SpaceX has been awarded $885.51 million by the Federal Communications Commission to provide Starlink broadband to 642,925 rural homes and businesses in 35 states.
My initial reaction agrees that does sound quite high.
However, I wonder what the alternative strategy costs for rural broadband are. My guess is that laying a lot of cable to remote locations could possibly be even higher than the $1376.52 per customer cost? It seems like something like Satelite internet connections could be less to set up, but it's not clear to me the cost of the equipment, installations and upkeep are in that case?
Also 1376 / 12 months averages out to only about $110 per month per customer for just one year. Which honestly doesn't sound too bad.
I wonder, what're the costs of providing fixed landline service, even in a city?
From burying the lines or stringing them on poles, to wiring up each drop into each dwelling, all the splices and repeaters and what-not, to the central office building and equipment and power and stuff, and maintaining that entire physical plant for years, it's all got to add up.
I'd imagine it's well within an order of magnitude.
Don't forget that the poles are usually owned by an existing power or telecom company, and if they even let you use their poles, you have to pay rent on the pole. Same for conduits. Building new poles and conduits can also be legally difficult and expensive.
It is also over 10 years... so maybe a set of free equipment and $8 off a month?
Note: a traditional cable company got more than $1B is subsidies, so maybe the distributed model is actually cheaper. Depends on replacement costs and lifecycle (in both cases).
The subsidy goes to SpaceX, in exchange for offering service at the required locations at the required performance. There is no requirement whatsoever for SpaceX to pass any of it on to the customers, and in fact doing so would be against the spirit of the offering. It's meant for incentivizing the buildout of infrastructure, not for passing on savings to consumers.
The beta terminal cost is $500, and beta service is $100/month (at up to ~150 Mbps or so right now?). So the money would cover the terminal cost to those customers and then full freight 8 months of service at current pricing. Alternatively/in addition, and more similarly to traditional in-ground service, it may also simply help fun actual infrastructure in the form of more/faster deployment of ground stations and sats. SpaceX may also (and it seems likely) have more standard service tiers for full general release, so something at 25 Mbps for $25/month say, and then working their way up. If they use this money to cover the minimum tier and then let people choose to pay the difference for more if they desired, then that'd bump the coverage to close to 3 years.
For the level of service they're offering that seems pretty reasonable honestly, and a much more efficient use of dollars than typical efforts (though WISPs might do even better in certain areas, they have different trade offs). Since it appears how the companies make use of the money is fairly flexible SpaceX will probably deploy it towards a few different metrics. The $500 upfront capex is probably the biggest impediment for a lot of people so getting that down is important, but if internally they had any issues with getting their sat shells filled out that'd be a good upfront usage too.
This is also spread out over 10 years, so where the most bang for buck is delivered will probably vary over time, by 2025 let alone 2030 SpaceX's economics will certainly look quite different with Starship deployment and filled shells/done ground stations.
>FCC funding can be used in different ways depending on the type of broadband service. Cable companies like Charter and other wireline providers generally use the money to expand their networks into new areas that don't already have broadband. But with Starlink, SpaceX could theoretically provide service to all of rural America once it has launched enough satellites, even without FCC funding.
>One possibility is that SpaceX could use the FCC money to lower prices in the 642,925 funded locations, but the FCC announcement didn't say whether that's what SpaceX will do.
SpaceX is still in the painful bootstrapping phase of things, and their cost structure right now is still higher then what they ultimately hope for. But from the sound of it they've got a lot of flexibility in how they deploy this money so long as they ultimately meet service targets, and they're only one player amongst many even for this subsidy money. If they're satisfied with service people don't tend to casually switch providers, so there is real value in being first. I think therefore SpaceX may consider using some of the money at least to lower the bar of someone signing up and try to get currently underserved households onboard as customers faster.
Additionally, don't forget this is only the first round, there is even more money available next time. Given the nature of bidding, I assume strategic calculations about how to win more next time will also play a role.
The leaked info is sort of wrong in both directions. (Or, the info is correct, but is widely misinterpreted.)
The $2.4B they paid to ST Micro is not for terminals, as ST Micro doesn't manufacture electronics, they are a foundry and so they only make the chips. The $2.4B includes the costs for the chips for the first million receivers, but the assembly and non-chip costs add a lot on top of that. So in that sense, $2400 per terminal is a serious underestimate.
But it's also wrong in the other direction, because the $2.4B didn't just include the chips, it also included the development and mask costs for those chips. This should be considered to be NRE and not considered as part of the price of the terminals, as SpaceX will not have to pay that for the next million terminals.
So the real number is above or below $2400 depending on what costs more, the motors, pcbs, the antenna layers, the chassis and the assembly of a terminal, or 1/1000000 of the NRE of developing the ASICs for Starlink. Who knows.
There is nothing in the article about customers personally benefiting from this. SpaceX could take the money and put it towards ground infr., etc., customers only seeing reduced payments due to NRE/maintenance subsidies. It sounds like SpaceX has quite a bit of autonomy here.
> The 35 states where SpaceX won FCC funding are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
This headline is only part of the story, looks like ~10 ISP's were awarded sizable subsidies.
While i am not a fan of subsidies in general, the ISP space is particularly tricky for free-market forces to ensure competition. The capital requirements are overwhelming in many cases for a traditional startups, leaving the only other option as local/municipal votes, which have been successful in some areas.
Long-term, i could see internet access to receive utility status in the states. Until that happens, funding ISP competition, particularly in rural areas feels like a wise move.
It does seem wise, except I believe that ISPs have already received large subsidies in the past and then never completed their end of the bargain. Without consequence, of course. I hope none of those companies received any more subsidy.
I've worked on various broadband-related projects as a grant-writing consultant (https://seliger.com/2009/11/13/adventures-in-the-broadband/), SpaceX will definitely not be the worst of the bunch and will almost certainly be among the top quarter.
My recent employer was one of the ISP providing rural telecom service. These subsidies accounted for a hefty percentage of our income and the company was still perpetually on the edge of failure. Most of our competitors were in similar situations, loaded down with breathtakingly large amounts of debt and expensive to maintain decaying infrastructure, much of it purchased from the Baby Bells when they got out of the market. I can't say that the company was particularly well run but am certain that without the government subsidies, the business would collapse and large numbers of rural customers would be without telecom services, which extend beyond just internet access.
Not sure what Starlink's existence is going to do to the company. Offering 25 Mbps aDSL with low reliability isn't going to compete very well if a customer can get 100 Mbsp service for a similar price and higher reliability. On the other hand, this might be justification the company can use to stop servicing the most expensive of the rural accounts to service while focusing on small town gigabit service that can compete with a reasonable expense to service.
Isn't Starlink supposed to have the lowest ping of any solution out there (light not travelling in fiber but air/space) and be a breakthrough for financial customers? Bandwidth doesn't really matter _too_ much in those applications does it?
>It already offers the lowest transcontinental latencies which for high frequency trading alone would be a bonanza.
Inter-satellite optical links aren't ready yet (and they're only barely getting to MVP on their initial generation sat shell). When those come online yes, Starlink should have a latency advantage over most any distance sufficiently long enough to make up their fixed RTT mileage cost with their 40% speed advantage vs standard optical fiber [1]. But for the current and near future deployment Starlink satellites act purely as "bent pipes" connecting terminals to a groundstation, both with LOS to the sat.
HFT gets cited a lot but probably one of their biggest bonanzas once intersat links are up will be marine and aviation internet. If you think rural pricing is bad...
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1: Possibly with a very few rarified exceptions that use terrestrial microwave links or if someone went to the trouble of using photonic bandgap fiber.
> one of their biggest bonanzas once intersat links are up will be marine and aviation internet. If you think rural pricing is bad...
I'm just not convinced about marine - IMO, there just aren't that many customers out there.
Aviation could be interesting, however, post Covid.
One market you didn't mention is military. I can see exactly why the military is cozying up to SpaceX over Starlink. They've had multiple failed attempts[1] at integrated networked warfare initiatives. Starlink seems like a backbone the military could use to implement their vision piecemeal (and with probably a much higher success rate).
I live in the midwestern US and I can get 80/20 Mbps VDSL from CenturyLink. Obviously results will vary depending on your exact location, but to say "you can't get [25Mb DSL] in the US" simply isn't true.
The infrastructure those companies have built already exists, and the subsidies are mostly going to pay debt. If the subsidies stopped, the companies would go bankrupt. Their assets would be sold to another company, likely at a price less than the debt. The new company could therefore have a lower debt burden, and wouldn't necessarily need the subsidies to provide the same level of service. The subsidies are stopping the market from efficiently allocating capital.
Sure, but what about the people who will have disrupted or potentially no internet access/support while the market is sorting itself out?
If your plan is to be carried out, then there is ripe opportunity for a politician to come to these areas an say, "vote for me, I will protect your internet access" and then fight for the funding instead.
Treat it like any other utility - it continues to run, just without servicing its debts. Most of the expense is paying for capital. Stop that (because bankruptcy) and the ISP can be profitable, and sold to whoever pays the most.
But why is it a problem that rural areas don't have telecom services? If they truly valued those services, they could move to where they are available.
These ISP subsidies are a classic example of government waste. ISPs promise, don't deliver, and are awarded even more cash to burn. There's no reason we should support this waste of our tax dollars.
Because the government has decided that the existence and viability of rural communities is a policy goal in and of itself; and that basic telecommunications services are necessary for public safety and good government in such communities.
See also USPS's Universal Service Obligation, which requires it to have a minimum level of service to every single address/user in the US.
This is common in developed countries (e.g. the EU requires all its member states to have universal service for both post and telecommunications). China isn't there yet, but is working towards that goal.
Similarly, most developed countries have some form of universal healthcare.
Nonetheless in America, this is considered an un-American example of socialism run amok. The same pro-individualist criticism applies to rural telecom, postal service, and infrastructure. And it applies even more directly to rural hospitals.
> The capital requirements are overwhelming in many cases for a traditional startups, leaving the only other option as local/municipal votes, which have been successful in some areas.
I disagree. Especially today, capital is highly abundant and dirt cheap. The markets are starved for yield on any sort of fixed income product, especially when it's secured by tangible assets with predictable cash flows. Every day the market sees new successful covenant-lite bond and loan sales raised with payback periods measured in decades.
The larger issue is that many municipalities explicitly enforce the local cable co's monopoly. This takes the form of exclusive "pole attachment" contracts. The local governments took kickbacks from the first broadband company that came along. For a quick payday upfront, they screwed their constituents out of any sort of competitive marketplace.
> I disagree. Especially today, capital is highly abundant and dirt cheap. The markets are starved for yield on any sort of fixed income product, especially when it's secured by tangible assets with predictable cash flows.
I disagree here. Capital might be highly abundant and cheap in general but not necessarily in the ISP sector for startups. There are enormous costs associated with laying and maintaining fiber lines or building/launching internet satellites. SpaceX has an advantage by being able to launch their own satellites, it might not be profitable if they had to contract out all of their satellite deployments. I don't think investors will be eager to throw lots of capital at an ISP startup, especially after Google Fiber.
The "last-mile" problem has been around for a long time and doesn't seem to be going away, although wireless solutions (including Starlink) is one way to bypass that problem.
In my country they simply force the main ISP to open their network on fair rates. No need for and entire new physical network but there is competition.
For financial comparison, New Zealand (similar size/population to Oregon) used a lending model to fund a national fibre rollout in a private-public partnership.
“The Government will [initially] invest up to $1.35 billion [NZD] in the UFB network, which it expects to cost a total of $3.5b [NZD]. That includes $929m which it will invest directly in Chorus in interest-free loans and equity. [The government] will not be entitled to any dividends until 2025 and the loans will not be repaid in full until 2036. The difference between what it will pay and what it will get back will be $600m in today's money” - https://archive.vn/20170807221541/http://www.stuff.co.nz/bus...
If there is any corporate entity I'd happy giving public funding, it would be SpaceX. Their end goal is to settle Mars and potentially other bodies in the solar system. Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors, I am perfectly happy with funding SpaceX in every way possible.
They seem to be the first defense contractor in a long time, maybe ever, with a specific eye on controlling costs. It may not be this way forever, but for now the taxpayers should get the savings where they can.
Nobody should feel forced to work more than they want to. (The abjectly lazy aside.) But we should also be free to work as hard as we want. And to freely associate with those with similar preferences.
I used to love burning both ends of the candle. It was invigorating. I didn't ruin my health for it. And it gave me life lessons I could not have learned any other way. The fruits of those years, as well as finding other interests, nudged me to a different preference. Which involved new (or changed) colleagues. I don't see why, to be satisfied with one arrangement, we must denigrate the other--they're just different solutions.
Work and life don't balance on a scale. The dynamic is more like homeostasis. One's stable ratio depends on a variety factors, extrinsic and from within, and what makes one person happy will be ruinous or lethargic for another.
Surely SpaceX employees are there by choice. How many of their employees have no better work/life balance employment choices? I would guess a rare few.
1) Every defense contractor mentions interest in controlling costs; they bid against each other with these specific values in mind.
The problem is over-run and underestimation, and the govts' lack of flexibility with regards to contract termination in most instances.
2) Defense spending has been historically hovering between 15-25 percent in the United States.
'Taxpayer savings' does not, nor has it ever, indicated more money in the hands of the taxpayer -- it indicates how many new projects will be budgeted.
In other words : The tax payer saves nothing, but the military is given extra toys within the same budget.
Now, whether or not you are for or against the further arming of our troops and allied fighters -- that's a personal question.. but let's not pretend this equates to saved cash for the citizenry.
I would argue this is a bug for the taxpayers but a feature for the contractor. Much of their profit comes from change-orders after they win a poorly administered low-bid contract. It seems the M.O. often is "bid low to get the contract, and then argue/nickel-and-dime the taxpayer to pad the profit margin"
SpaceX is a defense contractor that is disrupting the market considerably. While much of the existing industry is slowly adopting modern development strategies (design, manufacturing, etc. in SW and HW), SpaceX is leading the agile front here.
More distinctly, SpaceX has the corporate intention of interplanetary exploration and settling. SpaceX's integration into the established defense/NASA business table will help this end come to fruition.
Imagine what we could do if it was possible to identify and fund a thousand Elon Musks with hundreds of millions each?
He's eliminating gas vehicles, improving solar adoption, fixing rural internet, improving space science, making life interplanetary, etc.
It may be that Elon Musk types are extremely rare but I doubt they're as nearly as rare as most people think and we only need a thousand out of billions. The thing that makes him extremely rare, I think, is that he lucked upon a windfall of $200+ million from PayPal, a startup success that he had almost nothing to do with.
Now that I think about it, an Elon Musk Prize funded and designed by Elon Musk would be viable. His current net worth could fund 600+ Elon Musks. Elon Musk could create more Elon Musks...it's almost too simple!
He also lucked out on inheriting fortunes from his parents diamond mines. But, there are lots of people who inherit fortunes and do nothing with it. There are lots of people with drive and intelligence comparable to Elon Musk who don't have the privilege necessary to accomplish anything. Seems we're still a long way away from a meritocracy.
“You get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after awhile,” he said. “And of course pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of sauce. And that can go pretty far, too.
“So it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, if I can live for a dollar a day then at least from a food cost standpoint, well it’s pretty easy to earn like $30 in a month anyway, so I’ll probably be okay.’ “
This isn’t the only example of a young Musk roughing it. When he started his first company, Zip2, he and his brother slept in their office instead of renting an apartment. They showered at the YMCA.
“We were so hard up, we had just one computer so the Web site was up during the day and I was coding at night,” Musk recalled during a commencement speech at USC. “Seven days a week, all the time.”
This is bollocks and the sort of mythology that CEO's also love to create about their "beginnings." Read up on Elon's family background and father, he didn't grow up on a farm or in an orphanage in darkest Congo... he lived a well-off and privileged childhood.
"We started Zip2 with ~$2k from me plus my overclocked home-built PC, ~$5k from my bro & ~$8k from Greg Kouri (such a good guy — he is greatly missed).
My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway."
"He didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt. I couldn’t even afford a 2nd PC at Zip2, so programmed at night & website only worked during day. Where is this bs coming from?"
"This is a pretty awful lie. I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my Mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queens Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford."
Not a rebuttal of the Zip2 seed investment point, but the ability to leave SA when he was 17 for CA/USA with a suitcase of books is not something most South Africans would be able to do. Kudos to him for doing it, but most of the population of SA wouldn't have even seen that many books.
It's pretty clear that Elon was from a wealthy*N background so the details are kind of irrelevant. Who bought the plain ticket?
There is also security, it's easier to take risks with strong familial support and fallback. Not saying this is a bad thing at all, it just is what it is.
This old bullshit anti-Musk propaganda nonsense again. Some people will just do anything to prove that actually there are no special people. Everything is just privilege, we would have 100s of Elon Musk if only not for income inequality.
And if reality doesn't actually line up with that, hey why not just invent a bunch of stuff.
We can do this infinity. Somebody that grew up poor in the US has success. Well, he had food as a child, 100s of starving African could have done the same, but 'who don't have the privilege necessary'.
So lets not give credit to anybody ever. If you were not a slave in Somilia at 13 that swam across the ocean by yourself and then build a new technology from the ground up, you deserve nothing and you are just one of those no good privileged people.
Well, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship but there aren't many of them and the funding is a few orders of magnitude less. Perhaps somewhat made up for in social network/connections.
I've wanted to read about what happened if anyone ever decided to apply Asimov's filter at earlier ages. His filter was simply having interest in particular science fiction. https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/1963-asimov
I think the amount makes all the difference. A $200 million windfall is enough for FU money AND and investing. SpaceX and Tesla would not have existed, or would have failed, had Elon Musk not have his own fortune to call upon. He had planned to invest a portion but ended up needing all of his money.
Peter Thiel is a big part of why PayPal succeeded. PayPal enabled Elon Musk. I think Thiel also invested in various Elon Musk projects, so we probably do want more Peter Thiels.
I wouldn’t characterize defense spending as waste. China is a significant threat, for example, and maintaining superiority over them is of national importance IMO.
Some defense spending is reasonable, but we could get a lot while limiting things to say 200 - 300 Billion per year. That’s 4-6 times what the UK spends for example and they have 2 aircraft carriers etc.
Calling the British navy a battle ready fleet would be rather a positive attitude. Their submarine and surface ship captains don't know how to navigate, running aground and into other boats. And their aircraft carriers don't even have enough crew/planes and will deploy US Marine Corp units to meet their full complement. It will likely take the UK 15-20 years for the two new Carriers to be at full operating capability (2009-TBD, probably 2024 at the earliest).
That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.
What are you saying about UK ships not knowing how to navigate? The US navy is far, far worse in that respect, the British navy hasn't had anything near as bad as this happen anytime recently:
Over the last few years there have been several (4-5) instances of British subs nearly striking surface ships in their home waters. Also running aground right outside their home port in 2010. Not exactly reassuring.
The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.
Near misses are fairly common in all large navies, that says little about the British capacity for warfare. For example both the USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain actually had significant collisions yet the US Navy is generally considered by far the strongest in the world.
> For example both the USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain actually had significant collisions yet the US Navy is generally considered by far the strongest in the world.
The series of four accidents including those two in a short period in the US 7th Fleet was considered a sign of very significant problems. It is not at all typical of large, capable navies.
I agree that these incidents where a sign of significant issues. My point what they said little about the US Nacy’s overall capacity for warfare. Rates of accidents that are completely unacceptable in peacetime are a rounding errors in a significant war.
> My point what they said little about the US Navy’s overall capacity for warfare.
The reason for the fairly significant consequences, the global stand down, etc., is because, as many experts wrote at the time, they said a lot about the US Navy’s capacity for warfare.
> Rates of accidents that are completely unacceptable in peacetime are a rounding errors in a significant war.
Sure, because war results in change in priorites in which the same skill and capacity will produce a much higher accident rate than peacetime.
But a high peacetime accident rate, even if lower than the accident rat that would be acceptable in wartime, demonstrates an institutional incapacity to operate as directed successfully, which is a severe warfighting liability.
> But a high peacetime accident rate, even if lower than the accident rat that would be acceptable in wartime, demonstrates an institutional incapacity to operate as directed successfully, which is a severe warfighting liability.
Or simply a vastly different set of priorities. Navy ships are generally supposed to operate as a unit as their threatened by a host of over the horizon missiles, supersonic aircraft etc. In a very real way crashing into unknown ships isn't something that’s considered as a meaningful risk.
The root cause of these safety issues is however deeper. Militaries are constantly cycling both technology and people through positions. The specific implementation of training and UI where at fault for these crashes which is directly addressable. However, the institutional approach of using new people and technology has huge upsides in war. You need to be able to quickly replace losses in warfare so you need to rely on training not experience, and you need to test that this training is effective. Similarly, you can’t rely on proven technology and it’s proven training because new threats are constantly arriving.
That's directly going to cause accidents and while minimizing them is important, the long term tradeoff is considered worth it.
Their submarine and surface ship captains don't know how to navigate, running aground and into other boats.
The USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain are US Navy ships that have both had serious collisions recently that lead to loss of life. Ships having accidents is not a particularly good measure of battle readiness.
This view presupposes that nations themselves are important, and that preserving the existence and concept of nations, and their superiority over other nations, isn't wasteful.
I doubt very much that the children born on Mars will share your view about the value of Earth nations.
It would be nice if we could get away from nations, but I'm not really ready to cede the game and entrust China with supremacy or even parity and hope that it all works out OK.
I left it intentionally ambiguous about my own opinions on the topic, as I am not interested in a nationalistic debate about my own views, as they aren't relevant here. (If you'd like to take an easy guess at them and discuss further, my email's in my profile.)
I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.
Nations are great. Not everyone agrees on all policies. My personal opinion is that I do not want to live in a censored or communist country (Such as China). Having borders and different countries allows multiple ideas to exist and folks can choose where to live.
This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options.
That doesn't appear to be a defect inherent to nations since there seems to be a pretty even split between free and non-free nations[0] Rather, it seems to be a problem of bad governance, corruption, ineffective or non-existent institutions, etc. My reason for favouring a world with many nations is that failures of those varieties are generally limited by the borders of the nations in which they occur. A world with a single governing body is a world with a single point of failure.
I can't think of a single scenario where having more tanks or fighter jets would be decisive in a full scale conflict between nuclear powers.
Suppose the US and China get into a direct conflict. How does the US having a 10x advantage in the number of traditional arms vs only, say, 2x stop China from threatening to obliterate humanity with nukes the minute their leadership is facing an existential crisis?
Nukes have pretty much ensured via MAD that there is no future "full scale direct conflict" between major powers. No matter how narcissistic some despot might be, their overwhelming self-interest still realizes there's not much power held over an empty parking lot or when vaporized into the side of a building. It's proxy wars from here on out.
Given that, you can't think of a single scenario where having multiple floating runways would possibly benefit wartime?
Does something like Starlink prevent direct conflict, though?
Imagine a world where anyone can get unfettered internet access. Instead of the great Firewall of China, citizens can just access a starlink satellite. How does that help with spreading democractic ideals? How does protesting and information dissemination look different? What if citizens in Iran, Middle East, Myanmar, etc. could all do the same thing?
I hope Starlink is thinking about these Big questions.
Accessing a starlink satellite requires a bulky and expensive piece of equipment that emits electromagnetic waves and so can be tracked and confiscated and the operator fined, imprisoned, or killed.
It doesn't seem like a very promising route for bypassing authoritarian government restrictions on the Internet.
You want defense contractors well paid. It’s a industry rife for corruption and bribery. I want my defense workers well paid so they won’t even think about trying to profit by selling information.
It's not an either-or. This canard comes up a lot. The US federal government invests in an enormous number of things, think of it as a huge portfolio. NASA's budget is less than 0.5% of the federal budget, it's existence won't harm policies needed to mitigate climate change (e.g. carbon taxes), and indeed, a chunk of NASA's investment helps climate science.
Oh I didn't mean what you think I meant. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear.
I'm not one of those "why spend money on space when humans are starving on Earth" people.
My point was more about the actual technology required to terraform a planet. Why talk about terraforming Mars when our own would be saved by the same non-existent tech.
Oh sorry, my bad. I'm just triggered from seeing that argument so much. I agree, we need to terraform earth first. 1) stop the damage from getting worse 2) if it doesn't reverse itself, we may need geo-engineering, carbon capture, orbital mirrors, etc
And? Building bases on the moon, mars, or the asteroid belt doesn't require terraforming, anymore than living on an Antarctic base through winter requires the ability to farm for food, and wear a bikini.
We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste, the money is mostly spent on earth, dual use technology comes out of it, and it opens the possibility of space tourism, not to mention just cheaper launch capabilities (driven by the need to send a million tons to Mars) also benefit building a better space-based asteroid/comet defense system too.
>We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste
That's because they are framed as a more immediate existential threat. Humans are present biased and don't like to spend lots of money on low-probability events until they are unavoidable (see: attitudes towards pandemic preparations in 2019).
Actually we don’t fix stuff as a species until people start dying. How long it takes is how much bad PR is involved. Avoiding that bad PR instead of solving the problem is an art that we have become better at than solving problems.
Yup. Paul Krugman once said something to the effect that the human race would benefit from an Alien Invasion, because the way things are going, we don't invest in the planet, we don't unify and put aside petty grievances and selfishness, until there's a unified enemy.
If an actual high probability ELE asteroid collision was detected, people would get their shit together real quick. Or maybe not, the COVID crisis has shattered my faith. I'm sure a bunch of people would claim the asteroid prediction is a NASA scam to install socialism or something.
Talking about terraforming is kind of off-topic, but I would note that the articles refer specifically to terraforming by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, which has pros and cons. It would raise the temperature, but it wouldn't result in human-breathable atmosphere, if that was a goal.
Perhaps there aren't any better alternatives, but I'd think that orbital mirrors at least would be an option (like the soletta from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy), though the scale of construction would be beyond anything that's been done before even if it were extremely thin. Placing a million square miles of mylar into space doesn't sound like an easy problem, though something much smaller and specifically focused at, say, the equator or specific sites might be more practical.
I don't know if those who would argue against funding SpaceX take the "either traditional defense contractors or SpaceX" bait. I think a major argument is that there are better ways to spend the money here on Earth. I.e., it's nobler and more feasible to protect and improve this planet than settle another one.
As a former space industry worker, I don't know if I subscribe to that, but that's the best steelmanning I can come up with.
The counter argument to that, is that it is worth while to do things, even if there are other things that are worth while to do. For any single item one can pick out "Why spend on X, when Y has a need", someone else can come along and say "Why spend on Y when Z has a need".
I think that's exactly the point. It's a disagreement about what gets priority to get optimized. The problem is exacerbated when there are multiple giant sinks for resources (e.g., colonizing Mars, combating climate change). In a world of limited resources, some things have to get sidelined.
I think colonizing Mars is pretty small sink compared to climate change and many others. With how SpaceX going, I think for the first stage it's comparable to something like one modern Olympic games event cost.
>first stage it's comparable to something like one modern Olympic games event cost.
To continue on with the steelmanning, the first stage is probably a drop in a bucket compared to the entire effort. How much freight do you think it would take to colonize a planet with a population large enough to be relatively self-sufficient? Just the payload cost would be huge and that's just to park it (not to assemble, maintain etc.) I think the steelman argument would be to focus on things immediately needed, like healthcare, before space adventurism.
Edit: to put a finer point on it, the commercial space industry is essentially subsidized by the government precisely because it's not currently economical. In other words, if the government wasn't a customer there would be no commercial space industry. There's nothing inherently wrong with this because it's how high-risk industries often get started (e.g., the airlines), but the fact that it is subsidized by the government points to the fact that it is (currently) inherently uneconomical
So if SpaceX shuts down their entire operations (and lets include all rocket companies), then that would completely fix health care and the climate crises? I'm not following the logic of how that would work.
It is basically a larger version of the argument "Well, if you are so poor, why did you drink that cup of coffee this morning?"
>that would completely fix health care and the climate crises?
At no point did I say it's a magic bullet that would "completely fix" any of that. But spending hundreds of millions directly on healthcare would likely pay more healthcare dividends than, say, some unintended materials science application that started in rocket engine development.
How exactly do you think funding gets doled out? They aren't just given a blank check...Agencies request a certain amount, then as the sausage gets made on Capitol Hill, some programs are shaved, others are padded. The people in those discussions are bringing their priorities to the table and, in some cases, will have to make concessions like not having their metaphorical coffee in order to save a higher priority project.
I agree, spending more money on healthcare in the states would be fruitless, as the US already pays more per capita for healthcare than any other nation.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be snarky/sarcastic but do you understand some of the dynamics that bear this out?
For example, the U.S. pays more than 40% (down from 50%) of the worlds medical R&D. They essentially subsidize healthcare for much of the rest of the world (meaning the U.S. bears more of the cost so other countries can have cheaper care). There's plenty wrong with the U.S. healthcare system that needs fixing, but trite sentences don't begin to capture the real nature of the problem.
My disagreement with these arguments is not around what gets prioritized. I disagree with the fundamental premise that we have to pick at all. Human civilization is not single threaded. We can absolutely colonize Mars while solving global warming. In fact I can even imagine ways in which colonizing Mars can help solve global warming.
While I'm generally in favor of what SpaceX is doing, I don't think your point holds up in any sort of constrained environment. Could there be a marginal (or even reasonable) tangential benefit to other industries? Of course, but not as much as if those industries were the primary focus to begin with.
With limited resources, you have to prioritize or else you can run the risk of being spread so thin nothing is adequately funded so nothing really gets accomplished. You can't fight a war on all fronts, all the time.
What you're saying is true but I don't believe humans to be in any kind of "constrained environment" if more people can work on ad delivery and social media marketing than space exploration and environmental engineering combined.
>I don't believe humans to be in any kind of "constrained environment"
I probably didn't do a good job of explaining that I meant "constrained environment" in the operations research sense. Everything rooted in the real world is constrained. Why don't we each take a private jet to work everyday? Because we're constrained on money. If we're not constrained on money, we're constrained on time. If it's not that, we're constrained by the amount of carbon we can release and still have a reasonably favorable environment for humans.
One of the reasons the Space Shuttle became somewhat of a boondoggle was because of this. They had a constrained budget but had to meet the demands of multiple, often competing, stakeholders. Musk knows this; he knows that NASA has constraints he doesn't. He doesn't have to spread his facilities across multiple States to help ensure support from as many Congress people as possible. He doesn't have to expose himself to the same level of political risk that can change every four years. He can optimize under a different set of constraints, but it would be a mistake to assume he's unconstrained.
Again, I disagree with the framing. Colonizing Mars and global warming are not wars, they are opportunities. There are countless ways humans can spend their time and energy but none of them exist in a vacuum. Progress anywhere is progress everywhere.
I mean, defense contractors look at hot wars as opportunities as well. And they do drive technology forward, perhaps even more than any other force in this discussion. But that's not to say they don't have negative externalities that shouldn't be ignored.
The problem with the "spend it here" argument is that there is plenty of money to be spent here. Nobody wants to.
How many trillions are spent on war? On corporate subsidies and kickbacks on everything else? How much money is wasted in so many other stupid things? We have a GDP rising at a faster rate than our populations and have for decades. We don't spend the that extra money helping people. We could, but we don't.
And then people look to NASA and SpaceX and say "Look at all that waste".
Meanwhile, this money is going to go to providing low-cost internet all over America (and then the rest of the world). It's going to provide a real, tangible benefit to people at a lower cost than the alternatives.
I addressed this in a different comment, but the distinction is one of immediacy of existential threat. The DoD funding is framed in this context (and 60 years ago, NASA's as well - when it was almost 10x the fraction of GDP that it is today).
If people think there is an existential threat to their way of life, it's hard to convince them to take from that pocket to fund something more fanciful and likely only relevant generations away (if ever). That's the insidious part of the military boogeyman...and SpaceX probably knows this as well since they garner defense contracts too.
This money is being spent to improve things here on Earth. This is about providing internet to underserved communities on Earth. Now you could argue that SpaceX has made it clear that they created Starlink to increase their funding for settling Mars (developing Starship etc) but at the same time StarLink stands to be a huge boon for people in communities that don't have access to high speed internet currently and that seems like a win-win. According to the article, Charter Communications made even more money ($1.22 billion) from the FCC as part of this deal, I don't see anyone on here complaining about how Charter chooses to spend the profits from this deal, it's certainly not going to go to settling Mars.
Indeed, this is a great example of space exploration benefiting life on earth. If Elon didn’t want to colonize Mars he wouldn’t have started SpaceX which then wouldn’t have developed reusable rockets that make a LEO broadband constellation economically feasible.
And that’s just the beginning of the technology needed to fully achieve his ambitions.
>This is about providing internet to underserved communities on Earth.
Anytime lines like this get written, be suspect.
>I don't see anyone on here complaining about how Charter chooses to spend the profits from this deal, it's certainly not going to go to settling Mars.
I complain all the time about the cable companies, but this is a thread about SpaceX. As irrelevant as that comment is, it's even less relevant arguing that using funds to build a LEO/VLEO satellite ISP (that will probably get divested at some point) will somehow help them get to Mars. Commercially there's no point in going to Mars so it takes political willpower and nations to finance it on a scale that's many orders of magnitude greater than anything done at the moment (more than even the JWST).
> it's nobler and more feasible to protect and improve this planet than settle another one
That's an incredibly short sighted argument. As if this planet will last forever. I don't get this attitude at all. It's like saying why plan for the future at all!
It's probably a matter of convention. We consider solar a renewable resource even though the sun will eventually die out. Humans are wired to think little beyond generational timelines, not geological ones.
I think greed and hedonic adaptation can also lead to this. There's no monopoly on some of the lesser angels of human nature.
That link is assuming that the ends justify the means, which I tend to believe is the road to evil. In this case, there are more foundational principals that would take precedence.
You touch on the primary flaw of "spend the money here on Earth" argument.
Money spent on space programs IS spent here on Earth. The money paid to engineers and fabricators and for raw materials goes to pay for house payments, durable goods, food and taxes of the individuals working on these projects. And those payments create jobs delivering these services, which benefits an ever increasing number of people.
It's not as if dollar bills were litterally burned to provide rocket thrust.
I think you’re taking the phrasing too literally. It is meant to confer the money should be spent on programs that directly contribute to more people’s lives than just those who work on the specific program.
Your same argument can be used for the defense contractors as well and people will still line up to argue it’s not the best use of tax dollars
This program is about giving internet to under-served communities so their children can do remote schoolwork and things like that. What exactly is your problem with that?
I, personally, don’t have an issue with it. The context was that I am trying to give a good faith steelman argument for those who don’t think it’s the best use of money when other, perhaps more pressing, problems exist here “on earth” (quotations being used because I think the original intent of the phrase was too literally interpreted).
To extend that argument, is it better to give underserved internet access or spend the money on something that potentially saves someone’s life, like mosquito netting? I think even though HN is very in love with high tech problems, many would argue we could serve humanity better by prioritizing those lower tech problems that tend to solve more fundamental needs
Also, when a company has such an impactful goal that will, if successful, lead to it having power, it feels important that it's at least somewhat tied to the government.
I'm very capitalistic, but if SpaceX successfully colonizes Mars and builds factories there, I can imagine some frightening scenarios where it has considerable control over the U.S. rather than the U.S. having control over it.
Yes, sending your enemies to Mars is the best defense for sure. Nobody in their right mind would voluntarily spend the rest of their lives in a can filled with a few cubic feet of recycled air.
While I absolutely agree that defense contractor spending is an abhorrent waste of public funds, this is a bad take. Literally every company in this space (ISP's, and more so ISP's that utilize satellites) have used it as a platform to grift public funds. Examples include Lightsquared, Iridium, Globalstar, and the worst of all, DISH) SpaceX has significantly reduced the cost of building a satellite ISP but you need to consider the history here and the other players that have already cost American citizens a shitload of wasted money and resource.
If the FCC believed they should give assistance to SpaceX, it should have been in the form of access to the spectrum Charlie Ergen has been squatting over at DISH making the same promises SpaceX is doing right now. For those unaware of Ergan's history, the FCC for the first time decided to give a light wrist slap over setting up a constellation of fake shell corporations to bid on spectrum that included rural and small carrier subsidies. DISH has blown every build-out deadline and it's set back terrestrial carriers for years now. There were two they completely blew off that came due this year, and the only purpose they served was as an excuse to let the Sprint/TMUS merger happen, where previously TMUS had been calling out their business practices. I'm aware every Elon fanboy is going to wax poetic about how it won't be the same, but I'd caution you to consider SolarCity and what a public funds debacle that has been. There's a history of making big promises in areas and leaving a mess.
Running an ISP is an easy to understand business model, either be the only option in an area or provide better service (and/or price) then incumbents. As others in this thread have said, there's already a shitload of capital flowing around, so why should this capital come from the public. Why didn't Elon just run another 'Deposit $100 to get in line for Starlink!' As it stands most of the US is stuck with shit ISP's because of a lack of competition, and giving subsidies to incumbents (like Charter) are only going to enrich them and further entrench their monopolies.
SpaceX didn't launch this service as a practical or sensible business model for them, they already get paid to launch other telecommunications equipment into space, they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit.
I think this time it really is different. SpaceX has already reduced launch cost by an order of magnitude, and if Starship is successful another 1-2 orders of magnitude. This gives them a huge advantage over other LEO constellation attempts.
I don’t think this money is necessary for their success but if the money is there for the taking why wouldn’t they take it?
Why do you look at the history of telecommunication companies rather than the history of SpaceX?
They received subsidies for electric cars and delivered electric cars.
They received subsidies for space travel and they delivered both cargo and humans to the space station.
Now they receive subsidies on for telecommunication, given the two previous deliveries, what makes you think this third one will suddenly go the grift route?
>They received subsidies for electric cars and delivered electric cars.
Majority of the subsidies (around 70%?) were indirect on EV's through buyer incentive credits. I wouldn't directly consider this a Tesla subsidy as any established auto manufacturer could claim it with an electric vehicle. The remaining subsidies were far less than this FCC subsidy is.
> Why do you look at the history of telecommunication companies rather than the history of SpaceX?
Because when a company that isn't a telecommunications company decides to be one, it's important to understand why and the best way to do so is to look at the history of the industry and the behavior of principle executives in the company deciding to pivot.
>They received subsidies for space travel and they delivered both cargo and humans to the space station.
This was a great success and they should absolutely be commended for this. There are situations where the public and SpaceX have received a mutual benefit. The GPS, ISS missions, and Lockheed defense contracts all saved taxpayers a ton of money.
> Now they receive subsidies on for telecommunication, given the two previous deliveries, what makes you think this third one will suddenly go the grift route?
Sweeping aside that this is the way it's always been for a market that should not require subsidies now that costs can actually be amortized (unlike previously for Iridium), there's already a track record of scandals around their Elon-associated affiliates looting public funds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity#Lawsuits_and_investi...
> SpaceX didn't launch this service as a practical or sensible business model for them, they already get paid to launch other telecommunications equipment into space, they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit.
This is pretty much nonsense. Spend 10min actually researching the market and you would know it is nonsense.
Rocket launches are tiny part of the space market, even if SpaceX had a monopoly it would not be that much money. Also, the most valuable launches are trying up and there are not nearly enough of them for SpaceX to continue to grow.
Telecommunications however is a much bigger market, and that is why SpaceX is going into it. There is a gigantic market to be captured and SpaceX with cheap launch and amazing sat technology have a chance to do it. This is also a global play, the idea that this was done just to get access to US subsidies is nonsensical.
They have been planning for this for many, many, many years long before it was even clear if they could get access to this FCC subsidy at all, something that was disputed until just a couple months ago. They didn't invest multiple billion into this project to hopefully get less then 1 billion back in the next 10 years.
As to why SpaceX takes advantage of this, why should they not? SpaceX would do the same thing without these funds, but why not take advantage of it if the government offers it?
> Mars .... Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors
Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? Surely it's easier than starting from even less resources and livable environment than Mars.
There is a cultural myth in New Age communities that humans decimated Mars and came to Earth after, or something like that. We should fix Earth first
There's not much we can do if Earth is hit with another giant asteroid. Or some massive biological or radiological disaster. Or some other type of impossible to predict or mitigate disasters that could render Earth uninhabitable for humans. Musk's goal is to make the human race multi-planetary, not escape to Mars. Just as you should back up your critical data more than one hard drive, or run redundant servers to ensure your service runs reliably, populating multiple planets would ensure the continuity of the human race should some disaster befall us on Earth.
> Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors
SpaceX tenders for and receives contracts from the DoD. Such as one in August for Space Command launches and another in October for Earth-bound delivery of payloads. So they're a defence contractor.
The government has been subsidizing rural ISPs for quite a while. This effort is much more reasonable than many similar efforts because unlike many of the people sucking up these subsidies, it actually reaches everyone. Most of the carriers who accepted subsidies to increase rural internet access just picked the low hanging fruit and often introduced new service in regions which were already covered by other services.
My old house was stuck on 10GB service for years while ISPs bumped up subsidized service to many closer in/ semi rural areas. I have good access now, but just a few years ago I'd have loved the option of getting SpaceX's service at full price.
I live in the Mission hills of SF Bay and pay $600 / mo for internet via mobile hotspot (LTE). HughesNet is terrible. Nothing else is available. I can't wait for Starlink beta!
> $600 / mo for internet via mobile hotspot (LTE).
I'm not familiar with that area but my mind boggles at this amount. What kind of speeds do you get? Are that ISP able to offer a cheaper deal of some sort, eg 12 months? Why is it so much!?
Wishing you well, I hope you get Starlink soon in your area, or any alternatives.
I would assume it's so expensive due to data usage. Anything over LTE I've seen has ridiculously low data caps. I think as part of this funding the FCC should have a mandatory requirement of no data caps, or a cap of something more reasonable like 10TB a month that increases 5TB every X number years.
I assume you don't have kids stuck at home during covid. I have friends that are burning through 1TB of data a month like it's nothing. Between zoom/webex meetings all day for everyone in the family, and netflix in the evenings because they can't really go play with other friends, 1TB is a joke.
Heck, Cyberpunk 2077 is a 70GB download ALONE - that's 7% of your cap gone from you or your kid installing one game.
That game will provide you plenty of content for that data. Anyway, just because a few people use ~1TB of data doesn't mean every LTE plan should provide 10TB. You are asking for a 500x increase in the typical LTE data plan.
I said people receiving the fcc funding. As far as I know, none of the LTE players have been taking funds. If they have been I guess I don’t really care if it’s a 5x or 500x increase, it’s a reasonable requirement in 2029 IMO. The cost of transit bandwidth is nothing.
I'm not OP, but my parents house in Missouri sits around $300/mo for internet via mobile hotpot, occasionally getting up to around $500/mo in the months were a lot of family visit. HughesNet is their only available ISP, so they just went with a data plan through either AT&T or T-Mobile ("unlimited" but with a data cap with expensive overages that also drop you down to dialup-esque speeds) and stick that SIM card in their router.
There was also a brief stint of time when I lived in Europe in a long-term Airbnb that didn't tell us there was a data cap (and since we weren't real residents, we couldn't set up our own internet) and I got nearly $500/mo for a few months doing video calls for work etc from my LTE.
I assume they will eventually dynamically price based on density, to ensure it's available to whoever needs it and not where other equivalent or faster options are available for less money.
By definition I think the places that need Starlink the most won't hit density limits. But I think a lot of people will buy Starlink just because it's Starlink -- anything so their dollars aren't going to Comcast.
I think I read somewhere the beam size for starlink is around 200km diamater. That's actually really far. You'd probably want to service rural areas fairly distant from metro areas well, rather than slam the sat with a handful of suburban city customers.
I could be wrong but my guess is they will blacklist areas near cities entirely at least to begin with and focus on very rural areas with literally no alternative (no LTE etc).
Personally I think Starlink is going to have capacity crisis quickly if takeup is anywhere near as strong as demand seems to be and I'm sure SpaceX know this, so by fcoussing almost entirely on very rural areas (and maybe niche commercial/govt uses in more urban enviroments) they have a chance at managing demand a bit. Or they will start ramping up cost of service and/or putting very punitive bandwidth caps on (like all other sat providers).
I still think Starlink is an amazing breakthrough, but it really is a solution only for the 'last'/most rural 1% of households (or less).
or buy a grandfathered plan off of ebay that has truly unlimited (no throttling) for less than $100 a month
or there's dozens of other options with hundreds of GBs of data per month that are a fraction of the $600 a month you're paying. There is no reason to be paying that much and there are other options you haven't considered.
>Riddle me this, would SpaceX not have built out Starlink if they didn't get this subsidy?
I feel like that's a rhetorical question, but the obvious answer is yes.
>Since they already put Starlink satellites in orbit without any guarantees of subsidies, was this good use of government funds?
I suppose that depends: if Space-X's original timeline was 10 years... is it more or less valuable to the US to have broadband access on an accelerated timeline? My guess is, especially in the face of covid, the more access to high speed the better.
Would you rather have had those funds going to Frontier and Comcast? The funds are GOING to be spent, the only question is how. Not having rural broadband has been deemed an unacceptable outcome by the majority of Americans. The way the funds have been spent to date have definitely been a mixed bag.
I don't think the logic holds up here. It is conceivable that SpaceX could have entered into the market to disrupt the relatively lo-tech GEO options without FCC subsidy options (I think you agree here). Hughes (a GEO provider) themselves received a subsidy despite their being well established in North America. To ask that about SpaceX is to ask the same question about Hughes.
In the age of COVID-19, any investment in ISP infrastructure is beneficial.
Can the subsidy be used to accelerate making the service available to more users sooner, and at higher quality? Most likely yes, because with the design of Starlink, more satellites gives better service.
A related question: Were early subsidies into solar power a big help in climbing the learning curve while solar power had uncompetitive performance/$, or did advancements in related disciplines like chip manufacturing carry most of the weight?
Because not everyone has full freedom in deciding where to live, and access to broadband is a positive factor for financial mobility and economic activity.
City/population-center living is wildly inefficient for a host of reasons, and a dollar of urban development towards a major metropolis goes much less far than a dollar of urban development for a rural community.
We deal with the inadequacies of living in such big population dense areas because we want to; not because it's efficient.
Turns out it's not efficient to stack up as many people vertically as possible.
It over-burdens local municipal systems to the point of skyrocketing economic costs, creates more job scarcity due to sheer population and high real-estate costs, and creates untenable situations during times where population density is a net-negative, like during a pandemic.
Rural living has major problems too; lack of access to high quality services and travel come to mind -- but these are things that can be improved upon, and by every metric these things are improving.
There is no such game-plan for dealing with the burdens of heavy density populations mid-city; it's considered to be a fact of life.
>We deal with the inadequacies of living in such big population dense areas because we want to; not because it's efficient.
>Turns out it's not efficient to stack up as many people vertically as possible.
>It over-burdens local municipal systems to the point of skyrocketing economic costs, creates more job scarcity due to sheer population and high real-estate costs, and creates untenable situations during times where population density is a net-negative, like during a pandemic.
These are all exactly the opposite of true? It's very efficient to stack people vertically. What's not efficient is delivering sewer service to people whose houses are a half mile apart or having someone drive 60 miles round trip in a single occupancy vehicle to get to work every day.
To answer your related question, I believe that the answer is yes.
As https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c... explains, Wright's law says that while a technology is improving, we generally get a fixed percentage drop in cost every time we double production. Therefore the production increases thanks to subsidies caused those cost drops to come much sooner than they would have otherwise.
SpaceX has had 42,000 satellites approved. They have just under 1000 operational and are about half-way to phase 1. Which will only be able to provide broadband for a limited number of users at latitudes for Canada and some northern US states. (That is why they are doing beta programs, they don't have the capacity for more.)
Money to launch more satellites will give the company the ability to get broadband for more people in more of the rural USA much more quickly. It also helps Starlink through a chicken and egg problem where they can't make money unless they have satellites up, and they can't put satellites up unless they get money.
The subsidy isn't large enough to pay for all the satellites they need. They have money to launch more satellites and will be doing more launches subsidy or no subsidy.
The subsidy will only go directly to their bottom line.
First, the fact that they have the money to launch more satellites does not mean that they have the money to launch ALL the satellites that the full system needs. Indeed their projected cost for fully setting up Starlink is $10 billion dollars, which is more than the projected operating profit that they have had over their entire history. So it is easy to see that they won't be able to complete unless they get more money along the way.
In fact there is a significant risk that if they make less than they hope, that the company runs out of money and goes out of business. This subsidy reduces that risk, and therefore makes them more likely to complete, and likely to complete faster.
To achieve this purpose, the subsidy should be sized to help them over the hump, and not to pay all their costs. (Whether we should be handing out subsidies is a different question that I'm ignoring. Our government has chosen to, and the question is how to succeed.) Therefore there is nothing odd about the fact that it is less than 10% of the total amount of money that they think they will need. They aren't doing Starlink in the hopes of getting the subsidy. But the subsidy improves their odds of succeeding at Starlink.
And finally, you claim that the subsidy will only go directly to their bottom line. Which is to say that it shows up as profit and goes to Elon and other shareholders in the company.
It is true that plenty of companies operate that way. However after 20 years of running companies, it is extremely safe to say that Elon does not. In fact he tends to take every scrap of money that his company is generating, finds ways to borrow or raise more, and then reinvests it into even more ambitious projects.
So he won't be taking it as profit. What will he use it on?
Well, the three big projects that Elon is working on right now is building Starship, building Starlink, and preparing to settle Mars. Of those, Starship is required to finish Starlink at a price point where it is a viable business, and Starlink is required to fund Mars. Therefore it is essentially certain that he will pour this money directly into Starship and Starlink, rather than taking any of it as immediate profit.
Therefore we have good reason to believe that this money will be used for its intended purpose. We have good reason to believe that this money will in fact improve the odds of success, and enable them to deliver that success sooner. And therefore this money actually helps achieve the goal that the US government has set.
As noted, there is a significant risk of Starlink going out of business. The RDOF grants are not venture funding, and should not be used as such.
The FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund exists to bring high speed fixed broadband service to rural homes and small businesses that lack it.
I do not believe that Starlink would have excluded the areas it got subsidies for from service had it not gotten the subsidies.
Starlink must have ALL the money to launch and operate ALL the satellites it needs to become profitable. The subsidies do not even cover the cost of replacing deorbiting satellites.
> It is true that plenty of companies operate that way. However after 20 years of running companies, it is extremely safe to say that Elon does not. In fact he tends to take every scrap of money that his company is generating, finds ways to borrow or raise more, and then reinvests it into even more ambitious projects.
The objective of the government is not just to ensure that one or even two companies have infrastructure reaching most or all rural areas, but to ensure enough players in this field to establish a genuinely competitive market for pervasive rural internet access. The FCC has decided that without this subsidy there would not be enough companies offering enough access to enough areas to meet their mandate.
Given this goal, it’s simply unreasonable to deny funds to a company that has already set up that access, but only grant funds to new entrants. That clearly screws over the existing companies, which now can’t afford to compete on price with the new government funded entrants.
The only way to establish a level playing field and not penalise companies that already invested heavily is to give the grants regardless of past investment. Then you can genuinely allow the competitive market to establish fair and competitive prices for these customers. Free market principles should in theory ensure that this price competition should recoup a significant proportion of the subsidy costs for consumers and tax payers.
If that wee true, since Starlink will reach everywhere, they would only need to fund Starlink. In fact the OP would be correct and no subsidy would be needed since Starlink is already being built.
You can provide high bandwidth low latency access to the internet in places where not even 1.3B fiber subsidy’s won’t reach or you can build few hundred miles more fiber to mostly nowhere for the same price.
The fact is, starlink is the absolute best option in quite a few places - sparsely populated, far from dense urban areas. This is actually the best way to spend government money for that purpose even if it ends up in subsidizing terminal purchases.
If it helps ensure the diversity of ISP competition in the US market, then yes. $886m is a bargain if it helps meaningfully with that (assuming it's not a frequent subsidy).
There is a large difference between putting up a few percent of their constellation to reach initial minimum viability and putting up enough satellites to properly cover the rest of the world (a very expensive endeavor that will take years).
Plus, the US Government may directly benefit in a very big way from utilizing Starlink and that may make it a bargain compared to the alternatives. If US defense contractors were building that constellation, they'd be spending ten times what SpaceX is.
And that's before we get to the potential for intelligence gathering globally. The powers that be will be all over that, no matter what SpaceX claims to the contrary (SpaceX will have a gun to their head and will not have a choice, just as the Prism gang had no choice).
> If it helps ensure the diversity of ISP competition in the US market, then yes
The US ISP market is already fairly diverse. There are some 3000 ISPs in the US.
> $886m is a bargain if it helps meaningfully with that (assuming it's not a frequent subsidy).
Aye, therein lies the rub. Starlink will require a frequent and recurring subsidy, unless it can become profitable on its own.
Each and every satellite they put up will burn up in five years.
> There is a large difference between putting up a few percent of their constellation to reach initial minimum viability and putting up enough satellites to properly cover the rest of the world (a very expensive endeavor that will take years).
Maybe Starlink should have been required to demonstrate viability before allowing it to qualify for government subsidies?
> Plus, the US Government may directly benefit in a very big way from utilizing Starlink and that may make it a bargain compared to the alternatives. If US defense contractors were building that constellation, they'd be spending ten times what SpaceX is.
>
> And that's before we get to the potential for intelligence gathering globally. The powers that be will be all over that, no matter what SpaceX claims to the contrary (SpaceX will have a gun to their head and will not have a choice, just as the Prism gang had no choice).
If the DoD wants Starlink then they should pay for it themselves.
Are there any caveats to these subsidies, like allowing the government to tap all Starlink connections for surveillance, etc?
I mean the U.S. government already has such deals with other ISPs, and now the U.S. military wants to use Starlink, too, so I wouldn't be surprised if the DoD got involved in this FCC deal with SpaceX for more reasons than one.
I read a theory once that one of the reasons why so many Boomers were able to buy land or houses cheaply that later appreciated substantially in value was the interstate highway system built during WWII. Suddenly, a lot of real estate was in easy driving range of employers, and so there was a period of over-supply of highly desirable real estate.
I wonder if Starlink (and changes in work expectations due to the pandemic) will have a similar effect; a lot of rural land that people might have been inclined to move to if only they had some way to do their work remotely is now suddenly a realistic option.
Currently, or 5 years from now? Anyone working in the "services" industry, which is most of the United States, can work from home. And if the laws ever change for restaurants and auto-repair shops, I suspect you might see that being done from home as well.
I'd guess that user oedoedxef is referring to running a customer-facing business (a diner, an auto repair shop, or whatever) out of a primary residence, whether that means living in a commercially-zoned property or doing commerce in a residentially-zoned property or perhaps eliminating the distinction entirely.
Why is it strange? Why should us software developers be allowed to work from home, but others who need a livelihood and provide valuable services to society should not be allowed to produce goods from home?
After all, dentists and tailors see clients in their homes, and people who sell t-shirts online often manufacture and ship the goods from their home.
I don't know, but I suspect for the readership of Hacker News at least it's pretty high. (And I suspect there's a lot more people who can picture themselves working from home indefinitely than if you had asked the question a year ago.)
Not all jobs can be done remotely, but for the ones that can, the various impediments seem to be dropping away.
>What percent of workers do work that can be done remotely?
Not a huge number, but that's all you need to support a small town economy. It's like the plight of the rust belt -- you had small communities that relied on manufacturing job to support the local retail and services jobs. When those manufacturing jobs evaporated due to outsourcing those small towns imploded.
What percent of remote workers do their shopping at the local mom and pop vs. online? I would expect this is a much higher rate than non remote workers who are commuting past that mom and pop store every day, where it would be convenient to stop in and grab something on their way to work or home. Remote workers in a rural town have little reason to leave their house and go to town, which in a rural town might itself be a 10-15 min one way drive on unlit (and frequently unplowed in winter) roads that typically lack a sidewalk.
There is a big distinction between rural and towns. Even towns of 1-5k people are surprisingly dense since most were built out before urban sprawl became a trend.
I've had a similar thought regarding the impact of affordable autonomous vehicles, for two reasons. 1) Commuters who can read / game / whittle while they commute will be willing to commute farther, and 2) if widespread adoption of autonomous cars can mitigate the effects of traffic (i.e. enable us to actually drive the speed limit during rush hour, or at least closer to it), we'll be able to commute farther in the same amount of time.
Those effects combined would unlock an absolute ton of land around urban areas.
I have my doubts that autonomous cars will do much for traffic. Traffic doesn't necessarily happen because there are too many cars on the freeway, but too many cars on the much more limited capacity streets which back up onto the freeways. Everyone taking a self driving car into work isn't going to change the fact that traffic is bad because everyone insists on traveling 20'x5' apart from one another through a dense urban environment, which is the spacing a car gives you in bumper to bumper traffic.
Now autonomous articulated bus that can hold 60 people sitting down in the footprint of 3-4 cars, that's another story.
> more limited capacity streets which back up onto the freeways
These are often because of a bottleneck such as a traffic right (particularly left turn signal) or stop sign. If autonomous vehicles can be tweaked to increase throughput (better reaction times, shorter follow distance, less accidents, higher speed through chokepoints like tolls, not distracted or not accelerating slowly on light changes) you might see significant traffic reductions as a result. Little's law is applicable here.
The problems with bus or commuter lines is it's hard to get people to share a route efficiently. I've had it work in the past but only where I picked my housing according to an effective commuter line for my school or work. But that's hard to arrange at scale.
Where effective commuters line don't scale instead if you combine the above wins with an uber pool like service where 3-4 people are efficiently routed together. You could be looking at 2-3x fewer cars on roads that have better throughput and fewer bottlenecks.
> Traffic doesn't necessarily happen because there are too many cars on the freeway, but too many cars on the much more limited capacity streets which back up onto the freeways
That is true in the USA, which has absurdly short on and off ramps, but in my experience, many other countries around the world don't have this problem.
Canada, Australia and the UK all have much, MUCH longer on and off ramps, and traffic doesn't back up onto freeways. Freeways still clog up, however.
Major cities in all those countries are just as congested on the streets as American cities. Toronto in particular has some of the worst traffic on the continent.
Ain't a theory, it's by design: Robert Moses was the architect of this suburban vision of America. Not only did they pave the way out of the city, the highways also paved over the homes of millions of existing residents in the city, displacing them further out. Furthermore, highways were often used as barriers between rich and poor neighborhoods. You should read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York earned Robert Caro a Pulitzer prize for biography. I'm reading the first of his 5 part (and counting?) biography of Lyndon Johnson which I also highly recommend.
Subsidies for Frontier are pretty galling. I have an urban home in their original core market and they wouldn't bother fixing a phone line that went from 4Mb to 2Mb after switching to a new pair when the original went bad. They are pocketing everything and disinvesting in their wires.
This was a reverse auction, where the goal was to minimze cost to government to get high speed internet in rural areas.
Starlink bid in the Above Baseline tier, meaning ≥ 100/20 Mbps (with data cap of ≥ 2 TB).
According to the FCC [1], 99.7% of locations are at that tier or higher, and 85%+ in the highest Gigabit (1000/500) tier.
So it looks like the auction funded gigabit where there was a provider bidding at that tier, and the rest went heavily to SpaceX.
One question I have is whether these gigabit deployments actually happen, or if Starlink will pick off legacy business so quickly (full launch nationwide next year) such that rural providers aren't able to take the subsidies and actually implement the new offerings.
>One question I have is whether these gigabit deployments actually happen,
No.
Every time the US gives money to telecoms to roll out fiber, the telecoms play a shell game and disappear the money or use it to fight against municipalities that try to build their own infrastructure.
Thank you for that link. I remember the disappearance of the Project Pronto money in the 90s, and it's bothered me ever since. It's nice to know I didn't dream the whole thing.
Verizon signed a contract with NYC in 2008 to pull fiber to New Yorkers by 2014 and I still can't get fiber here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At this point I've really given up hope that I'll ever get fiber into the home on a reasonable time scale.
Money = power. The US is a barely veiled oligarchy.
As long as you have enough money to pay off politicians to make it completely ok, you can do whatever you like. After you pocket a bunch of money or whatever other shenigans you want, you dump a percentage of the money into the politcian's re-election campaign.
You don't even have to get politicians to make it legal, you could do other things like getting friendly with judges and passing them thinly veiled bribes as 'gifts'.
Most nerd-types I talk to are in complete denial about this. Almost every US federal judge is the spouse of a corporate lobbyist or political apparatchik. They even get caught sometimes having their spouses taking money from parties to the cases they are hearing but nothing ever happens to them.
In TX, a number of the rural telco providers already have really good service in the towns they cover. Presumably at least partially due to previous handouts of the universal service fund being used for broadband. So I assume the higher tier rollouts are in similar situations.
For example there is a rural co-op that covers a number of the towns just west of where I live. The towns actually have better service than I do (cheaper, and faster) because the entire town is a mile or two along a major highway, and a few rows of residential streets. The density is at least as good as the suburban area I live in for a square mile or so.
Drive a few miles out of town though, and your on some kind of wireless or sat service.
If you find a spot on Earth with no radio waves let us know.
AM goes pretty far, even amateur radio can travel across continents in the right atmospheric conditions.
GPS
Satellite TV
Every other civilian and military Comsat since we started launching things.
Starlink isn’t the problem if you are worried about being “irradiated”, the nuclear fusion reactor at the center of our solar system is likely of greater concern.
GPS and Satellite TV are different, plus, your way of thinking is flawed - just because there are precedents, it doesn't mean we should continue to add on top of them! In addition to light pollution, radio pollution is worse than ever. After Starlink setting a brew type of precedent, more will try doing the same.
But the number of satellites doesn't affect your ability to go somewhere without being irradiated.
GPS and TV sats beam radio signals to most habitable parts of the planet already. If you're worried about "radio pollution" I don't see how Starlink makes a huge difference.
Starlink won't cover the poles so maybe a bunker in Antarctica is an option.
Starlink is operating at mmwave frequencies directly in the ionosphere, which is electrically connected to the ground. A small current passes through each of us, and that current is now being polluted with unnatural oscillations which can affect living tissues, especially the mitochondria. As a result insects are dying, birds are falling out the sky, etc. This is a serious environmental and health problem.
Read the book, "The invisible Rainbow: A history of electricity and life".
Tesla was built before tax payer money, they got loans for scaling. They paid them back with interest, the tax payer profited.
SpaceX was also mostly built with Musk's personal fortune, after they developed the Merlin engine, and got the Falcon 1 to orbit, only then did they get contracts from NASA, and they actually saved NASA money, because SpaceX launch costs are significantly lower, ergo, in a way, they also paid the taxpayer back.
Pretty much most large successful companies have been subsidized by tax payer money in some way, if not by direct loans or contracts, then by taking publicly financed research from the military or academia, and commercializing it. Silicon Valley was started by Fairchild Semiconductor whose first contracts were military contracts. Computing started out funded by military. The CIA through In-Q-Tel put $150 million into 90 companies, including Google. Google Maps, acquired from Keyhole, was a CIA funded satellite mapping company.
Let's dispense with the rugged individualism. We all benefit from the government, and we all have a duty to pay it forward.
So, Elon Musk first flirted with Democrats, because this is how he got the buddy favors. But this year, he probably saw a change in the wind and started to flirt with Republicans - I expect him following the wind again...
What would you do if the local mafia showed up at your business and said "Nice little space/car company you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it?"
Call it an act of cowardice, but all of the top companies are currying favor with governments, because cronyism is everywhere, and if you are not in the game, you are out of it.
Do you think SpaceX would have beat ULA, who literally had the Apollo moon landing astronauts badmouthing competitors in front of congress, if they had not curried favor?
China is an especially great example of this: Don't play ball, you lose. (e.g. Google leaves China). Play ball, and find yourself continually kow-towing to keep the goodies flowing, as Tim Cook travels every year to Beijing and stroking the hearts of the government or nationalists.
Until we end money in politics and ban the revolving door of lobbyists, we're not going to address the problem of contracts being handed out with questionable rationale.
Very well put. And to your first question - in the 90s when a friend and I had a custom PC business is Bulgaria, the mafia showed up at our business and started to negotiate a monthly insurance policy, we kicked them out. They didn't show up again and didn't do anything to our business... but, yeah, we were too small and too lucky. I'm sure if we had a lot more to lose, we'd have probably reacted differently. But I still recall them starting negotiations at 1,000 Deutsche Marks (the German currency before the Euro) per month down to 100 DEM and I still kept saying "No." Fun times!
I don't have a terrible issue with this, it's actually not very much money and could have good benefits that have an economic impact much larger than $886M. I am against wasteful spending, but I believe on an economic/GDP basis this will more than pay for itself in the long run.
Currently the beta is geo-locked to within about 35 miles of there address you signed up for it.
Elon has said multiple times it will work perfectly well on a yacht crossing the pacific, a moving train, etc., so we have to assume the "stay in one place" restriction will go away.
Country borders will be interesting though, I assume many want to tightly control how you communicate with sats.
Currently (beta) it only works at the registered address (30mile radius I believe). However, this is certainly not a technological limitation, since SpaceX has demonstrate use in airplanes already.
I really hope this benefits the area of the country where my parents live. They pay $60 a month for 5M service (from a local Co-op that's the only game in town) which just isn't fast enough for my mom's dream of a work from home job.
This is basically the exact opposite of what you describe. The top 1% pay an overwhelming amount of the taxes, and these programs exist to provide broadband everywhere. Not saying I agree with this use of my tax dollars, but reality simply isn’t the way you’re framing it.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadHowever, I wonder what the alternative strategy costs for rural broadband are. My guess is that laying a lot of cable to remote locations could possibly be even higher than the $1376.52 per customer cost? It seems like something like Satelite internet connections could be less to set up, but it's not clear to me the cost of the equipment, installations and upkeep are in that case?
Also 1376 / 12 months averages out to only about $110 per month per customer for just one year. Which honestly doesn't sound too bad.
From burying the lines or stringing them on poles, to wiring up each drop into each dwelling, all the splices and repeaters and what-not, to the central office building and equipment and power and stuff, and maintaining that entire physical plant for years, it's all got to add up.
I'd imagine it's well within an order of magnitude.
Note: a traditional cable company got more than $1B is subsidies, so maybe the distributed model is actually cheaper. Depends on replacement costs and lifecycle (in both cases).
> Funding is distributed over 10 years, so SpaceX's haul will amount to a little over $88.5 million per year.
For the level of service they're offering that seems pretty reasonable honestly, and a much more efficient use of dollars than typical efforts (though WISPs might do even better in certain areas, they have different trade offs). Since it appears how the companies make use of the money is fairly flexible SpaceX will probably deploy it towards a few different metrics. The $500 upfront capex is probably the biggest impediment for a lot of people so getting that down is important, but if internally they had any issues with getting their sat shells filled out that'd be a good upfront usage too.
This is also spread out over 10 years, so where the most bang for buck is delivered will probably vary over time, by 2025 let alone 2030 SpaceX's economics will certainly look quite different with Starship deployment and filled shells/done ground stations.
In other words, they get all the money, even if no one subscribes.
>FCC funding can be used in different ways depending on the type of broadband service. Cable companies like Charter and other wireline providers generally use the money to expand their networks into new areas that don't already have broadband. But with Starlink, SpaceX could theoretically provide service to all of rural America once it has launched enough satellites, even without FCC funding.
>One possibility is that SpaceX could use the FCC money to lower prices in the 642,925 funded locations, but the FCC announcement didn't say whether that's what SpaceX will do.
SpaceX is still in the painful bootstrapping phase of things, and their cost structure right now is still higher then what they ultimately hope for. But from the sound of it they've got a lot of flexibility in how they deploy this money so long as they ultimately meet service targets, and they're only one player amongst many even for this subsidy money. If they're satisfied with service people don't tend to casually switch providers, so there is real value in being first. I think therefore SpaceX may consider using some of the money at least to lower the bar of someone signing up and try to get currently underserved households onboard as customers faster.
Additionally, don't forget this is only the first round, there is even more money available next time. Given the nature of bidding, I assume strategic calculations about how to win more next time will also play a role.
The $2.4B they paid to ST Micro is not for terminals, as ST Micro doesn't manufacture electronics, they are a foundry and so they only make the chips. The $2.4B includes the costs for the chips for the first million receivers, but the assembly and non-chip costs add a lot on top of that. So in that sense, $2400 per terminal is a serious underestimate.
But it's also wrong in the other direction, because the $2.4B didn't just include the chips, it also included the development and mask costs for those chips. This should be considered to be NRE and not considered as part of the price of the terminals, as SpaceX will not have to pay that for the next million terminals.
So the real number is above or below $2400 depending on what costs more, the motors, pcbs, the antenna layers, the chassis and the assembly of a terminal, or 1/1000000 of the NRE of developing the ASICs for Starlink. Who knows.
> The 35 states where SpaceX won FCC funding are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
While i am not a fan of subsidies in general, the ISP space is particularly tricky for free-market forces to ensure competition. The capital requirements are overwhelming in many cases for a traditional startups, leaving the only other option as local/municipal votes, which have been successful in some areas.
Long-term, i could see internet access to receive utility status in the states. Until that happens, funding ISP competition, particularly in rural areas feels like a wise move.
That's exactly why they need more money!! Because, maybe, this time they will?
If not, give them a bit more!!
Government subsidies at their finest! /s
Not sure what Starlink's existence is going to do to the company. Offering 25 Mbps aDSL with low reliability isn't going to compete very well if a customer can get 100 Mbsp service for a similar price and higher reliability. On the other hand, this might be justification the company can use to stop servicing the most expensive of the rural accounts to service while focusing on small town gigabit service that can compete with a reasonable expense to service.
SpaceX currently has a massive cost advantage in replenishing the satellite fleet which ever advancing equipment.
It already offers the lowest transcontinental latencies which for high frequency trading alone would be a bonanza.
Inter-satellite optical links aren't ready yet (and they're only barely getting to MVP on their initial generation sat shell). When those come online yes, Starlink should have a latency advantage over most any distance sufficiently long enough to make up their fixed RTT mileage cost with their 40% speed advantage vs standard optical fiber [1]. But for the current and near future deployment Starlink satellites act purely as "bent pipes" connecting terminals to a groundstation, both with LOS to the sat.
HFT gets cited a lot but probably one of their biggest bonanzas once intersat links are up will be marine and aviation internet. If you think rural pricing is bad...
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1: Possibly with a very few rarified exceptions that use terrestrial microwave links or if someone went to the trouble of using photonic bandgap fiber.
I'm just not convinced about marine - IMO, there just aren't that many customers out there.
Aviation could be interesting, however, post Covid.
One market you didn't mention is military. I can see exactly why the military is cozying up to SpaceX over Starlink. They've had multiple failed attempts[1] at integrated networked warfare initiatives. Starlink seems like a backbone the military could use to implement their vision piecemeal (and with probably a much higher success rate).
___
1. One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Combat_Systems
If your plan is to be carried out, then there is ripe opportunity for a politician to come to these areas an say, "vote for me, I will protect your internet access" and then fight for the funding instead.
These ISP subsidies are a classic example of government waste. ISPs promise, don't deliver, and are awarded even more cash to burn. There's no reason we should support this waste of our tax dollars.
See also USPS's Universal Service Obligation, which requires it to have a minimum level of service to every single address/user in the US.
This is common in developed countries (e.g. the EU requires all its member states to have universal service for both post and telecommunications). China isn't there yet, but is working towards that goal.
Nonetheless in America, this is considered an un-American example of socialism run amok. The same pro-individualist criticism applies to rural telecom, postal service, and infrastructure. And it applies even more directly to rural hospitals.
I disagree. Especially today, capital is highly abundant and dirt cheap. The markets are starved for yield on any sort of fixed income product, especially when it's secured by tangible assets with predictable cash flows. Every day the market sees new successful covenant-lite bond and loan sales raised with payback periods measured in decades.
The larger issue is that many municipalities explicitly enforce the local cable co's monopoly. This takes the form of exclusive "pole attachment" contracts. The local governments took kickbacks from the first broadband company that came along. For a quick payday upfront, they screwed their constituents out of any sort of competitive marketplace.
I disagree here. Capital might be highly abundant and cheap in general but not necessarily in the ISP sector for startups. There are enormous costs associated with laying and maintaining fiber lines or building/launching internet satellites. SpaceX has an advantage by being able to launch their own satellites, it might not be profitable if they had to contract out all of their satellite deployments. I don't think investors will be eager to throw lots of capital at an ISP startup, especially after Google Fiber.
“The Government will [initially] invest up to $1.35 billion [NZD] in the UFB network, which it expects to cost a total of $3.5b [NZD]. That includes $929m which it will invest directly in Chorus in interest-free loans and equity. [The government] will not be entitled to any dividends until 2025 and the loans will not be repaid in full until 2036. The difference between what it will pay and what it will get back will be $600m in today's money” - https://archive.vn/20170807221541/http://www.stuff.co.nz/bus...
84% of NZers can access fibre, and uptake is 64% as per: https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/quarterly-connectivity-updat...
Fibre is owned by infrastructure companies that charge standard rates to ISP’s, and the ISP’s compete to provide Internet to consumers.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/05/nro-reveals-plans-for-...
They seem to be the first defense contractor in a long time, maybe ever, with a specific eye on controlling costs. It may not be this way forever, but for now the taxpayers should get the savings where they can.
Nobody should feel forced to work more than they want to. (The abjectly lazy aside.) But we should also be free to work as hard as we want. And to freely associate with those with similar preferences.
I used to love burning both ends of the candle. It was invigorating. I didn't ruin my health for it. And it gave me life lessons I could not have learned any other way. The fruits of those years, as well as finding other interests, nudged me to a different preference. Which involved new (or changed) colleagues. I don't see why, to be satisfied with one arrangement, we must denigrate the other--they're just different solutions.
Work and life don't balance on a scale. The dynamic is more like homeostasis. One's stable ratio depends on a variety factors, extrinsic and from within, and what makes one person happy will be ruinous or lethargic for another.
Surely SpaceX employees are there by choice. How many of their employees have no better work/life balance employment choices? I would guess a rare few.
The problem is over-run and underestimation, and the govts' lack of flexibility with regards to contract termination in most instances.
2) Defense spending has been historically hovering between 15-25 percent in the United States.
'Taxpayer savings' does not, nor has it ever, indicated more money in the hands of the taxpayer -- it indicates how many new projects will be budgeted.
In other words : The tax payer saves nothing, but the military is given extra toys within the same budget.
Now, whether or not you are for or against the further arming of our troops and allied fighters -- that's a personal question.. but let's not pretend this equates to saved cash for the citizenry.
I would argue this is a bug for the taxpayers but a feature for the contractor. Much of their profit comes from change-orders after they win a poorly administered low-bid contract. It seems the M.O. often is "bid low to get the contract, and then argue/nickel-and-dime the taxpayer to pad the profit margin"
More distinctly, SpaceX has the corporate intention of interplanetary exploration and settling. SpaceX's integration into the established defense/NASA business table will help this end come to fruition.
He's eliminating gas vehicles, improving solar adoption, fixing rural internet, improving space science, making life interplanetary, etc.
It may be that Elon Musk types are extremely rare but I doubt they're as nearly as rare as most people think and we only need a thousand out of billions. The thing that makes him extremely rare, I think, is that he lucked upon a windfall of $200+ million from PayPal, a startup success that he had almost nothing to do with.
Now that I think about it, an Elon Musk Prize funded and designed by Elon Musk would be viable. His current net worth could fund 600+ Elon Musks. Elon Musk could create more Elon Musks...it's almost too simple!
“You get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after awhile,” he said. “And of course pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of sauce. And that can go pretty far, too.
“So it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, if I can live for a dollar a day then at least from a food cost standpoint, well it’s pretty easy to earn like $30 in a month anyway, so I’ll probably be okay.’ “
This isn’t the only example of a young Musk roughing it. When he started his first company, Zip2, he and his brother slept in their office instead of renting an apartment. They showered at the YMCA.
“We were so hard up, we had just one computer so the Web site was up during the day and I was coding at night,” Musk recalled during a commencement speech at USC. “Seven days a week, all the time.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/03/2...
My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056
Also relevant in that thread:
"He didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt. I couldn’t even afford a 2nd PC at Zip2, so programmed at night & website only worked during day. Where is this bs coming from?"
"This is a pretty awful lie. I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my Mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queens Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford."
This is pretty intense myth-making. He worked 4 days at a lumber mill.
It's pretty clear that Elon was from a wealthy*N background so the details are kind of irrelevant. Who bought the plain ticket?
There is also security, it's easier to take risks with strong familial support and fallback. Not saying this is a bad thing at all, it just is what it is.
And if reality doesn't actually line up with that, hey why not just invent a bunch of stuff.
We can do this infinity. Somebody that grew up poor in the US has success. Well, he had food as a child, 100s of starving African could have done the same, but 'who don't have the privilege necessary'.
So lets not give credit to anybody ever. If you were not a slave in Somilia at 13 that swam across the ocean by yourself and then build a new technology from the ground up, you deserve nothing and you are just one of those no good privileged people.
This may well be his next project.
I've wanted to read about what happened if anyone ever decided to apply Asimov's filter at earlier ages. His filter was simply having interest in particular science fiction. https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/1963-asimov
That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...
The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.
Similarly, military aircraft crash vastly more often than their civilian counterparts, but consider extreme safety simply isn't what militaires optimize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
The series of four accidents including those two in a short period in the US 7th Fleet was considered a sign of very significant problems. It is not at all typical of large, capable navies.
The reason for the fairly significant consequences, the global stand down, etc., is because, as many experts wrote at the time, they said a lot about the US Navy’s capacity for warfare.
> Rates of accidents that are completely unacceptable in peacetime are a rounding errors in a significant war.
Sure, because war results in change in priorites in which the same skill and capacity will produce a much higher accident rate than peacetime.
But a high peacetime accident rate, even if lower than the accident rat that would be acceptable in wartime, demonstrates an institutional incapacity to operate as directed successfully, which is a severe warfighting liability.
Or simply a vastly different set of priorities. Navy ships are generally supposed to operate as a unit as their threatened by a host of over the horizon missiles, supersonic aircraft etc. In a very real way crashing into unknown ships isn't something that’s considered as a meaningful risk.
The root cause of these safety issues is however deeper. Militaries are constantly cycling both technology and people through positions. The specific implementation of training and UI where at fault for these crashes which is directly addressable. However, the institutional approach of using new people and technology has huge upsides in war. You need to be able to quickly replace losses in warfare so you need to rely on training not experience, and you need to test that this training is effective. Similarly, you can’t rely on proven technology and it’s proven training because new threats are constantly arriving.
That's directly going to cause accidents and while minimizing them is important, the long term tradeoff is considered worth it.
The USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain are US Navy ships that have both had serious collisions recently that lead to loss of life. Ships having accidents is not a particularly good measure of battle readiness.
I doubt very much that the children born on Mars will share your view about the value of Earth nations.
I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.
This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options.
For the 99% of the other humans, it's even worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:tex....
Suppose the US and China get into a direct conflict. How does the US having a 10x advantage in the number of traditional arms vs only, say, 2x stop China from threatening to obliterate humanity with nukes the minute their leadership is facing an existential crisis?
Given that, you can't think of a single scenario where having multiple floating runways would possibly benefit wartime?
Imagine a world where anyone can get unfettered internet access. Instead of the great Firewall of China, citizens can just access a starlink satellite. How does that help with spreading democractic ideals? How does protesting and information dissemination look different? What if citizens in Iran, Middle East, Myanmar, etc. could all do the same thing?
I hope Starlink is thinking about these Big questions.
It doesn't seem like a very promising route for bypassing authoritarian government restrictions on the Internet.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terrafo...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6
I'm not one of those "why spend money on space when humans are starving on Earth" people.
My point was more about the actual technology required to terraform a planet. Why talk about terraforming Mars when our own would be saved by the same non-existent tech.
We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste, the money is mostly spent on earth, dual use technology comes out of it, and it opens the possibility of space tourism, not to mention just cheaper launch capabilities (driven by the need to send a million tons to Mars) also benefit building a better space-based asteroid/comet defense system too.
That's because they are framed as a more immediate existential threat. Humans are present biased and don't like to spend lots of money on low-probability events until they are unavoidable (see: attitudes towards pandemic preparations in 2019).
If an actual high probability ELE asteroid collision was detected, people would get their shit together real quick. Or maybe not, the COVID crisis has shattered my faith. I'm sure a bunch of people would claim the asteroid prediction is a NASA scam to install socialism or something.
Perhaps there aren't any better alternatives, but I'd think that orbital mirrors at least would be an option (like the soletta from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy), though the scale of construction would be beyond anything that's been done before even if it were extremely thin. Placing a million square miles of mylar into space doesn't sound like an easy problem, though something much smaller and specifically focused at, say, the equator or specific sites might be more practical.
As a former space industry worker, I don't know if I subscribe to that, but that's the best steelmanning I can come up with.
To continue on with the steelmanning, the first stage is probably a drop in a bucket compared to the entire effort. How much freight do you think it would take to colonize a planet with a population large enough to be relatively self-sufficient? Just the payload cost would be huge and that's just to park it (not to assemble, maintain etc.) I think the steelman argument would be to focus on things immediately needed, like healthcare, before space adventurism.
Edit: to put a finer point on it, the commercial space industry is essentially subsidized by the government precisely because it's not currently economical. In other words, if the government wasn't a customer there would be no commercial space industry. There's nothing inherently wrong with this because it's how high-risk industries often get started (e.g., the airlines), but the fact that it is subsidized by the government points to the fact that it is (currently) inherently uneconomical
It is basically a larger version of the argument "Well, if you are so poor, why did you drink that cup of coffee this morning?"
At no point did I say it's a magic bullet that would "completely fix" any of that. But spending hundreds of millions directly on healthcare would likely pay more healthcare dividends than, say, some unintended materials science application that started in rocket engine development.
How exactly do you think funding gets doled out? They aren't just given a blank check...Agencies request a certain amount, then as the sausage gets made on Capitol Hill, some programs are shaved, others are padded. The people in those discussions are bringing their priorities to the table and, in some cases, will have to make concessions like not having their metaphorical coffee in order to save a higher priority project.
For example, the U.S. pays more than 40% (down from 50%) of the worlds medical R&D. They essentially subsidize healthcare for much of the rest of the world (meaning the U.S. bears more of the cost so other countries can have cheaper care). There's plenty wrong with the U.S. healthcare system that needs fixing, but trite sentences don't begin to capture the real nature of the problem.
With limited resources, you have to prioritize or else you can run the risk of being spread so thin nothing is adequately funded so nothing really gets accomplished. You can't fight a war on all fronts, all the time.
I probably didn't do a good job of explaining that I meant "constrained environment" in the operations research sense. Everything rooted in the real world is constrained. Why don't we each take a private jet to work everyday? Because we're constrained on money. If we're not constrained on money, we're constrained on time. If it's not that, we're constrained by the amount of carbon we can release and still have a reasonably favorable environment for humans.
One of the reasons the Space Shuttle became somewhat of a boondoggle was because of this. They had a constrained budget but had to meet the demands of multiple, often competing, stakeholders. Musk knows this; he knows that NASA has constraints he doesn't. He doesn't have to spread his facilities across multiple States to help ensure support from as many Congress people as possible. He doesn't have to expose himself to the same level of political risk that can change every four years. He can optimize under a different set of constraints, but it would be a mistake to assume he's unconstrained.
I mean, defense contractors look at hot wars as opportunities as well. And they do drive technology forward, perhaps even more than any other force in this discussion. But that's not to say they don't have negative externalities that shouldn't be ignored.
How many trillions are spent on war? On corporate subsidies and kickbacks on everything else? How much money is wasted in so many other stupid things? We have a GDP rising at a faster rate than our populations and have for decades. We don't spend the that extra money helping people. We could, but we don't.
And then people look to NASA and SpaceX and say "Look at all that waste".
Meanwhile, this money is going to go to providing low-cost internet all over America (and then the rest of the world). It's going to provide a real, tangible benefit to people at a lower cost than the alternatives.
If people think there is an existential threat to their way of life, it's hard to convince them to take from that pocket to fund something more fanciful and likely only relevant generations away (if ever). That's the insidious part of the military boogeyman...and SpaceX probably knows this as well since they garner defense contracts too.
And that’s just the beginning of the technology needed to fully achieve his ambitions.
Anytime lines like this get written, be suspect.
>I don't see anyone on here complaining about how Charter chooses to spend the profits from this deal, it's certainly not going to go to settling Mars.
I complain all the time about the cable companies, but this is a thread about SpaceX. As irrelevant as that comment is, it's even less relevant arguing that using funds to build a LEO/VLEO satellite ISP (that will probably get divested at some point) will somehow help them get to Mars. Commercially there's no point in going to Mars so it takes political willpower and nations to finance it on a scale that's many orders of magnitude greater than anything done at the moment (more than even the JWST).
That's an incredibly short sighted argument. As if this planet will last forever. I don't get this attitude at all. It's like saying why plan for the future at all!
"I am no man!" — Eowyn
https://mobile.twitter.com/robert_zubrin/status/101347705748...
Edit: Will surely invest considerable resources to convert Earth to a national park once we have outgrown earth's economy 100x
I think greed and hedonic adaptation can also lead to this. There's no monopoly on some of the lesser angels of human nature.
That link is assuming that the ends justify the means, which I tend to believe is the road to evil. In this case, there are more foundational principals that would take precedence.
Money spent on space programs IS spent here on Earth. The money paid to engineers and fabricators and for raw materials goes to pay for house payments, durable goods, food and taxes of the individuals working on these projects. And those payments create jobs delivering these services, which benefits an ever increasing number of people.
It's not as if dollar bills were litterally burned to provide rocket thrust.
Your same argument can be used for the defense contractors as well and people will still line up to argue it’s not the best use of tax dollars
To extend that argument, is it better to give underserved internet access or spend the money on something that potentially saves someone’s life, like mosquito netting? I think even though HN is very in love with high tech problems, many would argue we could serve humanity better by prioritizing those lower tech problems that tend to solve more fundamental needs
I'm very capitalistic, but if SpaceX successfully colonizes Mars and builds factories there, I can imagine some frightening scenarios where it has considerable control over the U.S. rather than the U.S. having control over it.
If the FCC believed they should give assistance to SpaceX, it should have been in the form of access to the spectrum Charlie Ergen has been squatting over at DISH making the same promises SpaceX is doing right now. For those unaware of Ergan's history, the FCC for the first time decided to give a light wrist slap over setting up a constellation of fake shell corporations to bid on spectrum that included rural and small carrier subsidies. DISH has blown every build-out deadline and it's set back terrestrial carriers for years now. There were two they completely blew off that came due this year, and the only purpose they served was as an excuse to let the Sprint/TMUS merger happen, where previously TMUS had been calling out their business practices. I'm aware every Elon fanboy is going to wax poetic about how it won't be the same, but I'd caution you to consider SolarCity and what a public funds debacle that has been. There's a history of making big promises in areas and leaving a mess.
Running an ISP is an easy to understand business model, either be the only option in an area or provide better service (and/or price) then incumbents. As others in this thread have said, there's already a shitload of capital flowing around, so why should this capital come from the public. Why didn't Elon just run another 'Deposit $100 to get in line for Starlink!' As it stands most of the US is stuck with shit ISP's because of a lack of competition, and giving subsidies to incumbents (like Charter) are only going to enrich them and further entrench their monopolies.
SpaceX didn't launch this service as a practical or sensible business model for them, they already get paid to launch other telecommunications equipment into space, they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit.
> they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit
$1B is a fraction of what SpaceX, and Morgan Stanley among others, believe they can make from Starlink: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/22/mor...
I think this time it really is different. SpaceX has already reduced launch cost by an order of magnitude, and if Starship is successful another 1-2 orders of magnitude. This gives them a huge advantage over other LEO constellation attempts.
I don’t think this money is necessary for their success but if the money is there for the taking why wouldn’t they take it?
Which specific launches are you referring to? Some of the Space Force launch costs have gotten quite bloated for SpaceX as well
"United Launch Alliance, was awarded $337 million to launch two missions comparable to the one awarded to SpaceX"
https://spacenews.com/spacex-explains-why-the-u-s-space-forc....
They received subsidies for electric cars and delivered electric cars.
They received subsidies for space travel and they delivered both cargo and humans to the space station.
Now they receive subsidies on for telecommunication, given the two previous deliveries, what makes you think this third one will suddenly go the grift route?
Majority of the subsidies (around 70%?) were indirect on EV's through buyer incentive credits. I wouldn't directly consider this a Tesla subsidy as any established auto manufacturer could claim it with an electric vehicle. The remaining subsidies were far less than this FCC subsidy is.
> Why do you look at the history of telecommunication companies rather than the history of SpaceX?
Because when a company that isn't a telecommunications company decides to be one, it's important to understand why and the best way to do so is to look at the history of the industry and the behavior of principle executives in the company deciding to pivot.
>They received subsidies for space travel and they delivered both cargo and humans to the space station.
This was a great success and they should absolutely be commended for this. There are situations where the public and SpaceX have received a mutual benefit. The GPS, ISS missions, and Lockheed defense contracts all saved taxpayers a ton of money.
> Now they receive subsidies on for telecommunication, given the two previous deliveries, what makes you think this third one will suddenly go the grift route?
Sweeping aside that this is the way it's always been for a market that should not require subsidies now that costs can actually be amortized (unlike previously for Iridium), there's already a track record of scandals around their Elon-associated affiliates looting public funds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity#Lawsuits_and_investi...
This is pretty much nonsense. Spend 10min actually researching the market and you would know it is nonsense.
Rocket launches are tiny part of the space market, even if SpaceX had a monopoly it would not be that much money. Also, the most valuable launches are trying up and there are not nearly enough of them for SpaceX to continue to grow.
Telecommunications however is a much bigger market, and that is why SpaceX is going into it. There is a gigantic market to be captured and SpaceX with cheap launch and amazing sat technology have a chance to do it. This is also a global play, the idea that this was done just to get access to US subsidies is nonsensical.
They have been planning for this for many, many, many years long before it was even clear if they could get access to this FCC subsidy at all, something that was disputed until just a couple months ago. They didn't invest multiple billion into this project to hopefully get less then 1 billion back in the next 10 years.
As to why SpaceX takes advantage of this, why should they not? SpaceX would do the same thing without these funds, but why not take advantage of it if the government offers it?
Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? Surely it's easier than starting from even less resources and livable environment than Mars.
There is a cultural myth in New Age communities that humans decimated Mars and came to Earth after, or something like that. We should fix Earth first
We're already spending more than 99.99% of our money on Earth. Are you advocating for a strict 100%?
The US can use some of the trillions it wasted(and still wasting) on middle east wars for fixing Earth.
SpaceX tenders for and receives contracts from the DoD. Such as one in August for Space Command launches and another in October for Earth-bound delivery of payloads. So they're a defence contractor.
My old house was stuck on 10GB service for years while ISPs bumped up subsidized service to many closer in/ semi rural areas. I have good access now, but just a few years ago I'd have loved the option of getting SpaceX's service at full price.
I'm not familiar with that area but my mind boggles at this amount. What kind of speeds do you get? Are that ISP able to offer a cheaper deal of some sort, eg 12 months? Why is it so much!?
Wishing you well, I hope you get Starlink soon in your area, or any alternatives.
There was also a brief stint of time when I lived in Europe in a long-term Airbnb that didn't tell us there was a data cap (and since we weren't real residents, we couldn't set up our own internet) and I got nearly $500/mo for a few months doing video calls for work etc from my LTE.
They may ration service to a few people in big cities but i'm doubtful they will offer it at all to be honest.
By definition I think the places that need Starlink the most won't hit density limits. But I think a lot of people will buy Starlink just because it's Starlink -- anything so their dollars aren't going to Comcast.
I could be wrong but my guess is they will blacklist areas near cities entirely at least to begin with and focus on very rural areas with literally no alternative (no LTE etc).
Personally I think Starlink is going to have capacity crisis quickly if takeup is anywhere near as strong as demand seems to be and I'm sure SpaceX know this, so by fcoussing almost entirely on very rural areas (and maybe niche commercial/govt uses in more urban enviroments) they have a chance at managing demand a bit. Or they will start ramping up cost of service and/or putting very punitive bandwidth caps on (like all other sat providers).
I still think Starlink is an amazing breakthrough, but it really is a solution only for the 'last'/most rural 1% of households (or less).
you could get one with 400gb LTE data for $80 a month: https://www.onlinewirelessmall.com/att-hotspot-49-99prepaid-...
or there's these ones that don't have a cap??? https://www.onlinewirelessmall.com/att-netgear779s-with-plan...
or buy a grandfathered plan off of ebay that has truly unlimited (no throttling) for less than $100 a month
or there's dozens of other options with hundreds of GBs of data per month that are a fraction of the $600 a month you're paying. There is no reason to be paying that much and there are other options you haven't considered.
Since they already put Starlink satellites in orbit without any guarantees of subsidies, was this good use of government funds?
I feel like that's a rhetorical question, but the obvious answer is yes.
>Since they already put Starlink satellites in orbit without any guarantees of subsidies, was this good use of government funds?
I suppose that depends: if Space-X's original timeline was 10 years... is it more or less valuable to the US to have broadband access on an accelerated timeline? My guess is, especially in the face of covid, the more access to high speed the better.
Would you rather have had those funds going to Frontier and Comcast? The funds are GOING to be spent, the only question is how. Not having rural broadband has been deemed an unacceptable outcome by the majority of Americans. The way the funds have been spent to date have definitely been a mixed bag.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/07/fcc-dig...
In the age of COVID-19, any investment in ISP infrastructure is beneficial.
> In the age of COVID-19, any investment in ISP infrastructure is beneficial.
Not if you end up having nothing to show for it.
Can the subsidy be used to accelerate making the service available to more users sooner, and at higher quality? Most likely yes, because with the design of Starlink, more satellites gives better service.
A related question: Were early subsidies into solar power a big help in climbing the learning curve while solar power had uncompetitive performance/$, or did advancements in related disciplines like chip manufacturing carry most of the weight?
City/population-center living is wildly inefficient for a host of reasons, and a dollar of urban development towards a major metropolis goes much less far than a dollar of urban development for a rural community.
We deal with the inadequacies of living in such big population dense areas because we want to; not because it's efficient.
Turns out it's not efficient to stack up as many people vertically as possible.
It over-burdens local municipal systems to the point of skyrocketing economic costs, creates more job scarcity due to sheer population and high real-estate costs, and creates untenable situations during times where population density is a net-negative, like during a pandemic.
Rural living has major problems too; lack of access to high quality services and travel come to mind -- but these are things that can be improved upon, and by every metric these things are improving.
There is no such game-plan for dealing with the burdens of heavy density populations mid-city; it's considered to be a fact of life.
>Turns out it's not efficient to stack up as many people vertically as possible.
>It over-burdens local municipal systems to the point of skyrocketing economic costs, creates more job scarcity due to sheer population and high real-estate costs, and creates untenable situations during times where population density is a net-negative, like during a pandemic.
These are all exactly the opposite of true? It's very efficient to stack people vertically. What's not efficient is delivering sewer service to people whose houses are a half mile apart or having someone drive 60 miles round trip in a single occupancy vehicle to get to work every day.
As https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c... explains, Wright's law says that while a technology is improving, we generally get a fixed percentage drop in cost every time we double production. Therefore the production increases thanks to subsidies caused those cost drops to come much sooner than they would have otherwise.
Money to launch more satellites will give the company the ability to get broadband for more people in more of the rural USA much more quickly. It also helps Starlink through a chicken and egg problem where they can't make money unless they have satellites up, and they can't put satellites up unless they get money.
The subsidy isn't large enough to pay for all the satellites they need. They have money to launch more satellites and will be doing more launches subsidy or no subsidy.
The subsidy will only go directly to their bottom line.
First, the fact that they have the money to launch more satellites does not mean that they have the money to launch ALL the satellites that the full system needs. Indeed their projected cost for fully setting up Starlink is $10 billion dollars, which is more than the projected operating profit that they have had over their entire history. So it is easy to see that they won't be able to complete unless they get more money along the way.
In fact there is a significant risk that if they make less than they hope, that the company runs out of money and goes out of business. This subsidy reduces that risk, and therefore makes them more likely to complete, and likely to complete faster.
To achieve this purpose, the subsidy should be sized to help them over the hump, and not to pay all their costs. (Whether we should be handing out subsidies is a different question that I'm ignoring. Our government has chosen to, and the question is how to succeed.) Therefore there is nothing odd about the fact that it is less than 10% of the total amount of money that they think they will need. They aren't doing Starlink in the hopes of getting the subsidy. But the subsidy improves their odds of succeeding at Starlink.
And finally, you claim that the subsidy will only go directly to their bottom line. Which is to say that it shows up as profit and goes to Elon and other shareholders in the company.
It is true that plenty of companies operate that way. However after 20 years of running companies, it is extremely safe to say that Elon does not. In fact he tends to take every scrap of money that his company is generating, finds ways to borrow or raise more, and then reinvests it into even more ambitious projects.
So he won't be taking it as profit. What will he use it on?
Well, the three big projects that Elon is working on right now is building Starship, building Starlink, and preparing to settle Mars. Of those, Starship is required to finish Starlink at a price point where it is a viable business, and Starlink is required to fund Mars. Therefore it is essentially certain that he will pour this money directly into Starship and Starlink, rather than taking any of it as immediate profit.
Therefore we have good reason to believe that this money will be used for its intended purpose. We have good reason to believe that this money will in fact improve the odds of success, and enable them to deliver that success sooner. And therefore this money actually helps achieve the goal that the US government has set.
As noted, there is a significant risk of Starlink going out of business. The RDOF grants are not venture funding, and should not be used as such.
The FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund exists to bring high speed fixed broadband service to rural homes and small businesses that lack it.
I do not believe that Starlink would have excluded the areas it got subsidies for from service had it not gotten the subsidies.
Starlink must have ALL the money to launch and operate ALL the satellites it needs to become profitable. The subsidies do not even cover the cost of replacing deorbiting satellites.
> It is true that plenty of companies operate that way. However after 20 years of running companies, it is extremely safe to say that Elon does not. In fact he tends to take every scrap of money that his company is generating, finds ways to borrow or raise more, and then reinvests it into even more ambitious projects.
This is not proper use of RDOF money either.
Given this goal, it’s simply unreasonable to deny funds to a company that has already set up that access, but only grant funds to new entrants. That clearly screws over the existing companies, which now can’t afford to compete on price with the new government funded entrants.
The only way to establish a level playing field and not penalise companies that already invested heavily is to give the grants regardless of past investment. Then you can genuinely allow the competitive market to establish fair and competitive prices for these customers. Free market principles should in theory ensure that this price competition should recoup a significant proportion of the subsidy costs for consumers and tax payers.
The RDOF grants are not there to establish competition. RDOF grants exist purely for some company to provide broadband service where there is none.
If anything it's funding a local monopoly.
For the avoidance of doubt, here's the link to the FCC RDOF auction and the relevant quote:
"... Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to bring high speed fixed broadband service to rural homes and small businesses that lack it."
https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904
The fact is, starlink is the absolute best option in quite a few places - sparsely populated, far from dense urban areas. This is actually the best way to spend government money for that purpose even if it ends up in subsidizing terminal purchases.
If it were only subsidized there. Some of the Starlink areas are next door neighbours to subsidized fiber builds.
There is a large difference between putting up a few percent of their constellation to reach initial minimum viability and putting up enough satellites to properly cover the rest of the world (a very expensive endeavor that will take years).
Plus, the US Government may directly benefit in a very big way from utilizing Starlink and that may make it a bargain compared to the alternatives. If US defense contractors were building that constellation, they'd be spending ten times what SpaceX is.
And that's before we get to the potential for intelligence gathering globally. The powers that be will be all over that, no matter what SpaceX claims to the contrary (SpaceX will have a gun to their head and will not have a choice, just as the Prism gang had no choice).
The US ISP market is already fairly diverse. There are some 3000 ISPs in the US.
> $886m is a bargain if it helps meaningfully with that (assuming it's not a frequent subsidy).
Aye, therein lies the rub. Starlink will require a frequent and recurring subsidy, unless it can become profitable on its own.
Each and every satellite they put up will burn up in five years.
> There is a large difference between putting up a few percent of their constellation to reach initial minimum viability and putting up enough satellites to properly cover the rest of the world (a very expensive endeavor that will take years).
Maybe Starlink should have been required to demonstrate viability before allowing it to qualify for government subsidies?
> Plus, the US Government may directly benefit in a very big way from utilizing Starlink and that may make it a bargain compared to the alternatives. If US defense contractors were building that constellation, they'd be spending ten times what SpaceX is. > > And that's before we get to the potential for intelligence gathering globally. The powers that be will be all over that, no matter what SpaceX claims to the contrary (SpaceX will have a gun to their head and will not have a choice, just as the Prism gang had no choice).
If the DoD wants Starlink then they should pay for it themselves.
I mean the U.S. government already has such deals with other ISPs, and now the U.S. military wants to use Starlink, too, so I wouldn't be surprised if the DoD got involved in this FCC deal with SpaceX for more reasons than one.
I wonder if Starlink (and changes in work expectations due to the pandemic) will have a similar effect; a lot of rural land that people might have been inclined to move to if only they had some way to do their work remotely is now suddenly a realistic option.
After all, dentists and tailors see clients in their homes, and people who sell t-shirts online often manufacture and ship the goods from their home.
Not all jobs can be done remotely, but for the ones that can, the various impediments seem to be dropping away.
Not a huge number, but that's all you need to support a small town economy. It's like the plight of the rust belt -- you had small communities that relied on manufacturing job to support the local retail and services jobs. When those manufacturing jobs evaporated due to outsourcing those small towns imploded.
There is a big distinction between rural and towns. Even towns of 1-5k people are surprisingly dense since most were built out before urban sprawl became a trend.
Those effects combined would unlock an absolute ton of land around urban areas.
Now autonomous articulated bus that can hold 60 people sitting down in the footprint of 3-4 cars, that's another story.
These are often because of a bottleneck such as a traffic right (particularly left turn signal) or stop sign. If autonomous vehicles can be tweaked to increase throughput (better reaction times, shorter follow distance, less accidents, higher speed through chokepoints like tolls, not distracted or not accelerating slowly on light changes) you might see significant traffic reductions as a result. Little's law is applicable here.
The problems with bus or commuter lines is it's hard to get people to share a route efficiently. I've had it work in the past but only where I picked my housing according to an effective commuter line for my school or work. But that's hard to arrange at scale.
Where effective commuters line don't scale instead if you combine the above wins with an uber pool like service where 3-4 people are efficiently routed together. You could be looking at 2-3x fewer cars on roads that have better throughput and fewer bottlenecks.
That is true in the USA, which has absurdly short on and off ramps, but in my experience, many other countries around the world don't have this problem.
Canada, Australia and the UK all have much, MUCH longer on and off ramps, and traffic doesn't back up onto freeways. Freeways still clog up, however.
EDIT: Sorry for the ordering mistake - Comcast are "cheapest", SpaceX 2nd.
Starlink bid in the Above Baseline tier, meaning ≥ 100/20 Mbps (with data cap of ≥ 2 TB).
According to the FCC [1], 99.7% of locations are at that tier or higher, and 85%+ in the highest Gigabit (1000/500) tier.
So it looks like the auction funded gigabit where there was a provider bidding at that tier, and the rest went heavily to SpaceX.
One question I have is whether these gigabit deployments actually happen, or if Starlink will pick off legacy business so quickly (full launch nationwide next year) such that rural providers aren't able to take the subsidies and actually implement the new offerings.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/matthewberryfcc/status/1335978529...
No.
Every time the US gives money to telecoms to roll out fiber, the telecoms play a shell game and disappear the money or use it to fight against municipalities that try to build their own infrastructure.
https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-...
Money = power. The US is a barely veiled oligarchy.
As long as you have enough money to pay off politicians to make it completely ok, you can do whatever you like. After you pocket a bunch of money or whatever other shenigans you want, you dump a percentage of the money into the politcian's re-election campaign.
You don't even have to get politicians to make it legal, you could do other things like getting friendly with judges and passing them thinly veiled bribes as 'gifts'.
For example there is a rural co-op that covers a number of the towns just west of where I live. The towns actually have better service than I do (cheaper, and faster) because the entire town is a mile or two along a major highway, and a few rows of residential streets. The density is at least as good as the suburban area I live in for a square mile or so.
Drive a few miles out of town though, and your on some kind of wireless or sat service.
AM goes pretty far, even amateur radio can travel across continents in the right atmospheric conditions.
GPS
Satellite TV
Every other civilian and military Comsat since we started launching things.
Starlink isn’t the problem if you are worried about being “irradiated”, the nuclear fusion reactor at the center of our solar system is likely of greater concern.
What new precedent is Starlink setting?
GPS and TV sats beam radio signals to most habitable parts of the planet already. If you're worried about "radio pollution" I don't see how Starlink makes a huge difference.
Starlink won't cover the poles so maybe a bunker in Antarctica is an option.
Read the book, "The invisible Rainbow: A history of electricity and life".
Also check: https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/
Please read "The Invisible Rainbow: A history of electricity and life", and then get back to us with your thoughts.
You might find that your newly informed self differs from your present self.
SpaceX was also mostly built with Musk's personal fortune, after they developed the Merlin engine, and got the Falcon 1 to orbit, only then did they get contracts from NASA, and they actually saved NASA money, because SpaceX launch costs are significantly lower, ergo, in a way, they also paid the taxpayer back.
Pretty much most large successful companies have been subsidized by tax payer money in some way, if not by direct loans or contracts, then by taking publicly financed research from the military or academia, and commercializing it. Silicon Valley was started by Fairchild Semiconductor whose first contracts were military contracts. Computing started out funded by military. The CIA through In-Q-Tel put $150 million into 90 companies, including Google. Google Maps, acquired from Keyhole, was a CIA funded satellite mapping company.
Let's dispense with the rugged individualism. We all benefit from the government, and we all have a duty to pay it forward.
Call it an act of cowardice, but all of the top companies are currying favor with governments, because cronyism is everywhere, and if you are not in the game, you are out of it.
Do you think SpaceX would have beat ULA, who literally had the Apollo moon landing astronauts badmouthing competitors in front of congress, if they had not curried favor?
China is an especially great example of this: Don't play ball, you lose. (e.g. Google leaves China). Play ball, and find yourself continually kow-towing to keep the goodies flowing, as Tim Cook travels every year to Beijing and stroking the hearts of the government or nationalists.
Until we end money in politics and ban the revolving door of lobbyists, we're not going to address the problem of contracts being handed out with questionable rationale.
Especially when you compare what Orion or paying the Russians for a ride to the ISS has cost.
cf. shuttle costs of $1.5B per launch.
Elon has said multiple times it will work perfectly well on a yacht crossing the pacific, a moving train, etc., so we have to assume the "stay in one place" restriction will go away.
Country borders will be interesting though, I assume many want to tightly control how you communicate with sats.
Didn't the FCC give AT&T to lay Fiber, that they never did, and customers would be paying for?
Elon apologist?
Years from now when humanity finally wakes up (or worse, does not), let it not be said we were not warned.
International Appeal -- Stop 5G on Earth and in Space: https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/
Podcast -- The Shocking Truth About Electricity & EMFs: https://www.westonaprice.org/podcast/272-the-shocking-truth-...
Book: "The Invisible Rainbow: A history of electricity and life".
Planetary Emergency: https://www.radiationresearch.org/news/planetary-emergency/
Deadly Rainbow: https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/07/07/deadly-rainbow-wil...
Restoring a Vibrant, Living Planet: https://www.creationsmagazine.com/2020/06/26/restoring-a-vib...
Satellite Radiation: http://radiationdangers.com/satellite-radiation/