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If it's a hype bubble, you're not going to see how it's a failure until it crashes.
Yeah... that's a big if. Care to take a guess when we might see it in orbit? I'll be happy to take the "no it won't" side of that prediction.
My 50% confidence interval is within this year, and 70% within 2 years and 90% within 3 years for the first successful orbital flight and return for a Starship. I haven't actually checked further launch plans before writing this, but I think I can still hold myself to this.
Frankly speaking, I don't see any reason to be anything but bullish on SpaceX. Even if Elon was eaten by a wild doge today, the company has already revolutionized space travel, reusable rockets were as outlandish as fusion power for fucking forever. Starlink is profitable, and even the humble Falcon and Falcon Heavy have made lunar exploration feasible on post-Cold War budgets.
Ok, I'm going "no way" on all 3. The one in 3 years might surprise me, but for the sake of simplicity I'll round it down to "not going to happen". And I'm talking about simply going to orbit, if it successfully lands, I'll be shocked.
That's just not true. Others will point out that the actual innovative thing is making reusability cost-effective. We've seen reusability as a "mere" technical feat working for decades in the form of Space Shuttle.
Is it? I seem to remember a leaked email where Elon was complaining about Starlink's financials.
Well, the whole crux of the issue is making reusability profitable! That's what people really mean by that statement, or at least I do.
You can make the claim that fusion power exists today, except it costs more to get energy than you can sell it for. But nobody claims that we've "got" fusion power do they?
The Space Shuttle was a flying white elephant swollen with pork, too compromised from it's original vision to satisfy anyone except horny Texan senators. Same deal with SLS, though it doesn't even pretend to be reusable. It would be cheaper to fuel the Starship with dollar bills or just pile them to the Moon (this is hyperbole).
I find such a claim dubious, and it's more likely Elon kvetching even if it's true.
It is such a stunningly superior product to any other orbital internet provider that it's ludicrous. And they have massive positive feedback from the experience curve of having so many launches on hardware they own.
It's not like anyone is forcing them to do it, if it wasn't profitable or on the road to profit with massive growth they simply wouldn't do it.
No, I don't think you can make the claim. For one, a "power generator" that consumes more power than it generates is not a "power generator". A proper analogy would be a working fusion reactor generating a surplus, but being more expensive than any other available energy source. We don't have that. Secondly, every single fusion reactor test I heard of ran a couple seconds, and that was it. If we had something that could run reliably for days (even if it consumed energy on net), I could accept the analogy.
And then there's the small issue that I don't buy his reusability actually makes it cheaper. I asked someone else in the thread for a cost break down, have you seen one? I even searched for it today, but I can't find anything.
I dunno, I've seen people overstate the Shuttle's cost by taking the cost of the entire program (including infrastructure), and dividing by the amount of launches. From what I understand it was underwhelming compared to savings expectations, but it was a pretty solid craft.
Here's the story for anyone curious, but sure might be a hoax I guess.
How does that matter? Very few people need orbital internet. Cable or mobile does just fine, and probably better.
What if by "simply not doing it" they'd have nothing to do, therefore no hype in the media, and therefore had a lot more trouble raising money from investors?
No, it's not "very few people" who benefit from satellite internet, or even if the number meets your standard for very few, the ones who do are significantly wealthy and able to pay for it.
A quick Google shows 1.5 million subscribers.
Starlink is very popular in rural America and Australia where previously getting 1-10 mbps for 5-10 times the money and tiny data caps were the norm.
It is also incredibly useful out at sea, and the commercial users such as cruise ships are happy to pay tens of thousands at a minimum when the quality of service blows everything else out of the water. Not to mention the military applications, as so clearly shown in Ukraine.
I don't put much weight in that hypothesis, even if I grant it's possible.
If that was the case, they'd aim more for a minimum viable product deal instead of launching as many as the FTC will let them.
Commercial viability requires a high Q for the fusion process, but that's necessary and not sufficient in itself. It certainly can't be profitable if it uses more electricity than it produces.
SpaceX is so much cheaper than all of the other launch providers it's not even funny anymore. And it takes that degree of outright embarrassment for the entrenched interests in the US legislature to tolerate it taking away their NASA pork money.
So I went and checked a few providers that came up on Google, and put some random place in Bumfuck, Arizona as the address. Viasat indeed ended up quite underwhelming but HughesNet already has decent speeds with decent data caps, for pretty much the same price as Starlink.
Here's a more comprehensive comparison where Viasat looks a bit better, Starlink still comes up ontop in terms of quality, but in terms of bang/buck, what am I supposed to be seeing there that is so mind blowing? Lower pings? Am I supposed to be gaming while enjoying my cruise?
As for the 1.5 million subscribers, I admit that's more than I expected, but they require over 4000 satellites to service them, which works out to 375 subscribers per satellite, which apparently have a 5 year lifespan, while the old fashioned geosynchronous orbit based providers need a single satellite to cover a third of the globe. Pardon me if I remain skeptical about the profitability of this whole idea.
My only point here was that the comparison to fusion power is invalid. If you wanted to deliver cargo (or people, which SpaceX still cannot do to my knowledge) to orbit, you could do that with the Shuttle even if it was pricey. If you need a couple of MWh of electricity, you will not get it with fusion, no matter how much you pay for it.
I suspect Starlink, like Iridium, is being largely supported by a certain less-cost-sensitive user, with the commercial users being gravy on top.
They're definitely going to be paying off some of the R&D that way. Starshield has its own separate satellites and its own network, so you'd think Starlink revenue would still have to cover marginal costs for the commercial sats, but even if Starshield never needs to piggy-back on the commercial network, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX is getting extra cash to guarantee the presence of all that (from an asat perspective) "chaff"...
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