Item — HN Reader

Is this a case of doubling down, whilst SpaceX waits for the demand to launch satellites at the lower price grows.

Its one thing to be able to launch satellites far more cheaply than other companies, perhaps the economics demands certain number of launches a year to keep capacity up and price down?

The question is what happens when they launch all 1000 satellites?

2 comments

> The question is what happens when they launch all 1000 satellites?

The plan is for 12,000 satellites and they are only designed to last a few years and then be replaced. This keeps launch rates constant, allows them to make much larger use of economies of scale by having that many satellites, and to constantly improve speed by building the new satellites with state of the art technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...

That's a lot of satellites. What are they going to do with the deprecated ones?

LEO orbits degrade fairly steadily - without constantly boosting them back up they will de-orbit on their own. Because of that, they won't leave space junk in orbit.

From how they describe these satellites, they will be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere and not cause any issues on the ground either.

Probably plan to make fireworks out of them. Without periodic boosts, LEO satellites fall anyway, but I believe all new satellites are launched with reserve fuel for a controlled reentry burn over uninhabited ocean.

I've always seen this as two things. The first being space x filling in gaps in their launch schedule as you've pointed out.

The second is to launch a commercial services which can provide a constant, predictable income to fund other projects. The upfront capital must be huge but with debt markets still this cheap i'm not surprised they're investing.

I always thought of it as Elon Musk advertising.

But I visit reddit where tesla/elon/spacex topics are boosted with upvotes.

Im just bitter because I believed in him, but his promises fell flat.

I find the SpaceX subreddit to be full of good information. Its a bit heavy handed with moderation and over zealous leaving little room for discussion, you're either on team Musk or told to leave.

> I'm just bitter because I believed in him, but his promises fell flat.

Which promises are those, because I have seen him deliver most of his goals? Albeit, they are practically always late but everyone who has followed him should know by now that he always underestimates timelines. The running joke is to multiple his estimated timelines by 1.8 (mars year / earth year).