SpaceX COO Gwynn Shotwell has stated that SpaceX plans to have 24 Starlink launches in 2020.
Morgan Stanley forecasts indicate that SpaceX should start generating billions in revenue in 2020 with the completed launch of a minimally commercially viable Starlink network of 1000 satellites or more.
There will be revenue from providing internet to Tesla cars, airplanes, maritime ships and rural and underserved areas. There is also the value to financial centers for lower latency times. Light travels faster in vacuum than in fiber optic cable. The lowest time delays for stock trading will be via the Starlink network.
SOURCES- Morgan Stanley
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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You realize that these satellites are able to deorbit, communicate, and maneuver out out of the way. If anything they pose zero risk, people should instead be wary of India scrapping one of their satellites with a missile whose debris may hit the ISS. Also SpaceX is a business and space tourism is an extremely small market, they can’t make enough money just flying around the moon because it doesn’t make sense whatsoever. At the end of the day they are a business doing DOD contracts and are in the process of giving service to everybody, but of course it isn’t free since they are a business. The plastic analogy makes no sense either, a Starlink satellite is small and would break up in orbit. Also if you are peeved about people’s impact on the environment how about invest in biodegradables and stop being patronizing.
Apparently the ISS experiment for making ZBLAN fiber (by FOMS) appears to have been successful, beating earth made fibers. This in the future could drop the cost of (long range) fiber optic deployments due to reduced number of transceivers. Also makes a closing business case for space commercialization beyond conventional telecomm relay (the only big money market in space until now) to extend to space manufacturing (even when hobbled by sending raw materials from earth).
Accounting rules get updated periodically, usually to take account of new phenomena that weren’t common previously. New lease accounting rules (a big exercise for my employer) was probably infeasibly complex to calculate pre-computer.
I dunno. Tax lawyers seems to do a pretty good business, and there are a lot of them. That’s usually indicative of a lot of situations where the rules aren’t immediately clear.
I think the rules and conventions for expensing things have been nailed down to the final decimal point many generations ago. In terms of shipping costs, probably centuries ago.
This is not to say that there aren’t dodgy loopholes that allow some clever people to end up with more money than they are strictly supposed to, but it won’t be anything new.
That was kinda my first guess, too. But what if you’re actually providing launch services, and you reuse the rocket? Then it’s just like an airline depreciating an aircraft, isn’t it?
I guess for SpaceX and the F9, you could argue that the second stage is an operating expense, and the core is capital equipment.
This gets even more complicated when you’re both the consumer of a launch service and the provider of the service at the same time. I wonder if you can simultaneously claim the capital expense both for the satellite service and the launch service.
My guess is that if you are analysing a launch company then launch is an operating expense, but if you are analysing a satellite company then it’s a capital expense.
I think many more people will benefit from starlink. Leisure trips around the moon for some superwealthy individuals (and they will be the only people who will be able to afford it) is in a way frivolous.
Umm… Sure.
Where I come from still can’t get cell signal. If a satellite receiver and service is cheap enough they will have customers. I use to be a Dish customer. If they can give me the internet and TV for less than my cable company they have me as a customer. If they can give me cell service for less that my cell provider they have a customer.
Is launch a capital expense or an operating expense?
Really? What means? Please be specific!
…if it was so important to rush SpaceX projects other means of funding could easily be found, Pretty sure SpaceX could get more private and public funding if it had pursued it.
Moving the exploitation of space ahead a few years (and history suggests it can easily be delayed by decades if momentum is lost) is easily worth billions or trillions of times more than a slight increase in dust from burnt up satellites or disconcerting a couple of dozen astronomers who now have to allow for more satellites in their field of view.
Until these sort of things are build in Space from Space resources, they are not *really* Space projects. Just Space visitors, temp from Earth.
Starlink satellites are self de-orbiting and self-disposing due to their low orbit and relatively weak construction that ensures they are destroyed on re-entry. Their bulk mass will turn into plasma, and become a minuscule part of the space dust we already get from micrometeorites every day.
They will need to be replenished pretty often, actually, having an operating life of just a few years.
Financing SpaceX with starlink satellites is an excellent example of short sighted financing. In a fixed world SpaceX would be accounted for for all the harm that placing thousands up on thousands of satellites in low orbit the same way that we are now waking up to the realization of how much harm we are bringing to the world and to ourselves by using so much disposable plastic.
SpaceX could suffice financing its endeavors which are noble at their core with offering trips around the moon and maybe other celestial bodies in the vicinity and later on landing on some of them. Even if that means that their projects will be delayed for few years!
Great to see some added valuation on this development growth. Should keep access to funding relatively hight allowing Starlink to start generating those huge dollar signs everyone is talking about, which in turn funds Starship expansion and getting those boots on Luna/Mars going.