The vast majority of these people will not be able to afford a 1500$ satellite dish (that's how much it costs to build the thing, even though they sell it for 500$ for now) + 100$/month internet.
Plus, the places where Starlink is the most useful - rural areas - already have sky high costs. I just looked up what service looks like in Brazil: ~R$400/month (US$76) for 20mbps, with a 80GB data cap. When you have to buy the dish it costs over R$10k (~US$2000). This is the best you can get.
Add ground station costs, internet bandwidth, satellite production, dish production, customer service, personnel costs, R&D and you'll quickly see that the current prices are much below what is required to be profitable. Even if they have 5M customers (very hard to do in 5 years time), I wouldn't be hopeful for their prospects of not going under.
Of course, they may well survive on government handouts.
Edit to add: the bottom 45% who don't currently have access to high speed internet are unlikely to afford even a 300$ dish and an expensive data plan. The price of current plans is one of the main reasons why they don't have access in the first place.
That would make your numbers $420m every five years, or $84 million a year - slighly more than your average telecom CEO compensation.
But the goal for starship is $2m per launch. Let's assume that is bullshit and go for $10M instead, and only 300 satellites per launch. That's already down to ~$10M/year to maintain the entire constellation. Now you have room for all the other costs you mention. If they reach the stated goals, it will cost peanuts... you can see where this is going. Starship will be a ridiculous leap in launch costs if it comes to fruition.
The max capacity for the network, once at 42k satellites, is estimated to be around 50M people worldwide. Plus, you could have a downlink shared, say, among 50 people and spread the cost - 1-10mbps is still miles beyond 'no internet access'.
You might think the plan is crazy, but the math checks out. If this whole thing works, they could charge $10/month and be in the green - the satellites themselves will be the cheapest part of the whole system. No rent, no right of way, no construction, no maintenance work, free energy and extremely low material costs.
- ground station: must be negligible compared to everything else. They are literally planting giant routers out in a farm, need to pay rent, power and cabling to an exchange. Zero other infrastructure costs
- internet bandwidth: despite Netflix's attempts, ISPs have peering agreements that are usually free, as does Starlink
- satellite production: nobody knows, but they have said the payload is cheaper than the launch, so somewhere between $250-500k each at start
- customer service: online only, seems like the dish is self-diagnosing, will likely end up being much lower than traditional broadband
Fair enough, though you're neglecting the costs for building this all over the world, if they want to get access to any size of market.
> - internet bandwidth: despite Netflix's attempts, ISPs have peering agreements that are usually free, as does Starlink
Actually, according to Cloudlflare[0], you still need to buy a significant amount of traffic through transit agreements - cloud flare pays for 40% of its traffic in Europe (at a price they don't disclose), 60% in the USA (same price as in Europe), 40% in Asia (at 7 times the European price), 10% in Africa (at 14 times European price), 40% in South America (at 17 times European price), and 50% in Oceania (at 17 times European price). Only the Middle East region is 100% peered for them.
So the cost to actually deliver internet is definitely not going to be 0.
> - satellite production: nobody knows, but they have said the payload is cheaper than the launch, so somewhere between $250-500k each at start
So that is another 15M$ per launch at their declared aspirational cost (or an extra 100M$ per launch if you believe the Starship numbers). Just maintaing the entire constellation today would cost ~100M$/year, assuming almost all satellites reach their 5 year life span (current failure rate is 6% after one year).
> - customer service: online only, seems like the dish is self-diagnosing, will likely end up being much lower than traditional broadband
You can't sell online only customer support for access to the Internet if you want to reach any kind of realistic market. Furthermore, customer service more broadly includes delivery, sales, marketing, training materials; and this will be required all over the world, since they must target customers in remote places with little or no acces to the internet today.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...
Once Starlink has the satellite “mesh” operational they would probably become a tier-1 ISP and have zero transit costs. Maybe even sell traffic to other ISPs.
On the other hand, unless they somehow get the laser communication working, which is still a research problem despite their optimism, they have way too high latency to act as a tier 1 ISP - all traffic currently goes consumer - 1 satellite - ground station - Internet.
42000 sats
20gbps each
~1k users
2gbps @ 100:1 oversub
1gbps @ 50:1 oversub
Musk has said many things in interviews that have little to do with reality. Even if that number is true launch costs are more than the rocket itself. Even if we accepted the number, to make economic sense, they would have to get more value from 60 satellites than the $35M of profit they would make on each launch if they were launching commercialy.
> But the goal for starship is $2m per launch. Let's assume that is bullshit and go for $10M instead, and only 300 satellites per launch.
Prices for rockets similar to Starship are in the $150-200M range, so that is more the ballpark I expect from Starship, if it does fly. Perhaps it can go down to as low as 75-100M range, half the current cost of similar rockets! $10M is fantasy.
Not to mention, they are already being accused of breaking environmental regulations and other problems, so it wouldn't be surprising if launch costs actually go up if they are to maintain compliance.
Why would they even develop this new vehicle if it turns out more expensive than Falcon 9, or Falcon 9 Heavy? That would not make any sense. Plus those rockets are not reusable.
They have already achieved a reduction in price/kg by at least 10x with Falcon, see page 11 here: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170009968/downloads/20...
> $10M is fantasy
$2M is the fantasy, I already added 400% to account for skepticism. Starship is not a conventional launch vehicle, it's designed for full reusability with a turnaround time measured in hours (vs the current 14-50 days for a Falcon 9 refurb), like an airplane. Land, refuel, safety checks, fly again.
They are making a bigger rocket and making it reusable. The bigger the rocket, the more expensive the launch. For Starship the price per ton should be smaller than for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, but that doesn't mean it should be expected to be cheaper in absolute terms than much smaller rockets.
> $2M is the fantasy, I already added 400% to account for skepticism.
You're still talking about a price that would be a hundred times better per ton than any other rocket in history. Allow me to be extremely skeptical, please. Musk's arbitrary promises do not set a benchmark for me - he has been known to lie through his teeth about things like hyperloop, FSD, Neuralink, Starship earth to earth, and timelines in general.
And on the same note, what Starship is theoretically designed to do and what it will actually do when it is actually deployed may be significantly different things.
Apparently Musk is claiming 15M$. The public numbers for a launch are 3.3 times that, so even if that is pure profit, it's awfully good profit compared to what Starlink is bringing in.
> From next year they will likely be able to send 400 satellites for the same price with starship and the aspirational goal is to have a cost of 2M$ per launch.
This is based on Musk time - the likelihood of that happening in this time-line is not particularly good, given the track record of his promises. Time will tell.
The claimed 2M$ price is laughably 'aspirational'. Until I see it, I don't believe a word of it.
> It’s perfectly feasible, you just can’t understand how starship is such a game changer.
Let's wait for it to actually fly to space and back until we declare it such a game changer, ok? Musk's promises have a habit of never happening, or happening much later than claimed.