I’m not American, but doesn’t the Constitution say “we the people”, not “we the high status males”?
This is very on-brand for Musk honestly, he had a bit of value back when PayPal was decent and Tesla was the only EV company…
Since he started launching trash into orbit, he’s progressively gotten more and more insane in his ideas.
And yes, I consider starlink to basically be orbiting trash… In case anyone didn’t get it.
He has no business acumen, spending millions of dollars to put a wireless mesh in low earth orbit, and having to regularly replace the debris in orbit, costing millions more per year, then charging people out the ass for service, or putting so many users on it that you might as well be on dialup… Good plan. I’m a network/wireless tech as my day job, and putting enough users onto the system at an appropriate/affordable cost, to justify the expense of doing it, and maintaining it, is really dumb. You’ll overload your frequency allocation, exhausting any bandwidth that was available, and the service will suck. Reducing user load just increases costs to the end user month over month because each LEO satellite is worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and will only be in orbit for a few years, maybe 5 years at the high end.
I’m not a business person, but if each satellite costs $200k to build and put in orbit (it’s probably a lot more) and lasts 4 years, you need to make $50k/yr from that satellite to break even, of you’re charging about $100/mo for access to the service, that means every satellite requires 500 users to be subscribed in order to break even… Then ask yourself, can each satellite handle servicing 500 users?
No. The answer is no. They can’t. You’ll never break even at that price. And IMO, that’s a pretty generous estimate on costs.
It’s a bad plan from the beginning. Unless you can subsidize everything by launching the satellites along side orbital launches that other people have paid for, so you basically get to orbit for free, and/or somehow subsidize the cost of building the satellites, then you’re pretty much always going to lose money.
I’m not American, but doesn’t the Constitution say “we the people”, not “we the high status males”?
This is very on-brand for Musk honestly, he had a bit of value back when PayPal was decent and Tesla was the only EV company…
Since he started launching trash into orbit, he’s progressively gotten more and more insane in his ideas.
And yes, I consider starlink to basically be orbiting trash… In case anyone didn’t get it.
He has no business acumen, spending millions of dollars to put a wireless mesh in low earth orbit, and having to regularly replace the debris in orbit, costing millions more per year, then charging people out the ass for service, or putting so many users on it that you might as well be on dialup… Good plan. I’m a network/wireless tech as my day job, and putting enough users onto the system at an appropriate/affordable cost, to justify the expense of doing it, and maintaining it, is really dumb. You’ll overload your frequency allocation, exhausting any bandwidth that was available, and the service will suck. Reducing user load just increases costs to the end user month over month because each LEO satellite is worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and will only be in orbit for a few years, maybe 5 years at the high end.
I’m not a business person, but if each satellite costs $200k to build and put in orbit (it’s probably a lot more) and lasts 4 years, you need to make $50k/yr from that satellite to break even, of you’re charging about $100/mo for access to the service, that means every satellite requires 500 users to be subscribed in order to break even… Then ask yourself, can each satellite handle servicing 500 users?
No. The answer is no. They can’t. You’ll never break even at that price. And IMO, that’s a pretty generous estimate on costs.
It’s a bad plan from the beginning. Unless you can subsidize everything by launching the satellites along side orbital launches that other people have paid for, so you basically get to orbit for free, and/or somehow subsidize the cost of building the satellites, then you’re pretty much always going to lose money.
It’s worse than just putting trash into orbit.
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/06/28/spacex-is-destroying-earths-ozone-layer-elon-musk-new-study/74171065007/
Oh good. More man made horrors.