail. Blue Origin is a joke, only good to bleed executive bonuses and cronie deals off of Bezos. It's never going to amount to anything.
I mean I get the Musk hate, but you should not allow it to cloud your judgement.
Re: Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Literally, virtually nothing about BlueOrigin's early years is publicly known even today, so I'd sure like to know what sort of spy they're positing that Musk had inside BlueOrigin back then to copy it.
As far as I can tell, they're saying it's a "copy" because "it was a private space company". Except that there have been TONS of private space companies over the years.
Re: (Score:2)
I have plenty of dislike for Musk but becoming a competitor is not stealing anything. Especially if you actually launch things. That's like saying there should only be one carmaker because everyone is is just copying ideas.
In the real world, have you not seen startups and penny stocks? One person comes up with an idea and if it's a good idea, then the only other thing that gets investments are things that copy that idea. Sometimes they even named the bubbles (Web 2.0, e.g.)
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Never forget the dirty way SpaceX stole the idea for Starlink
So what? Ideas are cheap, execution is what counts as evidenced by:
2002: made SpaceX .. a copy of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin (founded in 2000)
So Bezos had a two year head start, and now is how far behind?
I think Elon is a tool and not nearly half as smart as he thinks he is, but SpaceX seems to be somewhere he allows the adults to actually run things and from all appearances it's wildly successful. "Hur dur, he took the idea from someone else" is a poor take.
The tech that made it possible (Score:2)
I was initially fine with those subsidies when I thought that electric cars would reduce pol
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Execution is cheap.
Hahahahhaa. Hahahahhhahhhaaaha. Hahahahahahhaaahhaaahaaaaa.
You have no idea. Execution is everything. The amount of original ideas in the world is miniscule, 99,99999% of all success stories are unoriginal ideas that someone executed good on a good time in a good place. In other words, someone heard something, went "huh, thats a good idea" and went ahead and did it. And you would not want it any other way, because a lot of times whoever has the idea is not the one who is able to make it work. The industrial revolution was not started by Watt's steam engine. It was started when Watt's patents expired and his zeal was no longer a blocker to those who had ideas on how to actually make it into something.
And here comes the important bit - rarely the success comes to just a copy of an idea, like Words With Friends. The success comes with more ideas on top of the previous one, ideas about how to make it better and cheaper, ideas on how to sell it, finance it, to take it further. If the improved idea was the one that succeeded as opposed to the original one, that is because the original idea with the original crew did not have what it takes, whatever it was. Sometimes it was just luck or bad timing, but such is life. Why is Blue Origin still dead on arrival after all these years, having all the money in the world available to them? Because Bezos has no idea what it is for other than space is cool, and the people running it are just fine earning their salary without doing anything. You can not fault Musk for doing a home run against a potato. The point to take home is that if the original idea had merit, if not the original crew, you would want to have at least someone succeed with it, for the benefit of mankind and such.
99,99999% times the people who complain about stolen ideas are those who just sit on their idea, if they even have one, daydreaming of success and never doing anything to make it real. And then they complain when someone else actually goes on and does something and gets some success with it. Because actually doing something for success is an unfair advantage, because daydreaming is an easy way to get dopamin, and actually doing something is hard, too hard.
Not that I am saying Must did not steal StarLink from WorldVu. I do not care to look into it and your link gives no real info on that claim. But if it actually was the case that he stole the idea from someone who came to him as a client, yes, that is a major dick move. Not an original one, though - check out Amazon copying successful 3rd party products as their own, and Apple doing the same on App Store. Dicks all around. This one is a real problem to solve.
That'd mean Microsoft and GNU/Linux are both evil (Score:4, Interesting)
It appears that under your criterion, Microsoft and the GNU/Linux community are both evil. Microsoft's business was built on 86-DOS that it acquired from Seattle Computer Products, which was "stolen" because it was an API-compatible clone of Digital Research's CP/M, and Windows, which implements a window-icon-menu-pointer graphical user interface (WIMP GUI) paradigm "stolen" from Xerox computers and Apple's Macintosh. GNU/Linux is "stolen" because it is an API-compatible clone of UNIX. Do I understand you correctly?
Re: (Score:3)
The idea that was stolen here was not "space rocket company." It was "move fast and break things" which was stolen from Facebook. It was just applied to rockets. It turns out, there was so much waste in aerospace from over-engineering that it was literally cheaper to just blow up rocket after rocket until it doesn't blow up.
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:4)
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds like what Huawei and its ilk are doing. Small wonder Musk loves China and Russia so much. I'm curious though, why hasn't he set up his businesses over there...
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/10... [ca.gov]
https://www.sfchronicle.com/po... [sfchronicle.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Stopped watching that thing years ago. But you were responding to my comment, so enlighten me, which Chinese city is his company registered in?
Re: (Score:2)
What part of SpaceX was stolen from Blue Origin? The only thing I can think of is it being a startup with a billionaire founder. Literally everything else is different. Or did they both copy from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Based on 2 million subscribers at $120/month (obviously some pay a lot more), that gives us a baseline of $240 million a month revenue.
With 12,000 satellites with a lifespan of 5 years, they need to launch 200 a month just to maintain the network. They launch between 20 and 60 satellites per rocket, depending on the orbits they want to reach and type of vehicles. So say at least 4 launches per month.
A Falcon 9 launch is estimated to cost around $62m. Obviously they have other costs, like all the ground stat
Re: (Score:2)
SpaceX has launched 79 times so far in 2023, and will probably end up at 90-95 by the end of the year. So they've already got the launch cadence solved. And the costs are a lot more complicated: launches don't cost them internally the same as they charge customers, but the Starlink satellites have a manufacturing cost associated with them too, though I imagine they've been working on cutting that cost as much as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Aren't you guys the same ones who get pissed when China steals ideas?
Re: (Score:2)
Aren't you guys the same ones who get pissed when China steals ideas?
The burden of proof is on you. Until such time as you produce any evidence, your attempts to throw unsubstantiated accusations of intellectual property theft at Musk is nothing more but a politically motivated smear job and part of leftist vendetta for providing idesputable proof of political collusion [substack.com] with the government to suppress free speech [arstechnica.com].
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
With Musk increasingly dogwhistling against Jews, the Henry Ford comparisons are becoming way too apt ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't call NPR "mainstream media". When it comes to viewership, Fox beats everyone in ratings. Guess what that makes Fox?
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Guess what that makes Fox?
The primary media service for right wing cultists.
Re: (Score:2)
2002: made SpaceX .. a copy of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin (founded in 2000) -- proceeded to take some of their ideas (example: sea landing vertical rockets: https://patents.google.com/pat [google.com]... [google.com] ) and also engineers from other aerospace companies too such as Masten Aerospace (which produced the Xombie, that Elon copied)
This is the one I love the most. That poor Bezos guy is now only the third richest man in the world, with barely $144 billion to his name. If that tyrant Elon hadn't stolen his idea, no doubt we'd all be on mars now with the flying cars etc.
Yeah, Elon is such a fraud!
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:5, Informative)
1995: Two companies started at about the same time, in an overlapping, new field. Zip2 was the less successful of them; Citysearch had bigger backers. What limited overlap they had early on they diverged significantly over time.
Internet companies all trying for the same thing at the same time wasn't even REMOTELY rare. There were dozens trying become what Facebook became.
1999: Two companies started at about the same time (literally just one month apart), in such an overlapping, new field that they ended up merging.
2002: Oh please. There were countless private rocket companies throughout history (mostly massive failures). Calling anyone a copy of another because "they're private rocket companies" is beyond absurd; every single rocketry company massively stands on the shoulders of rocket developers that came before them, and have since the very beginning. Sea landing of vertical rockets in specific is age-old, and wasn't part of SpaceX's plans for many years anyway. Every company had their own design principles (some more radical than others - see for example Roton). SpaceX's primary design principle was "mass production of cheap LOX+RP1 rockets where the upper and lower stages are near-identical and numerous engines are used in larger rockets so that you get economies of scale, while still designing the rockets to have a path to reusability". Sort of a hybrid between what used to be two competing ideologies: mass production of cheap disposable rockets, or expensive high-performance low-production-volume reusable rockets. Structurally they were also a hybrid of two competing ideologies: super-lightweight rockets that are fragile on the ground (balloon tanks) vs. super-sturdy rockets with lower performance in order to save money in ground ops (the Falcon series is strong enough to not collapse on the ground, but requires significant pressure stabilization to withstand launch forces)
2004: Again a case of "standing on the shoulders of giants", although to a lesser degree. A really abridged history of Tesla's early years:
* Gage and Cocconi started off working on GM on the Sunraycer; branched off into their own company (AC Propulsion) around the EV1 period.
* The two were great engineers but had terrible business sense. Over the years ACP developed side products like the Long Ranger charging trailer; the legendary AC-150 powertrain; and the tzero mini sports car.
* Eberhard became wealthy after having sold NuvoMedia to GemStar for $187M.
* Coincidentally, one of Eberhard's former employees was Gage's neighbor. ACP was looking for funds to convert the tzero from lead-acid to li-ion, and Eberhard had tinkered with electric cars in college. He decided to fund the conversion (and kept making "suggestions" which Gage found annoying and kept brushing off).
* ACP finished the conversion. The already spectacular tzero became even more spectacular, and started winning competition after competition. Everyone in the (still very small) EV space wanted ACP's tech.
* One entity to make use of it was the Stanford team of J.B. Straubel, who was working on a "Long Range EV" project in college.
* Eberhard, meanwhile, wanted to commercialize it, but butted heads with ACP, who had the daft idea to put it in a Scion rather than a sports car (Scion E-Box). After months of trying to get ACP aboard with converting a Lotus, Eberhard gave up and set out on his own (with Tarpenning).
* Musk meanwhile was introduced to Straubel by a former VP of Compaq (who bought Zip2), having heard that Musk was into EVs, having worked on ultracapacitors for EVs as a college internship. Musk learned of what was going on at ACP from him and became super-interested. He donated to Straubel's project and then got in touch with ACP.
* ACP put him through the same loop it had just put Eberhard through; Musk also thought the Scion was a daft idea (who would pay nearly six figures for a Scion?); he wanted to convert a Noble. Eventually Musk likewise told ACP he'd be setting off on his own. ACP responded that
Re: (Score:2)
Question for Rei: Can I get permission to re-post your history summary above to other venues? I often run into venues where a list of facts really need to be applied in the face of the usual deranged Musk hating urban legends. If OK, did you want an attribution?
Re: (Score:2)
Repost anything you want - this is the internet. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Repost anything you want - this is the internet. :)
It is? God damn it, not again...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Shenoy's system worked exactly like Neuralink's, furthermore he was an advisor to Neuralink from the start. See for yourself: https://med.stanford.edu/news/... [stanford.edu] Neuralink is similar but with more electrodes, it's clearly based on his work not an original concept of Elon's as you're trying to claim. If Neuralink's technology was invented by Elon Musk why don't you point to any key Neuralink patents that have Elon's name? How many BCI publications does Elon Musk have? What technology idea of Neuralink came fr
Re:Musk has never had even one original idea (Score:4)
Calling BrainGate the same thing as Neuralink's system is beyond absurd. BrainGate is basically a big meat tenderizer [brown.edu] sticking into the brain straight through the skull [physicsworld.com], with a small number of evenly-spaced fat, single-sensor pins that plow their way through whatever vasculature is in the way. Neuralink is based around a robot [techcrunch.com] that individually places ultrafine threads [biorxiv.org], each containing numerous electrodes, using imaging to automatically avoid the vasculature [science.org], with the data fed to an internal implant that communicates wirelessly [i-scmp.com] to a wearable unit.
And BrainGate wasn't even remotely the start of BMI development, and indeed, its incremental improvements over earlier versions were a lot more minor than the degree of difference with Neuralink's system.
Did you read *a single word* I wrote? For God's sake, *at least* read the last (summary) paragraph.
Re: (Score:2)
(For the record, in the "ultrafine threads" image, (A) - the tiny part at the tip - is the thread itself, being held by the robot. Which is the reason for a robot - no human could handle such tiny implants. Each thread has, as mentioned, multiple electrodes along its length. They're produced by electron beam lithography, like computer chip manufacturers' photomasks)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh so now you're believing Elon's claim that he came up with flexible electrodes? What? And robotic surgery too?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot-assisted_surgery
To clear:
1. Elon is falsely claiming he came up with robotic surgery.
2. Elon is falsely claiming he came up with the idea of using an MEA chip with flexible electrodes: https://www.science.org/doi/10... [science.org]
3. Elon falsely claims he invented the concept of wireless MEA. Here's one from 2015: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Stop propagating his false
Re: (Score:2)
"Elon" is not claiming that "he" "invented" anything. It would help if you would stop personifying the work of huge numbers of people into one boogeyman. And the papers you link were specifically cited by Neuralink.
I'll repeat, this time in bold:
Did you read *a single word* I wrote? For God's sake, *at least* read the last (summary) paragraph.
Re: (Score:2)
ED: Above link didn't post: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v1.full.pdf [biorxiv.org].
Re: (Score:2)
proceeded to take some of their ideas (example: sea landing vertical rockets
You can't be THAT stupid, surely? [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That report rehashed the data from Motorola Iridum satellites, which are orders of magnitude more massive, runs in different orbit, but lets just ignore all of that and just assume everything is the same.
I tend to trust the FAA more (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Reference please about the de-orbiting after the satellite goes dark (after the 5 year lifetime). I thought the problem was that the decay period to make re-entry from the orbit they are in is around 35 years. So after 10 years or so there will be more dead satellites than active ones in orbit. They have license to send 12K or 13K and they are asking permit to have ~35K active satellites. Space is big but there may be enough debris in LEO in 20 to 30 years that nobody can safely get out of LEO.
Re: (Score:2)
Treating satellites as disposable is making climate change worse and will continue to have effects we don't even understand yet.
See https://earthsky.org/earth/spa... [earthsky.org]
Re: (Score:2)
There is no other way to treat a satellite but as disposable. Any satellite will need fuel to keep itself pointed in the right direction, to maintain it's orbit and to manouver out of trouble. When it runs out of fuel, it's junk, as we won't have gas stations in space any time soon. What will happens to a sat then?
1. In LEO the satellite will deorbit because of atmospheric drag. The atmosphere might be extremely thin there, but it's still thick enough to deorbit satellites over time. To keep the orbits clea