So they now offer direct cellular coverage whereas before only offered internet?
This is great for regions that need to be connected and the power elites, but for the rest of us it wouldn't change much.
I disagree with almost all of Elon's "politics" but Starlink still has huge potential. Hopefully, he doesn’t abuse the power too much and focuses on making the world more connected, in the hands of the us government and given away like GPS it could be the way to go to get the whole world connected.
> This is great for regions that need to be connected
That's at least a billion people. I don't know what the intersection of that with the affordability is, though.
I'm writing this from an Ayahuasca center in rural Peru connected with Starlink. Before, internet was a ten minute drive into town away. We're now connected when at one side of the center. It would be nice to have it all the way into the jungle. And when you want to be disconnected, just turn your phone off or leave it behind.
> I don't know what the intersection of that with the affordability is, though.
My understanding is that the monthly cost for Starlink varies pretty wildly across the world. Presumably the same would be true for this cell service - idle satellites have the same huge fixed cost and don't generate any revenue.
a) Based on what we've seen in China, India etc many of those will shift towards densely populated cities or will stay and those locations will become industrialised, densely populated cities.
b) In densely populated cities it doesn't make sense to use Starlink when fibre is far cheaper, has limited congestion issues and can provide gigabit speeds at a minimum.
c) It's great that you're writing this in rural Peru but that is a declining use case and should not be extrapolated to the rest of the world.
There's just a really strong tendency for people all over the world to focus on their own experience. And you can actually reinforce this by zooming out too far. If you live in San Francisco, this seems like a pet use case and you can be like "What is it, 10% of the population?" But "the population" is quite the fucking denominator.
I mean, it's already happening and obviously Starlink has run the numbers. So I'm largely just reacting to the tone here.
Niche? Millions of airline and cruise passengers have been using Starlink. Industries, militaries and governments are Starlink customers. Millions of users in the rural areas. That’s some interesting definition of niche.
All those points are true, but it doesn't change the fact that Starlink will be quite profitable for SpaceX.
Currently, each launch of 23 Starlink satellites costs SpaceX around $50 million. To get 1,000 direct to cell satellites in orbit, they'll need to launch 44 times, costing them $2.2 billion. Due to the low orbits, air resistance causes the satellites to reenter within 5-10 years, so to maintain the constellation they'll need to spend $220-440 million per year. These costs will be much lower when they switch from Falcon 9 to Starship.
Now let's say only 1% of the population wants Starlink direct to cell. That's still 80 million people. If SpaceX charges cell companies $10/month per user for the service, that's almost $10 billion per year. And that's not counting the money they make from selling Starlink Internet, which currently has over 4 million subscribers. At $100/month, that's $4.8 billion per year in revenue.
So Starlink is profitable without direct to cell technology, but since they're launching the satellites anyway, they might as well collect more revenue by adding cell capability. DTC only becomes unprofitable if the cost of the extra hardware and mass is less than DTC subscriber revenue.
If someone is rescued in the wilderness thanks to direct to cell connection; if children can attend online classes despite living in the rural; if science expedition can stay online even in the most remote places, then that’s changing the world.
I’m writing this from starlink ten minutes from Silicon Valley.
Until recently, most of what you wrote applied to us too (our previous options were 128kbit theoretical dsl, 1 sec latency, or extremely flaky cellular).
Now that a double digit percentage of people on our street have starlink, the phone company finally ran fiber to the home.
Being able to make emergency calls from the many dead spots around here would be nice.
I switched to T-Mobile at the last upgrade interval because of this. My family looks forward to no longer relying on Garmin InReach devices when out hiking.
Initially I thought the same re: hiking, skiing etc. The only issue I see is that cellphone battery life is terrible compared to inReach like devices. Not sure I'd want to depend on it for longer than a few hours.
Same. Done a few trips to alaska and had to coordinate pickups and food drops via garmin inreach. Battery life on those is way better and more durable.
> The only issue I see is that cellphone battery life is terrible compared to inReach like devices. Not sure I'd want to depend on it for longer than a few hours.
I think it depends on the application you're using it for.
If you're constantly using the gps - yeah, I'd definitely agree with you.
But if you're using it purely for emergency communication, you can just turn off the cell phone, and it should be fine.
It's also possible to pursue a hybrid approach by bringing a battery to change the phone.
With an inReach I have the option of periodically tracking my position and uploading that to a site my loved ones can check. Even whilst doing this I can leave the device on for a multi-day trip without worrying about battery drain. I'm not saying you couldn't do this with a cell phone, but the inReach is just a more robust solution for a safety critical application.
Good news: people who pay more still get all those benefits.
And now, other people have some access (if non-optimal) to rescue services, despite the fact that they didn't (or couldn't afford to) pay more for inReach.
Modern smartphones can hold the battery for over a week with minimal usage. You could just turn data on when every few hours or so. It's not automated though.
At least my work S24 says ~16 days in airplane mode + power saver. Not tested.
If you have zero signal, modern iPhone allows you to connect to satellite and text using iMessage. I just used it this week multiple times during massive Pacific Northwest blackout.
Works surprisingly well. You have to be outside and hold iPhone in the specifics position pointed at satellite, it tells you where to turn iPhone to to get signal.
You can initiate a conversation with anyone while you are connected via satellite. But you do need to set up an emergency contact and/or Family Sharing Group if you want to connect via satellite and receive messages that were sent to you while you were offline.
(I’m referring to the "Messages via Satellite" feature that launched two months ago in iOS 18. This is different from the "Emergency SOS via Satellite" feature that has been around since 2022.)
I'd still carry an old-school PLB (not a satellite messenger subscription service) for the enduring battery-life, ruggedness, and reliability when it matters. And use LTE-Starlink for the basic non-urgent but super convenient communication needs.
this is how i feel. especially in the cold. for a lot of the stuff i do, i'm not gonna trust my life on a glass screen with a battery that doesn't work well in the cold.
I wish I could pay Starlink directly and have global satellite based LTE instead of having to go through a specific carrier and be limited by other carriers’ reciprocity to specific countries and bands
I think that, once SpaceX starts launch Starlink satellites with Starship, they'll be able to increase their globally available bandwidth by a factor of 5-10x (although it might take 5 years to roll out). A lot of that bandwidth will be eaten up by existing demand. But hopefully some of it will enable novel services like global cell service through a single provider (even if it's limited to low bandwidth applications like text and voice).
We're currently talking data rates on the order of (optimistically) 5 Mbit/s for a cell with a diameter of 15 square miles, i.e. something like 0.1 Mbit/s per km^2.
In very rural areas (which is the use case!), that's infinitely better than nothing, but anywhere people live, this is effectively nothing, and there is currently no way around ground-based infrastructure.
Compared to leveraging the existing cellular networks and using satellites for rare edge cases. ~8$/minute or say 1$/minute averages out to a more reasonable number when less than 5% of calls use it.
Sailors can make calls using the ships Wi-Fi via full sized Starlink dishes, they need coverage on land.
But even ignoring that the contention is low in the middle of the ocean and satellites have hardware either way, driving down the market rate for calls at sea.
250$/month gets you 50GB/month on the open ocean and unlimited on waterways, higher demand is cheaper per GB ex: 1TB for 1,000$/month. https://www.starlink.com/boats
Calls are ~0.75 MB/minute allowing a 24/7 conversion for for a full month for 250$, or more realistically mostly sending other kinds of data and a sub cent per minute opportunity cost for using that data on calls. The actual hardware installation is relatively trivial compared to operating a boat.
Is the reason that Starlink charges so much more for boats is low competition? Or is there something obviously much more complex / expensive about beaming gigs of data from space over the ocean vs land? I don't write this post with any spite; I am genuinely curious.
Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station hooked up to fiber. To work over the ocean you pass messages between satellites potentially several hops and then eventually down to a base station, but that’s inherently constrained as with all mess topologies you get far less bandwidth than initially seems possible.
So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and in part it’s a limited customer base for a lot of hardware, but it’s also just what the market will bare.
Yes, but compared to the setup for equivalent satellite services it is very cheap. The Inmarsat antennas need active compensation and they sit inside big radomes, while the Starlink antennas are smaller and do not need to move thanks to being phased arrays.
The bandwidth, latency and stability that Starlink has is also leagues better than geosynch based solutions, for a much lower monthly price.
Even without considering the better performance, the price makes it viable now to have a internet connections in places it did not make financial sense before.
Starlink is used in low density areas. You could setup LTE towers at a remote mine and use Starlink for the back haul, but for their customers using WiFi calling gives the same benefit without extra hardware.
Starlink signals are essentially line of sight right now. The bump up in power to penetrate even a single layer of drywall is almost certainly way outside the power budget of a Starlink satellite.
Whether a material is opaque to it. Buildings are transparent to lower frequency radio. Imagine that the satellites transmitted in visible light, doesnt really matter how powerful it is if you're in a room with no windows.
The baseband on handheld devices do not have that much power to transmit and receive from Starlink directly; and hence the partnership with MNOs. With 5G (after Google & Meta got involved, the designs took on a Cloud/Internet-heavy focus), Starlink very well might have "slices" carved out exclusive for its own use world over.
Kinda not. Generally if you got road you got reception. Only wilderness areas don’t. For few people who go camping, etc the standalone miniterminal makes most sense.
Yes there are, but I my guess is 95%+ of car miles are in areas with good reception. If you are building roads putting cell reception there is trivial.
I suspect the primary reason they took this approach is that licensing for these frequencies is astronomical if you want to cover the entire US. That would bleed them dry as they build out the constellation and try to ramp up user count.
Partnering with a national carrier handles the licensing aspect and if the tech pans out the economics could shift to allow them to buy national spectrum and offer direct service.
It's not acquiring the spectrum that's an issue right now. It's it not interfering with terrestrial networks. Euro carriers already pushing back against relaxing emissions restrictions for DTC specifically: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/10930985930353/1
Help me: Is DTC "direct-to-consumer"? I tried to Google for it, but I didn't find anything obvious. Else, hat tip for this FCC find! What a great share on HN.
That was 9 years ago and a lot has changed since then. They're moving to 3rd generation devices which have higher bandwidth and now have thousands of satellites deployed. Once Starship is able to deploy payloads, they'll increase the number of satellites even more quickly.
A lot has changed, but the calculus of fiber vs. satellites hasn't. Fiber (and fiber-served cellular) is good for high density, satellites are good for low density.
Starlink would need to license LTE spectrum in every country it operated. Much easier to work with local carriers and piggyback on their existing bandwidth.
I think this is the biggest reason. All nation's governments will absolutely ensure, overtly or covertly, that their national regulators limit any space-based supra-national system from being able to threaten their national telephony and data carriers. Why? Preventing losing national capabilities, government revenue (taxes, licenses & other domestic carrier fees, lobbying, kickbacks, bribes, etc) and, most importantly, losing the ability to snoop at will on calls and data (at least metadata if not full-take). Even in countries where the major carriers are all based in other nations, existing towers being land-based creates jurisdiction for the government to control and tax.
While many westernized democracies like to proclaim their commitment to freedom, rule of law and individual human rights - in practice there are currently zero governments on earth free enough to not consider loss of that absolute control over citizen's private communication an existential threat. Even in places where existing laws don't currently make it illegal, as soon as technology enables it - it will certainly be made illegal (by any means necessary). I assume SpaceX is smart enough to understand this reality.
> All nation's governments will absolutely ensure, overtly or covertly, that their national regulators limit any space-based supra-national system from being able to threaten their national telephony and data carriers
The ITU is pretty overt about how frequency allocation governance works. Absolutely no one wants a free-for-all frequency regime, for a multitude of reasons - not even SpaceX.
You may recall that Huawei 5G equipment was expunged from domestically-controlled, western infrastructure without having broken any laws, due to fears of future abuse. Your suggestion of a foreign company unilaterally, and illegally[1] imposing it's foreign-controlled, space-based phone network goes much further than whatever fears Washington had over Huawei.
1. Pretty much every country on earth with a government regulates how radio spectrum is licensed for telecommunications, not for the purposes of control as an end, but coordination and preventing interference.
> You may recall that Huawei 5G equipment was expunged from domestically-controlled, western infrastructure without having broken any laws, due to fears of future abuse. Your suggestion of a foreign company unilaterally, and illegally[1] imposing it's foreign-controlled, space-based phone network goes much further than whatever fears Washington had over Huawei.
Radio Free Europe has been doing something similar successfully for what, 70 years? Of course being in violation of a given country's laws is a tradeoff.
- "...without having broken any laws, due to fears of future abuse..."
Well, how did those predictions of the future perform?
- "The Chinese government espionage campaign that has deeply penetrated more than a dozen U.S. telecommunications companies is the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history — by far,” a senior U.S. senator told The Washington Post in an interview this week."
Thank you for further buttressing my point: granting a foreign company with military links access to your telecoms infrastructure is a bad idea, for tangible reasons. Worse if there's no local oversight.
An example is flying over India. Satellite internet service is not permitted. It cuts off the moment your flight crossed land in India and usually re-actives immediately after leaving.
Pirate radio is a lot less fun to run if you need it to be two-way.
Because you need your customers on the ground to run their own pirate transmitter (which can be located and penalized by ground authorities), and your satellites need to receive signals from the ground - which ground authorities from first-world countries can make arbitrarily difficult, deciphering a multitude of <1W transmission from customer cellphones is kinda difficult when a modern electronic warfare radar transmitter is tracking your satellite at the same time.
I see where you're coming from, but I prefer to have the relationship with a single entity (my cellular carrier) and get access to both. Simpler to deal with.
Agreed on the potential complication if/when I'm in another country, but, well, everything can't be simple...
Adding to this: I wish I can just buy a 4G modem for my cubesat and get 24/7 access through Starlink without waiting for my cubesats to be in view of my groundstation...
i wouldnt need more than 1MBit to ssh into my servers comfortably, and pull directions to the nearest "full power downlink" if i want to listen to music while i work or something
Have you looked into AWS Ground Station? I don’t know if it’s economical, or has enough locations for 24/7 access, but it might be better than once an orbit.
All ground station as a service are limited by radio licensing, you need to apply for transmit license to the country that the groundstation is located to legally transmit to your cubesat. Its not as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance
Compare this to a 4G modem / smartphone, its amazing that you don't need to file spectrum license to another country version of FCC everytime you travel. It. Just. Worked.
Yup. Small cell size is actually a feature for cell phone communications. You have to share bandwidth with everyone in your cell - the smaller the cell, the less crowding.
This is a general starlink issue, which is why I don't understand how is it economically or physically viable in crowded areas, such as cities, where the majority of human population lives.
It's not. They don't have the capacity to cover densely populated areas and it will always be cheaper to build out infrastructure on land in those areas than to launch something into space.
They aren't trying to compete with cell towers. SpaceX is partnered with traditional carriers in each country where LTE service will be available and the Starlink service is intended to supplement those services by providing service where existing cell towers can't.
Direct to Cell has pretty low bandwidth. The total bandwidth is 4Mbps per cell, with each person getting kpbs. If they do offer internet, it will be like 2G or dialup.
I was looking into the bandwidth (apparently most important parameter in cellular service) offered but nobody is mentioning including the Starlink landing page for the service. Sure it mentioned LTE but it can be anything from 1 to 100 Mbps and LTE+ can be well into Gbps.
Here is the previous post last year on Direct to Cell by Starlink and the main complains is about the puny bandwidth [1]. But if you are outside the town in remote places or in the middle of ocean any communication albeit a few bytes is most welcome, beggars cannot choose. For most IoT services it should be adequate but if you're inside tropical jungle or Amazon forest it will not work need to climb tree for the reception to work.
Others have already touched on the technical and regulatory issues, but also think of pricing. Would they price is like the US carriers do, or would they price it like a Scandinavian carrier?
If they want customers all over the world, they'd need to match the cheapest offering, as it's hard to argue that the service for some reason is more expensive in the US. I tried finding the price for a US cell phone plan, I can't actually do it. AT&T is impossible to navigate and always seems to bundle a phone. Mint Mobile tries to push 3, 6 or 12 months, which isn't even legal and the plans still come in at $40 for what is a $25 plan here in Denmark (with no additional fees).
If Starlink launched a world view subscription, at competitive prices they'd immediately crash the US cell service market.
And then one day: one censorship for the whole world.
No, thank you. The availability of different providers in different jurisdictions is crucial for thwarting world to function. I speak as a person from a country with government censorship implemented.
Doesn’t Globestar still have more satellites in orbit? With Apple supporting them, hoping there will be some consumer choice. This looking like regular cellular will become the new landline company.
To put some numbers to it, it looks like SpaceX started launching direct to cell satellites at the beginning of the year[1], and by July they had over 100 in orbit. Not sure how many are in orbit right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were close to 200.
Oh, no. Apple owns them at this point. 20% ownership, and they have 85% of Globalstar's current satellite capacity for themselves. GSAT isn't really putting new customers on the constellations and Apple is funding all the replacement hardware.
You don't have a clue what you're talking about, so from what did you derive these harsh feelings? Starlink satellites are in LEO, without active boosting they decay in mere years.
A decayed satellite doesn't just disappear though. There's particulate pollution from it burning up, not to mention the pollution from rocket launches.
There's also the light pollution that the astronomy community has been complaining about for years.
For astronomy, sinking costs of space launches present an opportunity to move the actual telescopes into space, where the atmosphere doesn't stand in the way at all.
I read a long description of an astronomer's journey to a prestigious Chilean observatory deep in the desert. He wasn't particularly happy about either the isolation or the bloodsucking bugs that could not be entirely exterminated and carried diseases.
Compared to that, remote work on a space-based telescope might be preferable from the human perspective, too.
There are about 6 thousand Starlink satellites out there and their total count may grow to some 40 thousand in the future.
But even if we abstracted the LEO to just one sphere, it would be quite a bit BIGGER than the Earth alone.
If 40 thousand, say, small cars were distributed across the entire globe including oceans, would you call the result "unsustainable pollution"? In fact, compared to what we live in today, such a world would be positively pristine. We are used to having 40 thousand cars in every city of 80 thousand people, which is usually just a small dot on the map.
Space is big. Even near-Earth orbits are mindbogglingly huge. Even if there were millions of satellites on low Earth orbits, that space would still be several nines of vacuum.
Some people aren't smart enough to appreciate theory. These people don't even learn the hard way either. They take their disbelief and excuses to their grave. For the rest of us, good theories aren't just admired from afar, they're acted upon before they materialize.
Bro you "learned" this theory from popsci media, evidenced by your surface level understanding of it. Any debris in these orbits clears out in a few years, it's a complete non issue with this constellation.
I am aware it's a low orbit that clears faster, but some debris can still fly upward. And even a few years is quite enough to destroy everything in the low orbit.
Significantly increasing perigee is pretty unlikely, though, and it is in the perigee where most of the braking action takes place. Highly elliptic orbits with low perigee are very unstable.
"And even a few years is quite enough to destroy everything in the low orbit."
That is precisely the assertion that I would at least like to see convincingly modeled. Because "enough to destroy everything" is a very big claim.
Any debris that gains energy doesn't get circularized so it's perigee is still low and for that reason it still deorbits quickly.
If this happens, then LEO becomes uneconomical for unimportant satellites for a few years. If you really need a really important satellite in LEO you can still put it there and just eat the increased attrition rate. Higher orbits will still be fine, particularly very high orbits like GEO where you can put most really important satellites if you really need them. Kessler syndrome in LEO wrecks commercial operation of LEO satellites for a few years, that's it. It doesn't stop humanity from launching weather satellites, military and communication satellites, space probes, etc. If a satellite really matters to society, a higher attrition rate increases costs but we have the means to launch many replacements for relatively small amounts of money. It's quite literally a non issue.
Furthermore, it's not even likely to happen anyway because ground tracking of debris is very good and these satellites can modify their orbits or even preemptively deorbit themselves if the situation becomes too dicy. The most likely circumstance that causes Kessler syndrome is a major war in which many LEO satellites are rapidly and violently knocked out without warning. But if there's a major war kicking off, the cost to humanity will be so great that crying about satellite casualties will probably get you punched in the face for being so insensitive about people dying.
"Appreciate" yes, but if you want to act on it by stopping a budding global industry in its tracks, I am afraid that the burden of proof is on you, not everyone else.
I would point out that it is in interests of the satellite owners to prevent their destruction, and that they act upon it already.
With some rules, the risk of satellites colliding can be significantly reduced, much like the risk of cars colliding in traffic.
Misanthropes [1] look at human civilization as a disease.
Look instead at what we've accomplished.
Think about the hard steps to life and intelligent life. About how silent the universe appears. Consider then how we're taking leaps towards making the cold and bleak universe self-aware. We are a part of evolution.
What would be tragic would be for this earth to simply boil away. Its life giving gasses and materials to vanish, unused, and life to be forgotten. Return to an unthinking rock.
[1] Maybe it's uncharitable to label you as a misanthrope, but looking broadly at this behavior in general.
I think it's fair to be concerned about what we're losing without being labeled as a Misanthrope. I think the progress, in its entirety, is worth it, but I'm still a little sad at the night sky having even more artificial things that take attention away from the stars. Looking at the night sky as a child seemed timeless to me, and that's no longer the case.
You can’t see Starlink satellites in the night sky except shortly after sunset or before sunrise when they are still in daylight and you aren’t. They don’t produce visible light on their own.
The night sky will be exactly the same otherwise so you’re doing a lot of handwringing over nothing.
Real astronomers are complaining about many other things. Streaking in long exposures and noise in other spectrums. But that’s not relevant to anyone looking at the sky with the naked eye or an amateur telescope.
I'm sort of undecided here. Yeah it's great for some use cases & many people, we should probably do it, seems worth it.
But also, before having 40k thingies on the orbit that will decay/break within years, why not think of a better strategy or the implications of this? We shouldn't repeat all the mistakes we have made in the past.
A lot of smart people have been trying to think of a better strategy for decades. This appears to be the best we can do within our current understanding of physics. A better strategy would require antigravity technology or faster than light communications or something similarly unlikely.
This is really interesting. Based on their wikipedia I can see they collect a lot of RF traffic - are IMEIs identifiable with the raw data captured that way? I'm surprised they are not encrypted. I say this as someone who knows nothing about the space.
In 2G/3G networks, IMSI is unencrypted in the initial handshake process while the handset gets a TMSI, so it can very trivially be passively observed, but only at specific points in time.
In 5G this is somewhat fixed - the handset uses its Home Network Public Key to encrypt the device-specific IMSI (producing a SUCI) which only the Home Network can decrypt. The MCC and MNC (carrier information) are still sent in the clear to allow the encrypted SUCI to route to the correct Home Network for decryption.
What I wonder about the Starlink constellation is, how secure it is physically? There are people burning down 5G towers. How plausible would be for a conspiracy nut to create a rocket to take out the satellites? Maybe starting a cascading effect?
Lot's of conspiracy theorists have become quite wealthy with the raise of Bitcoin, as it was very popular among them early on.
Military tech or not, its just atoms. Very interesting people are quite rich now, they will have access to precision machining advanced materials and chemicals if they have the motivation.
This is such an unhinged take, what if a super villain decided to build missiles to attack satellites? You understand that’s something nation states struggle with, that billionaire status doesn’t even guarantee success on.
Some bitcoin bro with a net worth in the millions is not building orbit reaching guided missiles in their garage. And if they were the satellites would be the least of our concerns.
USC students just broke the non-government, non-corporate rocket launch altitude record, reaching 143.25km[1]. But that is still a long way from the ~500km that Starlink operates at.
On top of that the person would have to develop a guidance system and payload capable of targeting and sufficiently damaging one of these satellites - not an easy feat.
Finally, it seems unlikely that a single hit would cause a chain reaction. There aren't that many satellites that are part of Starlink. Imagine 6000 cars spread over the surface of the Earth. Except that they're even more sparse than that because many of them are at different altitudes.
Additionally, SpaceX has already had to deal with the result of the debris field from the Russian Cosmos satellite that was destroyed by a Russian anti-satellite missile.[2]
Starlink has a lot of protection compared to other constellations since the satellites occupy such low orbits that most debris spontaneously deorbits in 5-10 years.
To disable a satalite would you actually need to hit orbital velocity? Couldn't you just shoot your rocket up to altitude and time it such that the satalite hits it?
They don't fly sun synchronous orbits, so a giant vertical laser cannon near equator running 24/7 can kill them all in matters of days. I think. Carrying this out likely also constitute a de facto declaration of war against the US.
Why near the equator? How much energy do you think it'd take to destroy one, over what period of time. Do you think you can aim your laser at something the size of a desk moving 8km/s at 500km-1500km away?
Its expensive to build rockets. Most rocket startups require at least 100 million $ to get a rocket into orbit. But a rocket into orbit is a far cry from an anti sat weapon. That technology is gone run you another 10-20 million $.
And then that kills 1 sat. SpaceX has many 1000s of sats.
So a small rocket like Electron cost around 8+ million $, lets say 6 million $ in cost. Plus lets say 1 million for the anti sat.
So you need to invest a couple 100 million $ into the development and produce many rockets. So you can calculate 7 million times * 6000, that gone be around 42 billion $.
Of course you would need to launch them from somewhere without a government that can stop you. Taking out vital infrastructure used by the US military tends to make people a bit angry. And neither China, Russia or Europe will want you anywhere close to them. This is likely gone make this much more expensive. Maybe you can make a deal with the Taliban? But they likely don't want that heat either.
So this is just a pure fantasy scenario.
> Maybe starting a cascading effect?
That's not gone happen. Far to low in orbit. As soon as they don't have propulsion they will drop lower. Until then the others can slightly raise their orbit.
There is not even a single nation state who has the capability to take out Starlink.
And no amount of people who burn down 5G towers could ever pull this off.
No, that’s just satellite backhaul for a cell tower. That’s not hard, but also typically if you can get power to a base station you can run fiber along the same poles the power runs on.
This is direct from handset to satellite, it’s clearly explained in the link.
Yeah, this is going to decimate your battery life. It's great to have in an emergency, don't get me wrong, but I'd probably leave data off otherwise when out remote.
My thinking is that you can think of Starlink satellites as LTE towers that just happen to be ~350 miles away from your phone. It happens to work because while they are far away, the satellites have a very clear line of sight (directly down) with few (no) obstacles.
The complication is that the base stations will be moving much more rapidly than traditional terrestrial towers.
1. As others have pointed out, the link budget (how much energy loss a particular radio link can handle before it is broken) for D2C satellites assumes a nearly direct line of sight from your handset to the satellite. This is much easier to achieve with satellites in space than it is with traditional cell towers that might have numerous walls/buildings in the way.
2. The D2C satellites use massive phased array antennas that are able to point a very narrow beam very accurately to the ground. This provides a substantial amount of antenna gain that further helps the link budget. The gain from the antennas allows the satellites to pick up even relatively weak signals from a handset.
There are other tricks as well, but these account for the largest differences. Of course, doppler gets in the way, but it is a solvable problem.
In theory, yes. Phased arrays can steer as many independent beams as the connected electronics support. I real life, it's probably going to be dozens or maybe hundreds of beams.
It’s going to be unambiguously good for wilderness rescue and disaster response.
But I like camping and hiking in remote areas in order to remove myself from the world. And I think the lack of connectivity discourages unprepared people from taking on more than they can handle in the wilderness. If the wilderness becomes fully connected, will it spoil that feeling? Will it lead to the last few truly remote places in the US suddenly being overrun with TikTok crowds? I honestly have no idea, and it’s a little scary.
But it feels like an anachronism that we don’t already have worldwide connectivity, and I guess this was just bound to happen.
There are virtually no unconnected places in most of Europe yet wilderness is still dangerous. It is good that rescue services can help you if accident happens (and it can happen even to the adequatly prepared).
Definitely. But when Apple released their Satellite SOS feature, I expected that to remain the cutting edge for a while, and for all devices to eventually gain very limited satellite emergency call capabilities. Instead, it seems like we’re going straight from most devices having zero connectivity in the (US) wilderness to all devices having connectivity everywhere in the world, as soon as next year. That’s a lot of change to come all at once.
Sounds like the future. And a good one at that. The pros far outweigh the cons. If someone can't disconnect purposefully to be with nature, then that's on them.
Sorry, forgot to add the crucial details. Such is the life while close to quitting work for the day.
The location, despite not being remote, has NO connectivity. It's the closest thing I can think of in my proximity that is completely unconnected. You're lucky to get GPRS there in terms of data, and most likely you won't even be able to place a call.[1] There is no broadband/fibre or any other sort of physical network connected to the buildings in the area.[2] The only way of connecting the place aside from Starlink that I've found is other satellite options[3], and it's most likely going to be 6 times as expensive and 50 times slower.
Sure, and people were making YouTube videos in the wilderness before that, but the accessibility that came with TikTok and Instagram created a phenomenon increased demand tenfold at many parks. That’s why you have to win a lottery to hike Angels Landing in Zion now.
Now we get wilderness livestreams! What will that do?
> Now we get wilderness livestreams! What will that do?
My guess is there will be some more wilderness livestreams streams, largely made by the people that are already going out to these places to produce content.
Are you particularly worried about a group of people that so far had no interest at all in taking pictures or videos in the wilderness but will now show up in droves to make competing bits of strictly-live content? Who are these users??
My point is that this will allow anyone to be an active content creator while they’re in the wilderness, which makes it quicker, easier, and much more appealing to create that type of content.
In another comment you pointed out overtourism but in this comment you seem to be saying your concern is that it will be easier to create content… for the people that are already there? Who cares if people make content or not while they are there?
Your issue is either not wanting people on their phones in parks — which you cannot control — or not wanting people in parks at all, which not only can you not control but that would also be a downright insane desire.
The reason why parks exist and are maintained is that people go to them. If nobody goes to a park, there is no incentive for upkeep or staff. Much (or virtually all) of the wilderness that you have enjoyed in your life is available to enjoy because people before you enjoyed it and made it accessible to you in some way. That is how parks work
The crowds are completely unmanageable in some parks, and it’s destroying the ecosystems and natural features that the parks were built to exhibit.
Ever heard of Fossil Cycad National Monument? Designated in 1922, and by 1957 all the fossils had been taken. There was nothing left to see. The national monument was abolished.
If you’ve never been, I’d recommend visiting Lake Louise in Alberta. However, when I last visited in 2019, the lake base was packed nearly shoulder to shoulder at 7am. Hiking the trail to the tea house was like walking a sidewalk in NYC at 9am, just a little rougher and steeper. I’ve heard it’s only gotten worse since Covid.
Is it selfish to want to be able to enjoy one of the most beautiful spots in Canada without it being crowded? Absolutely. But the sheer volume of people makes in a completely unenjoyable experience, not to mention the dangers of erosion/wilful destruction/litter/etc that over-toured nature spots eventually succumb to. The nice thing right now is that there are many, many places to go that most people won’t, due to lack of accessibility, lack of cell service, etc. By breaking down barriers, you open the floodgates.
I used to despise gatekeeping, wanting everyone to be able to experience as many joys as possible. But when seeing what happens when the masses get access to delicate niches, my opinion shifts. Maybe I’m just getting older and grumpier though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Not sure honestly. I've been to lots of remote areas, only accessible by multiple days of travel on foot or canoe, so probably? But I live on the other end of the country, so the effort likely wouldn't be worthwhile if it were truly inaccessible.
And they’ve been very expensive, subscription-based, and limited: no direct access to the internet, just location pings and text messages (which sometimes have to be preprogrammed). Nothing at all like what Starlink is talking about.
Garmin InReach has existed already for years. It didn't take the feeling away from me and I felt more comfortable having it in my backpack just in case. Wilderness adventures shouldn't be life or death experiences.
Starlink here, which includes data, is a huge jump from emergency SOS on Inreach. I do think we'll lose some of the magic of outdoors experiences when we can check nytimes.com and Reddit in the backcountry.
With Garmin InReach you can text actively. And I didn't. It is a mindset IMHO. If a person cannot control him/herself from using a phone while camping it is on them. No tech can change that and they will end up watching offline shows on their downloaded shows.
I doubt it is going to work very well so just hold your breath for the moment. Also the space junk issues are becoming formidable, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is all gone in 5 years, if it exists at all. Or else I’d like to believe.
It would be very interesting to see some kind of diagram depicting all of the corporate entities Musk is involved in and how each entity does business with one another.
xAI just raised billions to help Tesla build out FSD (or at least that was part of the pitch).
His empire is divided into so many corporate entities, but they all cross-pollinate and are clearly under his direct control for the most part.
The closest comparison I can think of is Berkshire Hathaway (one person/group controlling multiple wide ranging private and public companies).
> Starlink is a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX.
Starlink is not a separate entity — it's a division of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
From Terms of Service[1]:
> Your order for two-way satellite-based internet service (“Services”) and a Starlink antenna, Wi-Fi router and mount (“Starlink Kit” or “Kit”) is subject to the terms (“Terms”) of this Starlink agreement for the United States and its territories. These Terms, those terms incorporated by reference, and the details you agree to in your online order (“Order”) form the entire agreement (“Agreement”) between you (“customer” or “user”) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (known as “Starlink” in these Terms).
I didn't realize SpaceX was just a nickname for Space Exploration Technologies Corp, TIL
So the Terms of service is with SpaceX but apparently there is such a thing as Starlink Services LLC, but I'm just going off Wikipedia, all this corporate structuring is opaque to me.
> SpaceX was just a nickname for Space Exploration Technologies Corp
It's slightly more than that: it's a legally recognized nickname for the actual entity, technically called a "Fictitious Business Name" (aka DBA, "doing business as") registered with the state.
> there is such a thing as Starlink Services LLC
One might register a bunch of shell companies in various jurisdictions, holding various assets and contracts during the course of business, for tax reasons, to limit the blast radius of liabilities and facilitate business (for example, retail gift cards, e.g. Amazon, are often issued by a separate legal entity.) I think there's a qualitative distinction there with what Berkshire Hathaway or perhaps Alphabet Inc. do with their separate businesses that are hands-off subsidiaries. It appears at the moment Starlink is very much intertwined with SpaceX and user contracts and the trademark are actually directly owned by SpaceX, so not sure what they are using that particular LLC for.
While it's true, SpaceX will raise money by making Starlink (the less important / easier business) public and keep SpaceX (the real business that makes it possible that Starlink depends on) private.
> His empire is divided into so many corporate entities, but they all cross-pollinate and are clearly under his direct control for the most part.
My understanding is that, given Tesla is a public company, any collaboration between Tesla and other Musk companies needs to be approved by the board (or maybe by other C-suite executives) without Musk in the room. Musk can come up with the idea for a collaboration, but then the decision that it is in the best interests of Tesla and all its shareholders to proceed with the collaboration needs to be made independently of him.
By contrast, I don't think the rules apply as strictly to his other companies since they are privately held. The law cares a lot more about protecting shareholder rights in public companies than in private ones.
Following the law should be above the shareholder gain. Mentality like yours is what got us in this situation where people are blatantly abusing the government for personal gain.
It's not enough to just do a poll and say that most shareholders are "happy." If there is even one owner, which there will be, who objects, you need to be able to show that decisions were in the best interest of the company. That doesn't mean said owner has to agree with them, but if there are deals that arguably favor outside companies then you will hear from either the SEC or that one shareholder.
The other comment saying "the law is above shareholder gain" is kind of missing the point thought--the law in question is specifically to protect the interest of shareholders.
> The board at Tesla is basically Elon’s buddies. There is no oversight or independence there, they do what he wants.
This is true at most companies with a competent CEO.
My uncle had an inimical board that tried to remove him, but he somehow replaced them all one by one before they could. Needless to say he replaced them with people who didn't want to remove him ("buddies"; but what kind of a leader surrounds himself with people that want him to fail?). He's never told me how he did that despite my asking several times.
Some companies have board governance rules that mandate a majority of the board seats be of "outside and independent" individuals, but of course this can easily be gamed and, of course, these rules themselves can be put to a vote during shareholder meetings.
Still, it's always worth considering these structures before one invests--especially in med-to-large-cap public companies.
Alternatively, in private small-cap and venture-boards, the seats are nearly always filled by founders and lead investors and I would argue that's a "good thing".
> This is true at most companies with a competent CEO.
No it's not.
Competent CEOs hire boards that align with their world-view but are independent enough to provide useful advice. And almost all startup boards will have investors who definitely will not rubber stamp the sort of thing going on at Tesla.
AFAIK, Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s chair, had no particular association with Musk prior to joining Tesla’s board. She is an Australian business executive with a history of working in senior finance roles in Australian and US firms. She was recruited on to Tesla’s board by another (now former) Tesla director, Brad Buss, who to my knowledge has never been that closely associated with Musk either. Musk obviously trusts and respects Denholm, but I believe their relationship is more professional than personal - Denholm lives in Australia and travels to the US for Tesla board meetings.
Wasn't there a shareholder suite that alleged the directors aren't independent because of the above-standard Tesla options they receive? Robyn Denholm excecised and sold $35M worth of TSLA in the past month.
> Wasn't there a shareholder suite that alleged the directors aren't independent because of the above-standard Tesla options they receive?
Has a court accepted that argument? I mean, you can come up with all sorts of grounds to claim an independent director isn’t really independent, but unless a court with jurisdiction accepts the argument, it doesn’t really count for anything.
HN is a court of law: some things may fail to meet some legal test, but not that in no way means it automatically becomes subjectively "right". I am adding a datapoint on what's arguable and leaving the judgement of cogency to the reader.
My previously-unstated opinion is: remunerating directors like executives blurs the distinction between those 2 roles in ways that are likely detrimental to long-term shareholders.
If receiving stock based compensation is grounds for not being independent then wouldn't most companies have an independence issue with their boards? It just seems like a crazy claim on it's face.
Collaboration is handled by the executive team. The Board of major companies is not so active as to negotiate deals. One may be an activist board member and hold sway over the CEO, but ultimately it's the CEO's job. The Board simply picks the executive team.
It's similar (ish), but I think unfortunately the comparison distracts from your core point and observation.
Musk Inc. is, in essence, a privet equity company. He raises a fund, and invests it along with his own cash into a business he knows well, and with which he believes he can disrupt the status quo.
He's very hands on, understanding all the important core details, setting culture, and pushing hard. But he also delegates to experts he brings in to run his businesses.
It's obviously not the same as PE, but there are distinct similarities. With each of his companies he clearly can't take an active role all the time, but what his team are experts at is identifying the areas he needs to be on top of, and they will quite literally fly him in for it. It seems to me it's always the start of something, be it a new company or project. He will be there 24/7 getting it off the ground, but then hand over to lieutenants to run.
It's a formula that seems to work again and again. We're (well those of you in the US) are in for an interesting time over the coming year as he has a new project to kick start.
Seriously though, if he's primarily in a delegation mode these days, good for him, I think he's earned it
Bias disclosure: I feel like I could be a Musk if I actually had zero laziness and a few extra connections. We are similar in intelligence and interests and worldview (other than his edgy tweets of the last 1-2 years)
It’s not being downvoted due to any inaccuracy, but rather the implied positive sentiment about Musk’s involvement with the government.
A more pessimistic view might be: Musk’s businesses have technological advantages but are financially over-leveraged. Their present success relies on heavy government subsidies while their future success depends on complete privatization of government functions.
I agree with you, yet in a somewhat different way.
He is an investor investing in science fiction. This isn't even implied, he comes out and says it again and again.
I'm reminded of xerox parc's "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and I think that's his philosophy.
As to "businesses he knows well" I do not agree. He didn't go into electric vehicles, rockets, robots or neural interfaces as "business he knows well".
Just read about musk going to russia to try to get a launch vehicle going and coming back insulted and frustrated. So he broke down the problem and learned how to solve it.
Also "Private Equity" has a connotation of rent seeking nowadays, like "buying all dentists and monetizing to extract profit".
I don't see him that way philosophically. I see him as a pure creator, not a rent seeking wealth extractor.
"DOGE" is probably not a security (that will ultimately be a question for the courts I'm sure, but you have to stretch the Howey test quite far to find a "common enterprise". It's a picture of a dog with some dumb text), and there's no credible evidence that Musk ever dumps it or even really pumps it.
I see twitter as sort of frustration thing, like hyperloop.
With hyperloop - he was frustrated by the way high speed rail was being handled in california, and hyperloop came into being as his cost + engineering sort of optimization. But with hyperloop he wasn't forced to buy it.
With twitter he just got in too deep and had to buy it.
(though I probably don't know enough about the details of twitter and could be wrong)
＞ His empire is divided into so many corporate entities, but they all cross-pollinate and are clearly under his direct control for the most part.
It's not unusual for large companies to have a large web of corporate entities, but what's problematic is that they have different ownership rather than the same owners/owned by each other. (I started to say that one is public and others private, but it would be the same issue if two were public, as they would obviously not have the exact same set of owners.)
When xAI makes a deal with Tesla, if xAI is getting the better end of the stick, that is a self-dealing problem that the SEC can investigate on behalf of Tesla shareholders. The assets of Tesla belong proportionally to its owners, so Musk or another large owner can't make deals that give their private company an advantage at the expense of Tesla owners.
If Tesla gets too generous of a deal, that's something the non-Musk owners of xAI if any could raise an issue with, but when the public company is allegedly getting shortchanged, the SEC gets involved too. Moreover, even if you are trying to do it right, there is always the opportunity for someone to challenge you.
In the context of OP, the corporate structure of SpaceX et al. is about as far from interesting as it could possibly get. The obsession some posters have with rich people (and Musk in particular) is really unhealthy!
I really wonder if anyone is going to be able to catch up to SpaceX anytime soon. Kuiper seems dead in the water, the legacy operators seem unwilling to expand into LEO constellations.
I think the potential comptetitors in this business (low latency satellite internet megaconstellation) missed their opportunity.
Starship is very close to being able to put next gen Starlink satellites into orbit ("very close" as in most likely within a year or so). Once that happens, it's over, there will not be competition for at least a decade. Before Bezos and others (and/or EU/China) build their own Starship copies (and if you've seen recent EU/China concepts, you can't call it anything else...), it's going to be the 2030s.
Not to mention that the existing Starlink fleet is about to be old technology. The larger satellites launched by Starship is projected to dwarf the terminal speed available now (gigabit+ downlinks to consumer dishes).
I think Starlink has caused rural fiber deployments to accelerate because a friend's property in rural Oregon just got fiber, but the challenge remains: after you get fiber to the corner of your 22 acre lot, how do you cover the rest of the 21 acres? With fiber and using wifi as your backhaul you have to get a chain a bunch of nodes to get Internet to each building/area you want wifi. Starlink (business) lets you just stick a starlink mini dish in each place without having to worry about all that.
that solution isn't without issues. specifically, you have to climb trees and run power or do solar, and then if there's a heavy storm you can have issues. those aren't insurmountable problems but being able to get Internet anywhere there's liner of sight to the sky is easier (or harder!) depending on the terrain.
Climbing one tree to get Starlink to see the sky is less work then having to climb multiple trees to align a dish and a repeater so it's entirely terrain dependent so all we can say in the general case is we have to take a look at your land/situation before saying which would be preferable to you.
Centurylink ran fiber down the nearest highway to my rural Oregon property a couple of months before Starlink became available. AFAIK the timing was more coincidence than anything, but you're entirely right about the logistics of fiber being non-trivial. As usual, last mile is the hardest part. Even with fiber at the highway, the only service Centurylink would offer us was 10Mbps DSL. I bet they would have tun fiver to my house for $$$$$, but Starlink is plenty fast and it would almost certainly take a decade or more to recoup the one-time costs of getting fiber installed all the way to my house.
You are right for on-grid systems. If you can get power from the grid, it is easy to get fiber. I have friends working remotely from very rural zones in Brazil, and they got fiber for a lower price than it was for buying up the transformers/posts to route power to their farms.
But, there are still niche use cases, like ships and planes, that would pay a premium for fast LEO satellite connections. For people I know who live on islands, going from barely being able to use WhatsApp to entirely using the internet (YouTube / Netflix) is game-changing.
Not sure if they are dead in the water or not. However, they have until July 30, 2026 to deploy half of their fleet or they lose the FCC granted frequencies. The fleet is 3232 satellites.
So far they launched 2 test satellites. They contracted most of the launches to either new rockets or ones in development, like New Glenn, Ariane 6, ULA Vulcan. They actually had to contract three Falcon 9 launches to help out with that. In reality, I think SpaceX will end up launching a lot more than that.
Unless FCC is willing to be lenient, 50% of the satellites will be hard to accomplish by the deadline.
I doubt that very much. Gwynne Shotwell stated multiple times that they will work with whoever. In addition, SpaceX is already contracted for 3 launches of Kuiper.
The quick maths indicates that to achieve this, they’d have to launch 22.5 satellites per week every week for the next 18 months until that deadline. SpaceX seems to be launching at nearly twice that rate, having launched [1565 satellites](https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/30/live-coverage-spacex-t....) in the first 10 months of this year.
> I am sure it's doable if all the space providers work together and there aren't any showstoppers.
Are you living in a different world that me?
NO company or Government on Earth outside SpaceX has the capability to launch more than about 15 orbital rockets per year. Most are in the 5-10 per year range.
That's why I said "if all the space providers work together". That obviously includes SpaceX - they would be doing the heavy lifting here (mind pun intended).
> NO company or Government on Earth
Not that it's a possibility for Kuiper, but China had 67 launches in 2023.
How can it be that a LTE smartphone, costing ~$100 and doing all the things a smart phone can do, and being designed to connect to a cell network via a tower a few miles away, can somehow also function as the pizza sized $500 Starlink dish?
I keep coming back to the comments waiting to see how many orders of magnitude lower. 1 Mbps would be quite different than 10 kbps. Is this for facetime while camping, or send an SOS if your car breaks down in the backroads?
It's much closer to the SOS. They start with text messaging, which is much easier because it's low bandwidth and tolerant of delays. Voice can also be done at low bandwidth but its a bit harder to ensure things sound smooth. And then data, but I think this will only ever be low bandwidth like internet browsing, not tiktok or facetime. There's probably a reason they aren't boasting about the bandwidth they can achieve...
The constellation is subdivided into orbital planes, with ~20 to ~60 satellites in each plane chasing each other around the planet.
The following is somewhat speculative:
The bearing to the next satellite ahead or behind you in the same plane should be roughly constant; likewise, the bearing to satellites in adjacent planes orbiting in the same direction will change slowly during most of the orbit.
Near the poles the required slew rate will likely be too high to keep the side-to-side links working but that's also a part of the planet where subscriber density will be low so losing that capacity for periods of a few minutes when near the poles likely won't matter.
Which bandwidth can a phone reasonably expect given nobody around for kilometers? Are we talking kbits or mbits? Is there some kind of theoretical maximum?
Does this allow the ability to circumvent LTE networks in countries like China? Do we have the capability to send messages to any/all phones in China if we (USA) wanted to?
For that, Starlink would have to use the frequency band that the phone (and, therefore, the relevant operator) is using. Such frequencies are assigned by states to operators, and using them from space would be extremely easy to detect. That is why Starlink either has to make a deal with in operators, or acquire a licence to use a frequency band in every country it wants to operate.
I assume that if Starlink was trying to do this without agreement, in violation of the interational treaty on radio regulations, the USA would have to prevent them from doing so. If the USA did not, I don't see what would prevent China from shooting down Starlink's constellation.
As a side note on the technology, since Starlink satellites orbit 340km from earth, I wonder if they emit a directed signal. If they don't, I don't see how they intend to respect borders when sending messages down.
China has demonstrated ASAT weapons. They don't have enough in stock to take out the entire Starlink constellation but just the threat would be enough.
It then turn down to "soft" warfare. Iran will give some guy a missile to shoot your cargo ship. I'd like them to do that for countries that can't do anything though (ie: some countries in Africa). Good for the citizenry and no side-effects.
> Except China, does any other country have the ability to do this?
Any country capable of launching satellites or even sounding rockets could almost certainly do enough damage to majorly disrupt operations. Certainly the EU or Iran, possibly South Africa with the recent resumption of rocket launches at OTB.
- "I don't see what would prevent China from shooting down Starlink's constellation."
They absolutely do not have tens of thousands of anti-satellite missiles, or any other credible (non-nuclear) way to dismantle a constellation of that size. If you look at their own news media[0], they (Chinese defense) consider it a major weakness, and priority.
- "Researchers call for development of anti-satellite capabilities including ability to track, monitor and disable each craft The Starlink platform with its thousands of satellites is believed to be indestructible"
There aren't tens of thousands of Starlink satellites over China, and I suspect the issue would be solved or escalated way before the whole constellation gets down.
The regular Starlink, which requires a dish, doesn't even operate in China (it could technically but no regulatory approval). Obviously China would not allow this either.
This is supposed to launch in New Zealand during 2024, in partnership with a local carrier. Was being heavily hyped a year or so back, but I haven’t heard much recently?
I love how libertarians are willing to use a communication network controlled by a billionaire oligarch who bought a presidency to further his business and personal ideological interests, but are worried about government overreach.
In the 90’s, libertarians were against any consolidation of power (including corporations) that could infringe on individual rights. (This was roughly in Ron Paul’s time.)
That’s been replaced with corporate libertarians, which are against any government power that could infringe on the rights of corporations. See also Rand Paul, and the corporatist movement (which is sadly mainstream in the US, an offshoot of fascism, and essentially indistinguishable from modern libertarianism).
Anyway, they are many things, but I wouldn’t say they’re hypocritical.
It's massively hypocritical, even if the people don't realise it right away.
If you take libertarianism to its logical conclusion you wind up with feudalism, which is anything but free.
Whenever libertarians try to take their philosophy through to its logical conclusion in practice they just wind up reinventing government only worse (or reinventing banking only worse in the case of crypto).
In the United States, the libertarian caucus in power since 2022 has several leaders that could be said to be against individual rights, especially if you look within the Free State movement, oddly enough. However, they narrowly avoided their candidacy in this last election. The whole thing is a mess.
If anyone from Starlink or SpaceX is reading these comments here’s what you want to do: Sell your own branded trail cam with solar charging and LTE from orbit. You can charge $25-$40 a month for unlimited pictures sent from the cam. This would open up hunters, nature enthusiasts, and researchers to be able to place their hardware anywhere in the field without worrying about connectivity. Here in SWVA we have deep hollows that can’t get LTE without dense tower coverage that we don’t have the population to justify, but you can grab a satellite connection.
After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.
Ten years ago I installed one cam for Surfline and at that time it's was an off-the-shelf but expensive outdoor camera (stock firmware) connected to a locally-based broadband.
This could also be a hardware startup. If only there were some entrepreneur types around...
Presumably there's a market for this in other niches, e.g. weather monitoring, defense/border monitoring, etc... The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Where's the really valuable data?
I recall not too long ago a startup advertising exactly this idea for farms. It was some box with various sensors (and output lines) that you could configure to do a multitude of tasks
I work with researchers that deploy all sorts of solar powered sensor equipment in remote parts of New Zealand. Realistically Starlink would need to support NB-IoT and LTE-M which is what these kinds of devices are moving towards (if they need cellular connectivity). These are low power variants of 4G and 5G.
Even if you have solar and a fixed platform, you usually want to deploy as little solar as possible. Especially if you need to carry the gear on foot. So minimising power consumption is really important.
$25-$40 is insane. Spypoint offers 250 pics for free a month and 1000 for $6 a month. As long as you can connect to a cell tower (1 bar is enough). That probably covers 80 % of hunt properties.
At least in the Western United States, most hunting is done on publicly owned land, and there's enormous swaths of public land with absolutely zero cell phone coverage.
As long as it doesn't need near-real-time viewing (or if it does, said viewing can be billed for as a separate per-user fee), it wouldn't cost anything extra to SpaceX in the sense that those cameras could use free capacity, only transmitting when nothing else is.
This service uses a different radio link using LTE. That’s why you don’t need the dish. They had to launch new satellites with the extra radio gear. So your past experience is not necessarily representative.
Agreed. As an avid hunter/angler I've been trying to make things more difficult the last few years instead of easier. At some point the trail cams start making people look more like butchers IMO. Similarly in the fishing world, tools like Livescope are becoming deeply embedded in the community.
For me, the draw of the woods and rivers is the chance to disconnect from technology and reconnect to nature.
In Finland, i get 5Mbps LTE uplink for EUR 4 per month, for a trailcam, with unlimited use (at least in principle). So $20 per month sounds expensive, but obviously there are places where one has no earthly LTE and then it could be justified.
In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.
Finland is fairly flat and has _excellent_ LTE coverage. Being in Norway myself, which isn't flat, but still has fantastic LTE coverage for political reasons, I do often find myself thinking like you, and need to be reminded of how abysmal coverage is in rural North America (and even in for example rural Germany).
If I have to choose, I'd rather line the pockets of the gay man who believes in people's rights and whose only ambition is to get me to buy into his ecosystem of well engineered but overpriced hardware,
instead of the man who just bought himself a President so that he can direct government spending towards his businesses and away from his competitors while disowning his own child for their sexuality, and whose ambition is to rule the planet.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadThis is great for regions that need to be connected and the power elites, but for the rest of us it wouldn't change much.
I disagree with almost all of Elon's "politics" but Starlink still has huge potential. Hopefully, he doesn’t abuse the power too much and focuses on making the world more connected, in the hands of the us government and given away like GPS it could be the way to go to get the whole world connected.
The best possible outcome for Starlink is that he gets distracted with something else and doesn't meddle in it whatsoever.
That's at least a billion people. I don't know what the intersection of that with the affordability is, though.
I'm writing this from an Ayahuasca center in rural Peru connected with Starlink. Before, internet was a ten minute drive into town away. We're now connected when at one side of the center. It would be nice to have it all the way into the jungle. And when you want to be disconnected, just turn your phone off or leave it behind.
My understanding is that the monthly cost for Starlink varies pretty wildly across the world. Presumably the same would be true for this cell service - idle satellites have the same huge fixed cost and don't generate any revenue.
a) Based on what we've seen in China, India etc many of those will shift towards densely populated cities or will stay and those locations will become industrialised, densely populated cities.
b) In densely populated cities it doesn't make sense to use Starlink when fibre is far cheaper, has limited congestion issues and can provide gigabit speeds at a minimum.
c) It's great that you're writing this in rural Peru but that is a declining use case and should not be extrapolated to the rest of the world.
There's just a really strong tendency for people all over the world to focus on their own experience. And you can actually reinforce this by zooming out too far. If you live in San Francisco, this seems like a pet use case and you can be like "What is it, 10% of the population?" But "the population" is quite the fucking denominator.
I mean, it's already happening and obviously Starlink has run the numbers. So I'm largely just reacting to the tone here.
But it will decline such that Starlink is likely to be more of a niche product similar to how satellite internet services are today.
Are you really that ignorant?
By every definition that is niche.
Currently, each launch of 23 Starlink satellites costs SpaceX around $50 million. To get 1,000 direct to cell satellites in orbit, they'll need to launch 44 times, costing them $2.2 billion. Due to the low orbits, air resistance causes the satellites to reenter within 5-10 years, so to maintain the constellation they'll need to spend $220-440 million per year. These costs will be much lower when they switch from Falcon 9 to Starship.
Now let's say only 1% of the population wants Starlink direct to cell. That's still 80 million people. If SpaceX charges cell companies $10/month per user for the service, that's almost $10 billion per year. And that's not counting the money they make from selling Starlink Internet, which currently has over 4 million subscribers. At $100/month, that's $4.8 billion per year in revenue.
So Starlink is profitable without direct to cell technology, but since they're launching the satellites anyway, they might as well collect more revenue by adding cell capability. DTC only becomes unprofitable if the cost of the extra hardware and mass is less than DTC subscriber revenue.
Why not 5%, 10%, 100%. It's just made up numbers.
Will it be a good business for Starlink, sure. Will it change the world, probably not.
Until recently, most of what you wrote applied to us too (our previous options were 128kbit theoretical dsl, 1 sec latency, or extremely flaky cellular).
Now that a double digit percentage of people on our street have starlink, the phone company finally ran fiber to the home.
Being able to make emergency calls from the many dead spots around here would be nice.
Haha, good one.
I think it depends on the application you're using it for.
If you're constantly using the gps - yeah, I'd definitely agree with you.
But if you're using it purely for emergency communication, you can just turn off the cell phone, and it should be fine.
It's also possible to pursue a hybrid approach by bringing a battery to change the phone.
Or, as I have done on multi-day trips, a solar panel and a battery.
Cell phones are far more sensitive to temperature issues than dedicated devices.
And when you do have an issue no external battery is going to help you because they are also sensitive.
And now, other people have some access (if non-optimal) to rescue services, despite the fact that they didn't (or couldn't afford to) pay more for inReach.
I see this as an unqualified win.
At least my work S24 says ~16 days in airplane mode + power saver. Not tested.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/120930
Works surprisingly well. You have to be outside and hold iPhone in the specifics position pointed at satellite, it tells you where to turn iPhone to to get signal.
(I’m referring to the "Messages via Satellite" feature that launched two months ago in iOS 18. This is different from the "Emergency SOS via Satellite" feature that has been around since 2022.)
One space based cell plan for the whole world
I'm optimistic.
I think that, once SpaceX starts launch Starlink satellites with Starship, they'll be able to increase their globally available bandwidth by a factor of 5-10x (although it might take 5 years to roll out). A lot of that bandwidth will be eaten up by existing demand. But hopefully some of it will enable novel services like global cell service through a single provider (even if it's limited to low bandwidth applications like text and voice).
We're currently talking data rates on the order of (optimistically) 5 Mbit/s for a cell with a diameter of 15 square miles, i.e. something like 0.1 Mbit/s per km^2.
In very rural areas (which is the use case!), that's infinitely better than nothing, but anywhere people live, this is effectively nothing, and there is currently no way around ground-based infrastructure.
However, a Starlink mini dish can let you cheaply make calls from basically anywhere with some minor setup.
Traditional satellite phone corporations used to charge something like 8 USD/min.
But even ignoring that the contention is low in the middle of the ocean and satellites have hardware either way, driving down the market rate for calls at sea.
Calls are ~0.75 MB/minute allowing a 24/7 conversion for for a full month for 250$, or more realistically mostly sending other kinds of data and a sub cent per minute opportunity cost for using that data on calls. The actual hardware installation is relatively trivial compared to operating a boat.
So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and in part it’s a limited customer base for a lot of hardware, but it’s also just what the market will bare.
all mesh topologies
The bandwidth, latency and stability that Starlink has is also leagues better than geosynch based solutions, for a much lower monthly price.
Even without considering the better performance, the price makes it viable now to have a internet connections in places it did not make financial sense before.
It takes a day at most if you want a simple setup.
keeping the close-by phones on 5G to ease congestion and letting the fringe sit on 3G or 4G makes sense
The baseband on handheld devices do not have that much power to transmit and receive from Starlink directly; and hence the partnership with MNOs. With 5G (after Google & Meta got involved, the designs took on a Cloud/Internet-heavy focus), Starlink very well might have "slices" carved out exclusive for its own use world over.
See also: Cloudflare's Zero-Trust SIM (2022), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32982697
That is exactly what this is about, direct from standard handsets to starlink satellites.
It turns out they do.
And a single entity to decide who gets disconnected if they do not behave
Er, if you got highway, maybe? I assure you there are plenty of roads that have poor cell reception.
Partnering with a national carrier handles the licensing aspect and if the tech pans out the economics could shift to allow them to buy national spectrum and offer direct service.
Musk mentions this in the very first announcement of Starlink. https://youtu.be/AHeZHyOnsm4?t=191
I think this is the biggest reason. All nation's governments will absolutely ensure, overtly or covertly, that their national regulators limit any space-based supra-national system from being able to threaten their national telephony and data carriers. Why? Preventing losing national capabilities, government revenue (taxes, licenses & other domestic carrier fees, lobbying, kickbacks, bribes, etc) and, most importantly, losing the ability to snoop at will on calls and data (at least metadata if not full-take). Even in countries where the major carriers are all based in other nations, existing towers being land-based creates jurisdiction for the government to control and tax.
While many westernized democracies like to proclaim their commitment to freedom, rule of law and individual human rights - in practice there are currently zero governments on earth free enough to not consider loss of that absolute control over citizen's private communication an existential threat. Even in places where existing laws don't currently make it illegal, as soon as technology enables it - it will certainly be made illegal (by any means necessary). I assume SpaceX is smart enough to understand this reality.
The ITU is pretty overt about how frequency allocation governance works. Absolutely no one wants a free-for-all frequency regime, for a multitude of reasons - not even SpaceX.
You may recall that Huawei 5G equipment was expunged from domestically-controlled, western infrastructure without having broken any laws, due to fears of future abuse. Your suggestion of a foreign company unilaterally, and illegally[1] imposing it's foreign-controlled, space-based phone network goes much further than whatever fears Washington had over Huawei.
1. Pretty much every country on earth with a government regulates how radio spectrum is licensed for telecommunications, not for the purposes of control as an end, but coordination and preventing interference.
Radio Free Europe has been doing something similar successfully for what, 70 years? Of course being in violation of a given country's laws is a tradeoff.
Well, how did those predictions of the future perform?
- "The Chinese government espionage campaign that has deeply penetrated more than a dozen U.S. telecommunications companies is the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history — by far,” a senior U.S. senator told The Washington Post in an interview this week."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/21/...
Because you need your customers on the ground to run their own pirate transmitter (which can be located and penalized by ground authorities), and your satellites need to receive signals from the ground - which ground authorities from first-world countries can make arbitrarily difficult, deciphering a multitude of <1W transmission from customer cellphones is kinda difficult when a modern electronic warfare radar transmitter is tracking your satellite at the same time.
Agreed on the potential complication if/when I'm in another country, but, well, everything can't be simple...
Some regulation horror: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/space/Pages/API.aspx . Worst case you need to wait 7 years! to get your radio license
Compare this to a 4G modem / smartphone, its amazing that you don't need to file spectrum license to another country version of FCC everytime you travel. It. Just. Worked.
Its too big and power hungry to fit inside 10x20x30 cm cubesat though :( More reason to go bigger
There are millions of cell towers.
During a major event, cellular companies set up portable cell towers (COWs) and even these are not enough.
And a cell tower that is right next to you still pales in comparison to a single cable in bandwidth.
This is a general starlink issue, which is why I don't understand how is it economically or physically viable in crowded areas, such as cities, where the majority of human population lives.
Aren't you actually agreeing with me in actuality (in that cells are better than satellites for densely populated areas)?
I was looking into the bandwidth (apparently most important parameter in cellular service) offered but nobody is mentioning including the Starlink landing page for the service. Sure it mentioned LTE but it can be anything from 1 to 100 Mbps and LTE+ can be well into Gbps.
Here is the previous post last year on Direct to Cell by Starlink and the main complains is about the puny bandwidth [1]. But if you are outside the town in remote places or in the middle of ocean any communication albeit a few bytes is most welcome, beggars cannot choose. For most IoT services it should be adequate but if you're inside tropical jungle or Amazon forest it will not work need to climb tree for the reception to work.
[1] Starlink Direct to Cell:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848212
If they want customers all over the world, they'd need to match the cheapest offering, as it's hard to argue that the service for some reason is more expensive in the US. I tried finding the price for a US cell phone plan, I can't actually do it. AT&T is impossible to navigate and always seems to bundle a phone. Mint Mobile tries to push 3, 6 or 12 months, which isn't even legal and the plans still come in at $40 for what is a $25 plan here in Denmark (with no additional fees).
If Starlink launched a world view subscription, at competitive prices they'd immediately crash the US cell service market.
And then one day: one censorship for the whole world.
No, thank you. The availability of different providers in different jurisdictions is crucial for thwarting world to function. I speak as a person from a country with government censorship implemented.
Starlink has 6,426 [2] (Though that number is likely out of date by the time you read this)
[1] https://www.groundcontrol.com/knowledge/calculators-and-maps...
[2] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
Ah, thanks, I missed that.
Wait another month, there will be at least another ~500 in orbit.
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1. https://spacenews.com/spacex-deploys-direct-to-smartphone-sa...
2. https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2024/07/03/space...
They plan to launch 34,400 satellites
Oh, no. Apple owns them at this point. 20% ownership, and they have 85% of Globalstar's current satellite capacity for themselves. GSAT isn't really putting new customers on the constellations and Apple is funding all the replacement hardware.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285347/apple-globalstar...
There's also the light pollution that the astronomy community has been complaining about for years.
Actually, we can sustain this just fine. The public derives virtually zero measurable benifit from astronomy, particularly the sort done from Earth.
I read a long description of an astronomer's journey to a prestigious Chilean observatory deep in the desert. He wasn't particularly happy about either the isolation or the bloodsucking bugs that could not be entirely exterminated and carried diseases.
Compared to that, remote work on a space-based telescope might be preferable from the human perspective, too.
But even if we abstracted the LEO to just one sphere, it would be quite a bit BIGGER than the Earth alone.
If 40 thousand, say, small cars were distributed across the entire globe including oceans, would you call the result "unsustainable pollution"? In fact, compared to what we live in today, such a world would be positively pristine. We are used to having 40 thousand cars in every city of 80 thousand people, which is usually just a small dot on the map.
Space is big. Even near-Earth orbits are mindbogglingly huge. Even if there were millions of satellites on low Earth orbits, that space would still be several nines of vacuum.
Bro you "learned" this theory from popsci media, evidenced by your surface level understanding of it. Any debris in these orbits clears out in a few years, it's a complete non issue with this constellation.
"And even a few years is quite enough to destroy everything in the low orbit."
That is precisely the assertion that I would at least like to see convincingly modeled. Because "enough to destroy everything" is a very big claim.
If this happens, then LEO becomes uneconomical for unimportant satellites for a few years. If you really need a really important satellite in LEO you can still put it there and just eat the increased attrition rate. Higher orbits will still be fine, particularly very high orbits like GEO where you can put most really important satellites if you really need them. Kessler syndrome in LEO wrecks commercial operation of LEO satellites for a few years, that's it. It doesn't stop humanity from launching weather satellites, military and communication satellites, space probes, etc. If a satellite really matters to society, a higher attrition rate increases costs but we have the means to launch many replacements for relatively small amounts of money. It's quite literally a non issue.
Furthermore, it's not even likely to happen anyway because ground tracking of debris is very good and these satellites can modify their orbits or even preemptively deorbit themselves if the situation becomes too dicy. The most likely circumstance that causes Kessler syndrome is a major war in which many LEO satellites are rapidly and violently knocked out without warning. But if there's a major war kicking off, the cost to humanity will be so great that crying about satellite casualties will probably get you punched in the face for being so insensitive about people dying.
I would point out that it is in interests of the satellite owners to prevent their destruction, and that they act upon it already.
With some rules, the risk of satellites colliding can be significantly reduced, much like the risk of cars colliding in traffic.
Cars don’t produce light pollution, which I believe is what’s being mentioned here.
Look instead at what we've accomplished.
Think about the hard steps to life and intelligent life. About how silent the universe appears. Consider then how we're taking leaps towards making the cold and bleak universe self-aware. We are a part of evolution.
What would be tragic would be for this earth to simply boil away. Its life giving gasses and materials to vanish, unused, and life to be forgotten. Return to an unthinking rock.
[1] Maybe it's uncharitable to label you as a misanthrope, but looking broadly at this behavior in general.
The night sky will be exactly the same otherwise so you’re doing a lot of handwringing over nothing.
Real astronomers are complaining about many other things. Streaking in long exposures and noise in other spectrums. But that’s not relevant to anyone looking at the sky with the naked eye or an amateur telescope.
But also, before having 40k thingies on the orbit that will decay/break within years, why not think of a better strategy or the implications of this? We shouldn't repeat all the mistakes we have made in the past.
In 5G this is somewhat fixed - the handset uses its Home Network Public Key to encrypt the device-specific IMSI (producing a SUCI) which only the Home Network can decrypt. The MCC and MNC (carrier information) are still sent in the clear to allow the encrypted SUCI to route to the correct Home Network for decryption.
Rockets are a military technology, and are treated as such.
Military tech or not, its just atoms. Very interesting people are quite rich now, they will have access to precision machining advanced materials and chemicals if they have the motivation.
Some bitcoin bro with a net worth in the millions is not building orbit reaching guided missiles in their garage. And if they were the satellites would be the least of our concerns.
not plausible at all. Most /countries/ aren't able to launch a rocket to orbit.
USC students just broke the non-government, non-corporate rocket launch altitude record, reaching 143.25km[1]. But that is still a long way from the ~500km that Starlink operates at.
On top of that the person would have to develop a guidance system and payload capable of targeting and sufficiently damaging one of these satellites - not an easy feat.
Finally, it seems unlikely that a single hit would cause a chain reaction. There aren't that many satellites that are part of Starlink. Imagine 6000 cars spread over the surface of the Earth. Except that they're even more sparse than that because many of them are at different altitudes.
Additionally, SpaceX has already had to deal with the result of the debris field from the Russian Cosmos satellite that was destroyed by a Russian anti-satellite missile.[2]
Starlink has a lot of protection compared to other constellations since the satellites occupy such low orbits that most debris spontaneously deorbits in 5-10 years.
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1. https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2024/11/usc-student-rocke...
2. https://spacenews.com/starlink-satellites-encounter-russian-...
And then that kills 1 sat. SpaceX has many 1000s of sats.
So a small rocket like Electron cost around 8+ million $, lets say 6 million $ in cost. Plus lets say 1 million for the anti sat.
So you need to invest a couple 100 million $ into the development and produce many rockets. So you can calculate 7 million times * 6000, that gone be around 42 billion $.
Of course you would need to launch them from somewhere without a government that can stop you. Taking out vital infrastructure used by the US military tends to make people a bit angry. And neither China, Russia or Europe will want you anywhere close to them. This is likely gone make this much more expensive. Maybe you can make a deal with the Taliban? But they likely don't want that heat either.
So this is just a pure fantasy scenario.
> Maybe starting a cascading effect?
That's not gone happen. Far to low in orbit. As soon as they don't have propulsion they will drop lower. Until then the others can slightly raise their orbit.
There is not even a single nation state who has the capability to take out Starlink.
And no amount of people who burn down 5G towers could ever pull this off.
This is direct from handset to satellite, it’s clearly explained in the link.
Or a directional microwave link to the next station in sight.
No, they claim direct phone to satellite link.
The complication is that the base stations will be moving much more rapidly than traditional terrestrial towers.
1. As others have pointed out, the link budget (how much energy loss a particular radio link can handle before it is broken) for D2C satellites assumes a nearly direct line of sight from your handset to the satellite. This is much easier to achieve with satellites in space than it is with traditional cell towers that might have numerous walls/buildings in the way.
2. The D2C satellites use massive phased array antennas that are able to point a very narrow beam very accurately to the ground. This provides a substantial amount of antenna gain that further helps the link budget. The gain from the antennas allows the satellites to pick up even relatively weak signals from a handset.
There are other tricks as well, but these account for the largest differences. Of course, doppler gets in the way, but it is a solvable problem.
I guess the "narrow" in the current context is the beam widening to hundreds of miles on earth.
It’s going to be unambiguously good for wilderness rescue and disaster response.
But I like camping and hiking in remote areas in order to remove myself from the world. And I think the lack of connectivity discourages unprepared people from taking on more than they can handle in the wilderness. If the wilderness becomes fully connected, will it spoil that feeling? Will it lead to the last few truly remote places in the US suddenly being overrun with TikTok crowds? I honestly have no idea, and it’s a little scary.
But it feels like an anachronism that we don’t already have worldwide connectivity, and I guess this was just bound to happen.
eg. 50.30819551805026, 16.50959758078629
The location, despite not being remote, has NO connectivity. It's the closest thing I can think of in my proximity that is completely unconnected. You're lucky to get GPRS there in terms of data, and most likely you won't even be able to place a call.[1] There is no broadband/fibre or any other sort of physical network connected to the buildings in the area.[2] The only way of connecting the place aside from Starlink that I've found is other satellite options[3], and it's most likely going to be 6 times as expensive and 50 times slower.
[1] Anegdotal evidence, based on many devices on two of Poland's most prominent carriers when it comes to infrastructure - Orange/T-Mobile (shared NetWorkS! project) and Plus [2] https://internet.gov.pl/map/?center=1839972.2603685544%3B649... [3] https://www.dostawcy-internetu.pl/Dwukierunkowy-Internet-Sat...
Now we get wilderness livestreams! What will that do?
My guess is there will be some more wilderness livestreams streams, largely made by the people that are already going out to these places to produce content.
Are you particularly worried about a group of people that so far had no interest at all in taking pictures or videos in the wilderness but will now show up in droves to make competing bits of strictly-live content? Who are these users??
My point is that this will allow anyone to be an active content creator while they’re in the wilderness, which makes it quicker, easier, and much more appealing to create that type of content.
Your issue is either not wanting people on their phones in parks — which you cannot control — or not wanting people in parks at all, which not only can you not control but that would also be a downright insane desire.
The reason why parks exist and are maintained is that people go to them. If nobody goes to a park, there is no incentive for upkeep or staff. Much (or virtually all) of the wilderness that you have enjoyed in your life is available to enjoy because people before you enjoyed it and made it accessible to you in some way. That is how parks work
Encourage others to explore the wilderness?
Ever heard of Fossil Cycad National Monument? Designated in 1922, and by 1957 all the fossils had been taken. There was nothing left to see. The national monument was abolished.
That’s what’s at risk from overtourism.
Is it selfish to want to be able to enjoy one of the most beautiful spots in Canada without it being crowded? Absolutely. But the sheer volume of people makes in a completely unenjoyable experience, not to mention the dangers of erosion/wilful destruction/litter/etc that over-toured nature spots eventually succumb to. The nice thing right now is that there are many, many places to go that most people won’t, due to lack of accessibility, lack of cell service, etc. By breaking down barriers, you open the floodgates.
I used to despise gatekeeping, wanting everyone to be able to experience as many joys as possible. But when seeing what happens when the masses get access to delicate niches, my opinion shifts. Maybe I’m just getting older and grumpier though, so take it with a grain of salt.
It would be very interesting to see some kind of diagram depicting all of the corporate entities Musk is involved in and how each entity does business with one another.
xAI just raised billions to help Tesla build out FSD (or at least that was part of the pitch).
His empire is divided into so many corporate entities, but they all cross-pollinate and are clearly under his direct control for the most part.
The closest comparison I can think of is Berkshire Hathaway (one person/group controlling multiple wide ranging private and public companies).
Starlink is not a separate entity — it's a division of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
From Terms of Service[1]:
> Your order for two-way satellite-based internet service (“Services”) and a Starlink antenna, Wi-Fi router and mount (“Starlink Kit” or “Kit”) is subject to the terms (“Terms”) of this Starlink agreement for the United States and its territories. These Terms, those terms incorporated by reference, and the details you agree to in your online order (“Order”) form the entire agreement (“Agreement”) between you (“customer” or “user”) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (known as “Starlink” in these Terms).
[1]: https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1020-91087-64?r...
So the Terms of service is with SpaceX but apparently there is such a thing as Starlink Services LLC, but I'm just going off Wikipedia, all this corporate structuring is opaque to me.
It's slightly more than that: it's a legally recognized nickname for the actual entity, technically called a "Fictitious Business Name" (aka DBA, "doing business as") registered with the state.
> there is such a thing as Starlink Services LLC
One might register a bunch of shell companies in various jurisdictions, holding various assets and contracts during the course of business, for tax reasons, to limit the blast radius of liabilities and facilitate business (for example, retail gift cards, e.g. Amazon, are often issued by a separate legal entity.) I think there's a qualitative distinction there with what Berkshire Hathaway or perhaps Alphabet Inc. do with their separate businesses that are hands-off subsidiaries. It appears at the moment Starlink is very much intertwined with SpaceX and user contracts and the trademark are actually directly owned by SpaceX, so not sure what they are using that particular LLC for.
My understanding is that, given Tesla is a public company, any collaboration between Tesla and other Musk companies needs to be approved by the board (or maybe by other C-suite executives) without Musk in the room. Musk can come up with the idea for a collaboration, but then the decision that it is in the best interests of Tesla and all its shareholders to proceed with the collaboration needs to be made independently of him.
By contrast, I don't think the rules apply as strictly to his other companies since they are privately held. The law cares a lot more about protecting shareholder rights in public companies than in private ones.
If law was applied equality to billionaires as it does to regular people, he would be in jail for fraud.
The other comment saying "the law is above shareholder gain" is kind of missing the point thought--the law in question is specifically to protect the interest of shareholders.
This is true at most companies with a competent CEO.
My uncle had an inimical board that tried to remove him, but he somehow replaced them all one by one before they could. Needless to say he replaced them with people who didn't want to remove him ("buddies"; but what kind of a leader surrounds himself with people that want him to fail?). He's never told me how he did that despite my asking several times.
Still, it's always worth considering these structures before one invests--especially in med-to-large-cap public companies.
Alternatively, in private small-cap and venture-boards, the seats are nearly always filled by founders and lead investors and I would argue that's a "good thing".
No it's not.
Competent CEOs hire boards that align with their world-view but are independent enough to provide useful advice. And almost all startup boards will have investors who definitely will not rubber stamp the sort of thing going on at Tesla.
Uh why would the Tesla board object to management creating more shareholder value than any other car company ever?
AFAIK, Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s chair, had no particular association with Musk prior to joining Tesla’s board. She is an Australian business executive with a history of working in senior finance roles in Australian and US firms. She was recruited on to Tesla’s board by another (now former) Tesla director, Brad Buss, who to my knowledge has never been that closely associated with Musk either. Musk obviously trusts and respects Denholm, but I believe their relationship is more professional than personal - Denholm lives in Australia and travels to the US for Tesla board meetings.
Has a court accepted that argument? I mean, you can come up with all sorts of grounds to claim an independent director isn’t really independent, but unless a court with jurisdiction accepts the argument, it doesn’t really count for anything.
My previously-unstated opinion is: remunerating directors like executives blurs the distinction between those 2 roles in ways that are likely detrimental to long-term shareholders.
Yes, a Delaware court. It’s why Musk’s pay package is contested and why Tesla redomiciled.
Musk Inc. is, in essence, a privet equity company. He raises a fund, and invests it along with his own cash into a business he knows well, and with which he believes he can disrupt the status quo.
He's very hands on, understanding all the important core details, setting culture, and pushing hard. But he also delegates to experts he brings in to run his businesses.
It's obviously not the same as PE, but there are distinct similarities. With each of his companies he clearly can't take an active role all the time, but what his team are experts at is identifying the areas he needs to be on top of, and they will quite literally fly him in for it. It seems to me it's always the start of something, be it a new company or project. He will be there 24/7 getting it off the ground, but then hand over to lieutenants to run.
It's a formula that seems to work again and again. We're (well those of you in the US) are in for an interesting time over the coming year as he has a new project to kick start.
Seriously though, if he's primarily in a delegation mode these days, good for him, I think he's earned it
Bias disclosure: I feel like I could be a Musk if I actually had zero laziness and a few extra connections. We are similar in intelligence and interests and worldview (other than his edgy tweets of the last 1-2 years)
A more pessimistic view might be: Musk’s businesses have technological advantages but are financially over-leveraged. Their present success relies on heavy government subsidies while their future success depends on complete privatization of government functions.
He is an investor investing in science fiction. This isn't even implied, he comes out and says it again and again.
I'm reminded of xerox parc's "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and I think that's his philosophy.
As to "businesses he knows well" I do not agree. He didn't go into electric vehicles, rockets, robots or neural interfaces as "business he knows well".
Just read about musk going to russia to try to get a launch vehicle going and coming back insulted and frustrated. So he broke down the problem and learned how to solve it.
Also "Private Equity" has a connotation of rent seeking nowadays, like "buying all dentists and monetizing to extract profit".
I don't see him that way philosophically. I see him as a pure creator, not a rent seeking wealth extractor.
What is an example of this non accountability?
Although strangely he destroyed the revenue model at the same time, which is something a PE firm would be careful to avoid.
With hyperloop - he was frustrated by the way high speed rail was being handled in california, and hyperloop came into being as his cost + engineering sort of optimization. But with hyperloop he wasn't forced to buy it.
With twitter he just got in too deep and had to buy it.
(though I probably don't know enough about the details of twitter and could be wrong)
I don't see what's confusing about it.
It's not unusual for large companies to have a large web of corporate entities, but what's problematic is that they have different ownership rather than the same owners/owned by each other. (I started to say that one is public and others private, but it would be the same issue if two were public, as they would obviously not have the exact same set of owners.)
When xAI makes a deal with Tesla, if xAI is getting the better end of the stick, that is a self-dealing problem that the SEC can investigate on behalf of Tesla shareholders. The assets of Tesla belong proportionally to its owners, so Musk or another large owner can't make deals that give their private company an advantage at the expense of Tesla owners.
If Tesla gets too generous of a deal, that's something the non-Musk owners of xAI if any could raise an issue with, but when the public company is allegedly getting shortchanged, the SEC gets involved too. Moreover, even if you are trying to do it right, there is always the opportunity for someone to challenge you.
And now, he’s becoming some sort of circus act to disrupt the bureaucracy of the Federal government. So I wouldn’t count on the SEC doing anything.
Starship is very close to being able to put next gen Starlink satellites into orbit ("very close" as in most likely within a year or so). Once that happens, it's over, there will not be competition for at least a decade. Before Bezos and others (and/or EU/China) build their own Starship copies (and if you've seen recent EU/China concepts, you can't call it anything else...), it's going to be the 2030s.
Listen to the most recent RKLB earnings call. Constellation on the way, Neutron launching in 2025. There will be competition.
The world is continually moving towards being centred around cities where it makes sense to simply rollout fibre.
Especially with gigabit speeds being the new standard.
And even in Australia they are starting to move remote areas onto fibre.
It's a solved problem.
But, there are still niche use cases, like ships and planes, that would pay a premium for fast LEO satellite connections. For people I know who live on islands, going from barely being able to use WhatsApp to entirely using the internet (YouTube / Netflix) is game-changing.
But I assume we are talking about use cases beyond tiny niches.
So far they launched 2 test satellites. They contracted most of the launches to either new rockets or ones in development, like New Glenn, Ariane 6, ULA Vulcan. They actually had to contract three Falcon 9 launches to help out with that. In reality, I think SpaceX will end up launching a lot more than that.
Unless FCC is willing to be lenient, 50% of the satellites will be hard to accomplish by the deadline.
I am sure it's doable if all the space providers work together and there aren't any showstoppers.
Are you living in a different world that me?
NO company or Government on Earth outside SpaceX has the capability to launch more than about 15 orbital rockets per year. Most are in the 5-10 per year range.
Who the heck is going to launch all these sats?
> NO company or Government on Earth
Not that it's a possibility for Kuiper, but China had 67 launches in 2023.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENodeB
The following is somewhat speculative:
The bearing to the next satellite ahead or behind you in the same plane should be roughly constant; likewise, the bearing to satellites in adjacent planes orbiting in the same direction will change slowly during most of the orbit.
Near the poles the required slew rate will likely be too high to keep the side-to-side links working but that's also a part of the planet where subscriber density will be low so losing that capacity for periods of a few minutes when near the poles likely won't matter.
I assume that if Starlink was trying to do this without agreement, in violation of the interational treaty on radio regulations, the USA would have to prevent them from doing so. If the USA did not, I don't see what would prevent China from shooting down Starlink's constellation.
As a side note on the technology, since Starlink satellites orbit 340km from earth, I wonder if they emit a directed signal. If they don't, I don't see how they intend to respect borders when sending messages down.
Except China, does any other country have the ability to do this?
With US government permission, Starlink could ignore the radio licensing rules of Iran, South Africa or even the EU.
Violating RR is already "soft" warfare.
Any country capable of launching satellites or even sounding rockets could almost certainly do enough damage to majorly disrupt operations. Certainly the EU or Iran, possibly South Africa with the recent resumption of rocket launches at OTB.
They absolutely do not have tens of thousands of anti-satellite missiles, or any other credible (non-nuclear) way to dismantle a constellation of that size. If you look at their own news media[0], they (Chinese defense) consider it a major weakness, and priority.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/chin... ("China military must be able to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites if they threaten national security: scientists")
- "Researchers call for development of anti-satellite capabilities including ability to track, monitor and disable each craft The Starlink platform with its thousands of satellites is believed to be indestructible"
Sure there are; that's how orbits work. These aren't geostationary satellites.
They're not as impregnable as the military's new LEO obsession makes out.
Probably not happening until next year:
> But in September the telco (and Optus across the Tasman and other Direct to Cell exclusive partners) removed “launching 2024″ references from its website. -- https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/commerce-commission-take...
That’s been replaced with corporate libertarians, which are against any government power that could infringe on the rights of corporations. See also Rand Paul, and the corporatist movement (which is sadly mainstream in the US, an offshoot of fascism, and essentially indistinguishable from modern libertarianism).
Anyway, they are many things, but I wouldn’t say they’re hypocritical.
If you take libertarianism to its logical conclusion you wind up with feudalism, which is anything but free.
Whenever libertarians try to take their philosophy through to its logical conclusion in practice they just wind up reinventing government only worse (or reinventing banking only worse in the case of crypto).
You can’t grant absolute power to corporations without also implementing feudalism.
Of course, there are voters that think they are voting for individual libertarianism, but are voting for corporate libertarianism instead.
(Similarly, there are progressives and moderates that end up voting for corporatists.)
Also why does my cell phone not need a clear view of the cell tower? It works in my brother in laws walk in closet just fine. Same frequency.
Direct to cell is only possible because it's an almost entirely unobstructed view.
After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.
I guess they need to contract with businesses or parks? It would be cool to buy a cheap one and just tie it to a tree or something.
Presumably there's a market for this in other niches, e.g. weather monitoring, defense/border monitoring, etc... The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Where's the really valuable data?
Even if you have solar and a fixed platform, you usually want to deploy as little solar as possible. Especially if you need to carry the gear on foot. So minimising power consumption is really important.
Direct to cell bandwidth is obviously very limited.
You need very little bandwidth because there is typically not a lot happening at a remote cabin.
https://www.spypoint.com/en/spypoint-experience/plans
No new antennas implies we're in the 1-6 GHz region. Should be fine?
Additionally, Starlink was a complete lifesaver during Helene.
Christ what more do you guys need to shoot a rabbit.
For me, the draw of the woods and rivers is the chance to disconnect from technology and reconnect to nature.
In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.
instead of the man who just bought himself a President so that he can direct government spending towards his businesses and away from his competitors while disowning his own child for their sexuality, and whose ambition is to rule the planet.
Maybe its about time people stop mixing sexuality with identity and character.