61–70 of 127 posts
I think this is bad news for SpaceX as well. Investors are going to be very reluctant to give more money to Musk.
I don't think it's exactly fair of them to blame "financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19" for their bankruptcy. The history of space industry is full of companies that ran out of money when attempting to launch massive satellite constellations. And let's be frank, an attempt to out-compete SpaceX on mass satellite production and cheap launches was doomed to fail.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Internet is a commodity for the average person, you can't make money in that market. This assumes that razor thin margins are bad, which is usually a safe assumption but in the case of Starlink, I say it's not open minded enough. To boot Starlink online requires a minimum cost for service area (sats), but once you've got that area booted, onboarding new customers is trivial (vs laying fiber, cable, digging holes).…
Doesn't work like that. Each starlink satellite has capacity of 20gig/sec. Assume that only 1 or 2 of the sats will be over a major metro area at any one time - that's 40gig/sec total capacity. That's only ~5,000 HD netflix streams at once (even less for 4K). It will soon become totally overloaded. A city like NYC probably has home/office bandwidth use of 40gig/sec per a few city blocks, nevermind the whole metro are…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except Iridium recently launched an entire new generation of satellites to replace their old one, and it is expected to be profitable. Likewise, lots of people expect SpaceX to make a killing on Starlink. There were good reasons to be skeptical of OneWeb, but "consumer satellite communication companies have gone bankrupt before" is not one of them.
> lots of people expect SpaceX to make a killing on Starlink What lots of people expect is kind of irrelevant... OneWeb going bankrupt suggests that profit margins will be low at best, negative at worst. Cheaper launch cost is not enough to change the business from to non-viable to hugely profitable. Who will be the customers of Starlink? Internet is a commodity for the average person, you can't make money in that ma…
A single contract from the US government that displaces their contracts with various providers could be profitable to spacex.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Internet is a commodity for the average person, you can't make money in that market. This assumes that razor thin margins are bad, which is usually a safe assumption but in the case of Starlink, I say it's not open minded enough. To boot Starlink online requires a minimum cost for service area (sats), but once you've got that area booted, onboarding new customers is trivial (vs laying fiber, cable, digging holes).…
Doesn't work like that. Each starlink satellite has capacity of 20gig/sec. Assume that only 1 or 2 of the sats will be over a major metro area at any one time - that's 40gig/sec total capacity. That's only ~5,000 HD netflix streams at once (even less for 4K). It will soon become totally overloaded. A city like NYC probably has home/office bandwidth use of 40gig/sec per a few city blocks, nevermind the whole metro are…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> lots of people expect SpaceX to make a killing on Starlink What lots of people expect is kind of irrelevant... OneWeb going bankrupt suggests that profit margins will be low at best, negative at worst. Cheaper launch cost is not enough to change the business from to non-viable to hugely profitable. Who will be the customers of Starlink? Internet is a commodity for the average person, you can't make money in that ma…
I grew up in a rural area. We had dial-up for years until we got point to point wireless, which capped out at 1.5 mbps. 3 of my team members live in a rural area and have similar internet. They’re all waiting to throw money at spacex as soon as it goes live. There’s millions of people in the US like them that would sign up. My wife and I are planning to move further from the city, but one of our concerns is getting d…
Exactly my situation. I have symmetric gigabit and due to a nature of my business requiring symmetric fat pipe I have to live in a city. The minute I could get that gigabit in a wilderness I am out.
So this will be the final OneWeb constellation: https://space-search.io/?search=OneWeb (shamelessly plugging my own website here) Such a shame about OneWeb though, met some of them at a conference in Spain just a month ago, where the elephant in the room was StarLink already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> lots of people expect SpaceX to make a killing on Starlink What lots of people expect is kind of irrelevant... OneWeb going bankrupt suggests that profit margins will be low at best, negative at worst. Cheaper launch cost is not enough to change the business from to non-viable to hugely profitable. Who will be the customers of Starlink? Internet is a commodity for the average person, you can't make money in that ma…
> What lots of people expect is kind of irrelevant... OneWeb going bankrupt suggests that profit margins will be low at best, negative at worst. Cheaper launch cost is not enough to change the business from to non-viable to hugely profitable. Your comment here is pure speculation. From everything we know, the problem for them was huge capital cost and massive required cashflow to buy launches. All that when your comp…
I don't think it's exactly fair of them to blame "financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19" for their bankruptcy. The history of space industry is full of companies that ran out of money when attempting to launch massive satellite constellations. And let's be frank, an attempt to out-compete SpaceX on mass satellite production and cheap launches was doomed to fail.