SpaceX Should Go Commercial With Starlink in September

The eleventh launch of Starlink is scheduled for early July. Gwynn Shotwell says that after 12-14 launches, SpaceX will begin selling commercial service.

This means that SpaceX should be going commercial with Starlink service in September of this year.

SpaceX called the last launch (June 13) SL-9.
SpaceX has scheduled SL-10 on June 23.
SL-11 mission is scheduled for July.

The twelfth mission is not scheduled yet. There are several other customer missions. The SL-12 or SL-13 mission will likely be what is needed to complete a system for commercial activation. They will likely need to sort out some beta testing before they go with the commercialization activities.

SOURCES- Gwynn Shotwell, Warren Redlich Youtube
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

24 thoughts on “SpaceX Should Go Commercial With Starlink in September”

  1. The moral stand of individuals and the stand they adopt for businesses they control are 2 vastly different things, the latter has serious financial implications. The motivational imperative is almost never the underlying morality of the stand, but usually the positive goodwill to be gained or the negative consequences to the business if they don’t take the stand. Concepts such as morality almost always take a backseat to the interests of money, and is usually the domain of the marketing dept. When business takes stands against people engaging in despicable behavior, when business doesn’t take stands against people engaging in despicable behavior, it’s all just business, you have to know and understand the general demeanor of your customers.

    The most important insight I’ve gained over the years, via a certain amount of visibility behind the curtains of many large businesses, the best interests of money goes before all other concerns. If you feel guilty later, you can always cleanse your soul with a donation to a worthy cause.

  2. SpaceX is a business directed by an individual human. Humans DO take stands for moral reasons.
    Of course, what one person thinks is the moral choice, may not be moral to another person.

  3. They might have to work with companies like Netflix to pre-download the bulk of movie data encrypted, and then just stream a ‘thin’ data stream of time-coded decryption codes.

    So if you’re in a rural area, your streaming video would work a bit differently – you can’t just pick a movie and start watching, but you can pre-plan a number of movies you’ll want to watch soon and buffer them on a multi-terabyte drive.

    It isn’t perfectly secure of course, but then anything that lets one get decoded video onto one’s screen isn’t. It ought to be secure enough for streaming movie services.

  4. Related – a bit from the “Connect America Fund Omnibus Order…”

    “Universal service support shall be eliminated in an incumbent local exchange carrier study area where an unsubsidized competitor, or combination of unsubsidized competitors, as defined in section 54.5, offers to 100 percent of residential and business locations in the study area voice and broadband service at speeds of at least 4 Mbps downstream/1 Mbps upstream, with latency suitable for real-time applications, including Voice over Internet Protocol, and usage capacity that is reasonably comparable to comparable offerings in urban areas, at rates that are reasonably comparable to rates for comparable offerings in urban areas.”

    Looks to me like Starlink could potentially put an end to Universal Service support pretty much everywhere in the US – though Alaska service may come a bit later.

  5. As I understood it, Starlink wasn’t going to get laser links between satellites until end of this year?

    Unless they’ve got some alternative means of forwarding data between satellites, they’ll just be going from regional ground stations to a satellite and back down to users. That’s adequate for alpha testing and beta market testing, and might continue to be used for routing to nearby servers longer term.

    But they’ll have to get laser communication system working for real service. No public mention of the status of that, that I’ve heard, and I’d think Musk might have mentioned it if satellites were launched to test it. And it doesn’t sound like an easy problem either – may require multiple satellite iterations to perfect.

  6. Forget about Starlink on cities, the half a dozen satellites passing over that city at any time wouldn’t be capable of servicing hundreds of thousands of citizens.

    Starlink is great for rural areas, but not so much on densely populated zones. My guess is that SpaceX will save the precious bandwith on cities exclusively for highly paying costumers (the military, financial companies, …).

  7. Per Elon the instructions for activating the transceiver are “Point at sky, plug into power” and not necessarily in that order. The Air Force has already tested one on an aircraft, so, yes, if you plunk down the cash for the transceiver and the service/bandwidth, you can put it on a truck. The band width would be overkill.

  8. Good idea! My primitive thinking is that it shouldn’t be too hard to make a receiver for trucks because the satellites themselves are already mobile.

  9. I’m tempted myself – though ATT finally got fiber to us last year and I’m seeing 1.3 GB. However, we’re looking at maybe going full time in an RV for a couple of years and THIS would really ease one of the things I’d want – good internet service.

  10. it might be that the government rules about meeting their subsidy criteria are too onerous and troublesome

    Definitely the primary driver.

  11. ‘Re: Notice of Ex Parte Communications,WC Docket No. 19-126; WC Docket No. 10-90’ took place Jan 20 2020: “ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1012068447797/Rural Broadband Fund Ex Parte.pdf”

  12. SpaceX is a business, businesses don’t take stands for moral reasons.
    It was the best business decision given the climate at the time.
    They’ve been actively engaging with the fcc regarding the requirements of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

  13. I think military will pay nice sums since accessible internet would give another advantage over rivals.

  14. I wonder if the array satellite dish by starlink will be mobile? If so it would be grate for travel and truck drivers.

  15. It might be a moral stand, it might be that the government rules about meeting their subsidy criteria are too onerous and troublesome to be worth the money.
    And of course it could be both.

  16. Given the nature of Starlink’s deployment it will become the de facto standard that you must beat. Fiber to the home can beat it but fiber is expensive.

    I’d be interested just to have a second connection to the internet.

  17. Good for them.
    Although in principle I feel they should be perfectly eligible.
    I approve their moral stand.
    Thanks.

  18. 2018

    While SpaceX ultimately convinced(2017) the FCC not to lump Starlink and other non-geostationary orbit satellite systems with higher latency orbits, the company formally notified the FCC earlier this month that it still won’t be seeking Connect America funding for Starlink. “SpaceX believes that it is more effective to leverage advanced technology and smart private sector infrastructure investment to reach America’s unserved and underserved population, rather than seek Government subsidization for this effort,” SpaceX’s Vice President of Satellite Government Affairs, Patricia Cooper, wrote in a May 8 2018 letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

  19. Having decent internet is pretty much the last thing holding me back from “retiring” and buying a large, rural homestead.

  20. FCC is saying it doesn’t think they can provide latency below 100 milliseconds, SpaceX says they can easily and consistently beat that. It’s still a race for them to prove to the FCC that Starlink meets their criteria.

  21. It really depends on price and benefits; will the new Starlink be competitive with what we already have at home?

    For many cases, it might not.

    People in cities are getting home connections of several hundred Mbps nowadays, and I don’t see Starlink seriously competing with that in price or speed. Of course, it may happen your town ISPs are really bad, so Starlink might actually represent a challenge for them.

    But for giving fast and truly universal Internet access to faraway places, it will mop the floor with the competition. Satellite Internet is slow and expensive, so that’s the real market they want to revolutionize.

    Trucks, boats, airplanes, homes on the range, etc. will become their customers. The same for Telcos wanting to create remote cell towers without the expense.

    But most people will probably not notice any change, as they will continue using their local (and mostly hated) ISP and the 5G in their mobile devices.

    But for those of us wanting to live free from the tethers and the metropolis they dwell on, it can be a real revolution.

  22. Yes, because cable companies are evil price gouging monopolies with no serious competition for broadband and crappy last generation tv boxes … sadly… Starlink won’t be cheap enough to keep them honest…and maybe it’s not good for streaming Netflix…

Comments are closed.