Honestly, I think this might be one of the only companies I know of recently where I've gone "huh, that seems like a low valuation". Is this a hype factor or do knowledgeable others feel similarly?
If it pans out, Starlink can disrupt a massive, $1 trillion/ year telecom market that is itself booming. Depending on how well they can productize long-term (miniature receivers embedded in laptops, tablets etc.) they stand to capture whole percentage points or even tenths of that market, giving Starlink itself a valuation in the trillions.
It's also an ultra-high moat business, a truly global monopoly. Once you have 12.000 sats in the sky amortized and own the only launch service capable of servicing them, you are impossible to budge.
Does SpaceX even have to do that? Can't they just open source all the designs and let anyone with an account use their network? Leave the construction, sale and support for receivers up 3rd parties.
Better to sell gasoline than to build gasoline engines :)
SpaceX absolutely could deny selling rockets to anybody as rocket launch is not a monopoly.
OneWeb has contracts with ISS, Arianespace, RocketLab, BlueOrigin and so on. Non with SpaceX. I don't know if that is because SpaceX denied them, or if they just don't want to work with them.
Probably didn't ever ask, since they're a direct competitor. I can imagine how this conversation would go:
OneWeb: oh, by the way, can we buy launches on your rockets for our satellite Internet thing?
<Both sides laughing>
SpaceX: no.
Not possible because of physics. Unless they branch into a completely different portion of the spectrum with all-new satellites and some communications tech that is as of yet unknown, they really cannot miniaturize the receivers.
There might be technical showstoppers today related to transmitter power and battery, beamforming effectiveness and indoor performance of a mobile device, signal processing difficulties etc., ergo "long term productization".
Aww, hell! Make it a small pizza box sized device I can put on a bracket I can hang out the window! Include a wireless hotspot and you'd sell those things like crazy!
BTW existing US regulations on apartments and the like require landlords to install roof antennae if technically required.
So far, we are not seeing a ton of new types of traffic that just would not be feasible where it not due to SpaceX's lower launch cost.
I think that will come, but it will come with the LEO based communication satellite fleet, and that is still a ways out.
Note that I specified correct foresight above. I'm confident that some things will be launch on the now cheaper rockets over the next 20 years that turn our to be commercial failures. I don't know which they are though, just that they are. If you have an idea that might work with a cheaper launch you should start building it, but you should start small to prove it can work.
This is a very high valuation for such a capital-intensive high-risk company.
That's even worse than what rockets were before SpaceX came along. Rockets would be exactly the same as each other.
Once you can pick and choose your satellite parts Domino's like and have it built, then you'll see the valuation skyrocket. That may be as hard or harder than building another SpaceX.
Insomuch as Oneweb uses off-the-shelf parts, they want so many of them that their suppliers are having to build new factories to build those parts. Their solar array supplier is doing that, for example. I suspect Starlink will use a model closer to the Gigafactory and Tesla's partnership with Panasonic.
Lots of people are offering standard satellite parts, at high prices and low volumes. It'll be interesting to see what kind of trickledown Oneweb causes.
It’s going to tend more towards deploying satellites rather than exploring Mars.