Comment on [deleted]

• Hallowed_Grave@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  How does the company stay afloat when they’re constantly replacing satellites? The money, the logistics, and most of all, the materials. What a waste.

  source

  • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Because they launch them in large batches using a reusable rocket, so it doesn't actually cost much. They did work out the economics of Starlink before they started building the system.

    source

    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Also, most of their starlink launches are done when someone else is paying for a launch too. Rarely do they have a launch that doesn’t have mass or volume left over, and they just shove starlink sats into that as a secondary payload.

      Elon is dumb as fuck with a lot of decisions, but Gwen shotwell knows what the fuck she’s doing.

      source

      • ThePrivacyPolicy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        This is incorrect unless you’re providing a source. I follow several space need sites and they do dedicated launches. Here’s an article even showing the payload setup - which fills the cargo bay. spaceflightnow.com/…/next-spacex-launch-to-deploy…

        source
    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      When they worked out those details they also thought they would have 20,000,000 subscribers before now and not just 2,000,000

      source

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        They are nevertheless already profitable, and they haven't even begun using Starship to launch satellites yet.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
  • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Because they launch these alongside paying customer payloads.

    Starlink is FAR from the only thing they launch. A customer pays for a payload, and any volume or mass left over in the launch is filled with small starkink sats.

    They have basically $0 on launch costs because of this. They just toss them in when they have someone else paying for the rocket.

    source

    • Swim@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      do you sources to back that up?

      source
    • xortingen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I remember that this was their plan at the beginning but i’m not sure if they actually ever did it.

      source
• ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Well it won’t work out very well when they already have less than 15% of the subscribers they thought they would have by now.

  source

  • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And yet they are already profitable.

    source

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I highly doubt that. They just got to 2 million customers like 5 months ago. If you’d average the costs in pricing differences between residential and business, etc. you would figure it averages out to $200 a month per account. Even if you pretend that they have had 2,000,000 customers for that last three years straight that would only amount to $1.2B and I’d guarantee they have well over that in costs thus far. Skipping all the R&D the 5,000 satellites up there right now cost $500,000 to $600,000 per satellite to get to orbit (so total cost, fuel, making satellite, etc.). Even at just $500k each that’s still $2.5B.

      So yeah. There’s not really a snowballs chance in hell it’s in the black right now.

      source

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Here's an article that talks about it.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • hansl@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Are they? I haven’t seen any reports of profitability for Starlink.

      source

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Here's an article that talks about it.

        source