Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
dannyw | on: Starlink Mini 2
A decade ago, you’d be looking at 2mbps under good conditions, significant outages and reliability issues, and paying $50 to $100 per gigabyte.
| parent | next
{"deleted":true,"id":50448869,"parent":50448849,"time":1794361633,"type":"comment"}
dools | parent | next
Yeah and the reason is that providing this kind of coverage is wildly unsustainable.
mdorazio | root | parent
Starlink is profitable. It is not unsustainable at all when you own the rockets and the satellite manufacturing. Read the audited financials if you don’t believe it. Other parts of SpaceX are a different story.
estearum | root | parent
It's profitable if you don't pay for the rockets. The audited financials say the launch cost is $0 for Starlink (and -$whatever for Space [the launch business] but as depreciation over five years and not as direct costs).

So it's almost certainly the case that Starlink itself would not be profitable if it had to pay for its own launches. If Starlink paid for its own launches, the launch business would be closer to profitability but still not profitable, i.e. you'd have two unprofitable businesses instead of one.

loading story #50449324
loading story #50449488
MarsZebra | parent
[flagged]
ETH_start | root | parent | next
SpaceX launch costs are an order of magnitude lower than those of the launches that deployed Iridium and Teledisic's satellites.
Cthulhu_ | root | parent | next
> In early 2002 he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia, where they attempted to purchase ICBMs.

That's a sentence I wasn't expecting, lol

MarsZebra | root | parent
Someone explain the downvotes here. It's not popular among Musk fans to know the true history of the company?
mdorazio | root | parent | next
Starlink is a profitable business segment. The majority of revenue comes from consumers, a minority comes from a combination of enterprise and government customers. Saying it’s subsidized or dependent on golden dome is simply not true.
VanTheBrand | root | parent | next
I think the core issue is that even if the subsidy you are saying got it this far ended, they’ve reached a point where they could keep going without it. So even if what you are saying is true, it’s still wrong.