SpaceX’s Starlink surpasses 2M active customers

I'm not a part of the Musk empire, but from a technical perspective, suits are going to make whatever projections they're going to make irrespective of reality. Regardless of that, I'd feel pretty good about having 2M active users by getting satellites into space, myself.

Considering that they fired the Starlink executive team and essentially rebooted the project between then and now, being only a couple years behind projections is fricking amazing.

They did not "expect over 20M by now". That article is some bad reporting. It pulls from a private forecast given very early on to investors in 2015 that depended on a lot of things going different than they actually did. For example, the pandemic not happening, and Starship actively flying.

2015 is when they first opened the early development facility in Redmond. No hardware, not even prototype hardware, no government applications filed. Didn't even have an office building.

The entire design of the system went through multiple massive revisions before it even launched the first test satellites, as well as a firing of most of the entire executive staff (who went to work for Amazon, which still has yet to launch any of their satellites).

In a presentation[1] in 2015 to a group of people (early employees?) he mentioned that they plan to launch prototypes in "3 months" (standard Elon time), they didn't launch any prototypes until 2018. That'll kind of throw off your plans to getting to 20 million.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4