How on earth could he have ever thought that was a good idea omg 😂

He should gone ahead and taken out billions in loans against his company and got some cash in hand tax free.

In addition to the consumers using it, they’ve been making bank on commercial sales like airlines and cruiseships. But ya, it’s a money maker even accounting for having to renew the constellation every 5 years.

They are, and the sane states will rightfully ignore it.

For the MAGA states though they just nod along and will disenfranchise all those voters.

“how does Ted Cruz change a lightbulb in a winter storm”

It doesn’t get changed, he’s in Cancun.

We never actually solved the telephone line problem globally. This is a global issue, not a US issue or western country issue. Some countries just skipped right over it in areas it was simple to do and went straight to wireless after struggling for decades without connectivity, but still the rural areas rely on some form of satellite internet.

Again, you seem to be worried about these launches, but it will be less than 1 day of transatlantic flights each year to maintain the network. The fuel is methane and oxygen which as I said only has CO2 as a pollutant. If that’s the cost to provide global internet coverage that’s nothing. It’s more for Falcon 9, but its absolutely tiny on the scale of what we do and what it provides.

The unknown externalities are what does burning things up in the atmosphere do, and that is something we don’t truly have an answer today. SpaceX already solved the throwing away 1st stages each launch which every other launch provider does, and are close to solving the 2nd stage as well. If they can solve the 2nd stage, then we really are only talking about whatever damage the burned up satellites do. In the meantime, they burn up the 2nd stages as well as the satellites which everyone else also does, or leave it in a dead orbit.

How many hundreds of thousands or millions of km of trenches though do you think you actually need to serve the entire rural world? How long do you think that would take? That 750km trench might only ever serve 500-1000 people, hence why it never gets built.

Starlink and the LEO constellations provides the capability for anywhere in the world that can clearly see the sky, to have internet. Today. The next stage of the network will make that capable of serving everyone in rural areas instead of having some cell capacity limits on people as the V3 dishes provide 10x the capabilities per dish, and 20x per launch. The only reason not everyone has access to it is because of geopolitical reasons and licensing, but it could technically serve the entire worlds rural areas today.

For the non land areas you can’t just wish wash that away with ‘future tech’ or it’s not important. Keeping hundreds of thousands or millions of drones up in the middle of the oceans isn’t going to happen. Sea internet is just as important to the millions of people who work or live on the sea as it is to the rural people at home. The dramatic improvement in quality of life at people at sea is also improved, and has even been noted by the military.

Surprisingly, Starship is actually ‘clean’ in terms of air pollution. It’s exhaust is just CO2. They could in the future pull CO2 out of the air via solar to make the methane making it neutral. So it’s still a global warming issue, but it’s not tossing other noxious compounds into the air. It’s also a tiny fraction of current airline usage. There’s more CO2 emissions from 1 day of transatlantic flights, than it would take to maintain and grow starlink each year with starship.

Edit: and in case you missed it, starship is operational now. They launched 10 functioning satellites on the last launch. Its a long ways off from being fully and rapidly reusable, but it can deploy payloads now.

Please forgive my sin. You’re right.

We dont actually know this yet. There are potentially other risks from burning more things up in the atmosphere as well that we don’t know.

Edit: its worth pointing out, these satellites are a drop in the bucket compared to what naturally burns up in the atmosphere, however that doesnt mean just a little bit more might not tip the scales. Like some co2 is fine in the atmosphere, but when we put extra in its a problem. There might be a balance that the dishes disrupt.

Fair… but why would any private company do that without going public? Do any?

Doesn’t really matter if the government is the main source that gets it off the ground.

Maybe a upstart paper company was able to snag a contract and they could undercut existing companies because they found an abandoned mill that they got for pennies on the dollar.

National security is definitely an issue, but again nothing to do with how it was built. Thats entirely outside how something is funded.

Edit: just to clarify the majority of all early funding. Today its starlink, government money isnt the main thing now.

They generally weren’t given money.

They won contracts and provided services. They did it almost entirely with fixed base price contracts as well. None of the cost plus, which was typical in space, and leans more into handouts as people intentionally try to milk the government by going over.

Its like if the US government buys billions of pieces of paper a year from paper suppliers and you expect them to own the paper companies that sell them the paper because they took government money for a sale. Many even own their own mills, but thats now a government mill since the government bought their paper.

They would talk to coordinate who to talk to, but that would probably be the end. It can show respect when a CEO reaches out to another CEO to say hey we need to work together on this, who should my guy reach out to at your place. Maybe the occasional update.

How many people does it take to screw in a light bulb with Ted Cruz? 1 because no one else is there to help.

There are limits on shareholders in private companies.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp

Looks like the number is 2000, but that excludes employees. It used to be 500.

I have a great idea! What if we censor every negative review! People would see all these amazing shit games with amazing reviews and buy them!

See, you don’t really get the scale. It’s not practical, the land size where it needs to be would be immense, and all the numbers below get worse as you go north. This would be around Texas.

These things would need to run in the winter when the output is worst. You would need approximately 7GW of solar to power a 1GW datacenter and charge the batteries to run on off sun hours. That battery would need to be 16 GWh.

Except, that’s perfect winter weather. It’s not always perfect winter weather, it needs a buffer, likely at least 1+ day of buffer for when there is no sun, so thats another 24GWh of battery, and that 24GWh of battery needs another 7-10GW of solar to keep it topped up appropriately.

So 23-26 14-17 GW of solar and 40GWh of battery and you can have some bad solar days with a complete 1 day backup if everything is taken offline, but you really think they would build something like this completely off grid that only has 1 day of backup?

That’s 14-17 times the largest solar field active in the USA today, and 13 times the largest battery.

Getting all that space, permitting it all etc would take years on it’s own.

Thats why they’re all doing gas turbines. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like it, but it’s definitely easier and quicker than something on the scale what would be required with solar. Long term yes the solar/batteries would be cheaper.

Edit: i fail at addition and addrd storage and solar for the solar. 7GW + 7-10GW is not 23 to 26. So itd be 14 to 17x not 23-26x.

Well… those are remnants of a supernova aren’t they? So the velocities to have meaningful impacts came from a sun?

Definitely not what I was thinking or trying to say though, and not our sun, but kinda still all the energy comes from at least, a sun.

We’ve tried to do it on the ground for decades to little success. We give them money, and they say, oh so sorry we spent it all and did 0.001% of the requirements.

SpaceX and these other LEO constellations can do it in a few years, at their own risk.

Also, these constellations serve areas that fiber will never serve. 5g towers maybe in many but not all, but never fiber. They also serve areas like the ocean, and air, some of which will never be served by 5g.

edit: Also there’s no risk of trapping us on earth with something like Starlink. It’s too low and will resolve any mass destruction in a handful of short years. The risk comes with something like Eutelsat One Webs constellation at 1200km that will last millennia in a Kessler Syndome type doomsday scenario.

Big Oil predicted global warming pretty spot on, they just fought it and hid the findings instead.

To some extent I think we’ve gotten pretty good at long term predictions on things like this, but no one wants to hear it.