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in the most remote parts of the u.s
reliable internet is still hard to come
by
42 million americans still don't have
access to broadband
this is a nine and a half acre homestead
in idaho and when we first got here
we had zero cell service we tried to put
boosters at the top we tried to put
boosters at the bottom we tried to put
boosters anywhere we could
we had no cell service so we really
needed some good reliable
internet and then starling came along
mike lordin and his fiancee liz racer
are one of more than 10 000 customers
using starlink
spacex's ambitious projects build an
interconnected network of thousands of
satellites to provide high-speed
broadband internet across the globe
they've been using starling service for
about six months now
and are documenting their experience of
living in a homestead on youtube
there are some times when the starlink
does drop out the dropouts aren't really
significant it seems to be just like
short little blips you know a couple
seconds here and there
the only time that you really really
notice it is if you're like live
streaming or if you're using the wi-fi
calling
option other than that you know if
you're just surfing the web or something
it seems to be very fast so far for what
it is it's a real good connection
you know considering our circumstances
starlink is still in beta and currently
serves select customers in the northern
u.s
canada the uk germany and new zealand
experts estimate that there are around
70 million households worldwide
that are good candidates for
satellite-based consumer broadband
and have the capacity to pay amid a
global pandemic that's kept employees
from going to offices
and children from schools the need for
universal broadband has become
undeniable if the service expands to its
intended global customer base
starling could be key to spacex's
success
and elon musk's vision for a colony on
mars
i think it's fair to say that the
majority of
spacex's valuation today is tied to the
starlink business model
generally speaking the global launch
industry is about a 5 billion
a year industry spacex in previous
discussions has talked about
a 30 billion dollar a year opportunity
in the starlink business looking about
three to five years out
the basis of starlink's internet service
involves three components
a satellite dish ground stations and the
satellites themselves
the service is meant for customers like
lordan and racer who live in a sparsely
populated area that's not being served
by traditional internet companies
given the high cost of laying cable or
fiber which can be as much as twenty
thousand dollars a kilometer
terrestrial service providers tend to
focus on urban and suburban areas where
there's high
density it simply does not make economic
sense to
reach out to consumers in low density
areas
the only option we really considered was
we had a local internet company that
wanted to come in they would have had to
erect a tower on the top of our mountain
they maybe could have given us five megs
a second and it would have been about
the same monthly price as the starlink
service
we have other friends that are in
similar situations
as us and they have you know those other
satellite internet providers and
a lot of them are data cap most of the
rates are real high
starling customers pay 499 dollars for
the hardware needed to connect to the
network
and an additional 99 per month for the
service
currently there are no data usage caps
or contracts
so far spacex has launched over a
thousand satellites into orbit
but the company plans to deploy 4425
satellites by 2024.
by the time that spacex is done building
out its global starling satellite system
known as a constellation
the company will have launched about 12
000 satellites and although not yet
approved by the fcc
spacex has requested permission to
launch an additional 30 000 satellites
which would bring their total to 42 000.
unlike traditional internet satellites
which
are as big as a school bus and orbited
around 36 000 kilometers above earth's
surface
starling satellites are much smaller and
closer at about 550 kilometers above
earth's surface
but the satellite's closer placement
means they can see less of the earth at
any given point in time which is why
spacex needs so many
on the flip side spacex claims that this
closer orbit allows the system to have a
lower signal delay
known as latency latency is important
for things like video streaming and
gaming
lordan says speeds vary according to
factors like weather but on average he's
been getting speeds of about 75 megabits
per second for downloads and around 12
megabits per second for uploads
in a filing to the fcc spacex said that
starling services quote
meeting and exceeding speeds of 100
megabits per second for downloads
and 20 megabits per second for uploads
musk has said that he expects the
service will double in speed by the end
of the year
to do this the company is developing a
technology known as inner satellite
links
the basic premise is that you have an
optical sensor
which is effectively a laser that points
from one satellite
and connects to the another optical
sensor on another satellite and creates
this you know unseen path from one to
the other
that's this stable connection almost
like a wire and if you
you have that stable connection you can
drastically increase the speed
because you're now moving signal from
one satellite to the other at the speed
of light
rather than the speed of whatever's on
the ground another benefit
is reducing the amount of infrastructure
needed given starlink's current
architecture we estimate that they will
need more than 100
ground stations in the u.s if however
they move to the
laser communications on the satellites
they can greatly reduce the number of
ground stations needed
as well as the complexity of the overall
system on a global basis
on the consumer side lordan says that
working with technology was simple
spacex does not currently provide an
installation service so users are on
their own for the most part
they ship and deliver a big old box to
your door and inside that box it's
really not that many items it would be
the starlink dish itself
the router the power supply and the
little tripod mount to set the dish on
and it's super straightforward starlink
actually has an app that you can
download on the phone
and it walks you through everything
literally just plug this thing into the
wall
and put the dish where the app tells you
to put the dish starling's dish comes
equipped with a built-in heating element
which keeps it free of snow and ice
it's also motorized allowing the dish to
automatically orient itself to stay
aligned with the satellites overhead
but making its equipment user-friendly
has not come cheap for spacex
the biggest challenge that spacex is
facing with starlink is also one of the
big
unknowns about the actual equipment cost
itself
people aren't sure exactly how much
either spacex is paying
for or paying to build its antennas
there's been a lot of speculation that
it's a thousand dollars a unit two
thousand dollars a unit
if they're you know selling these kits
for 4.99 a kid
and it costs them two thousand dollars
to make they're running huge losses to
begin with and they have to get a lot of
people on board to make
up for that in the long term by charging
for service
spacex has been tremendously successful
in their launch business
dominating the industry in just 10 years
however
the launch industry global launch
industry is not a large enough market
to subsidize elon musk's dream of
building a colony on mars
the key to musk's vision for colonizing
mars is starship
the massive rocket is meant to be fully
reusable and capable of launching up to
110 tons of cargo at once
though spacex has not revealed how much
it's spent on the starship program
in the past musk has estimated that it
would cost the company about five
billion dollars to complete
that's where starlink comes in the
decision to move
into starlink gives the company a market
adjacency
that's significantly larger in size and
has the potential to generate the types
of revenues and profits that would be
needed for that mars colony
earlier this year a spacex job posting
revealed that the company is planning to
build a factory in austin texas to
manufacture
its starling kits but although starlink
is initially targeting the consumer
market
experts say there's a lot of room for
the service to expand
the intended markets for starlink
measure in the tens of billions of
dollars ranging from
consumers to enterprises and mobility
applications including vessels at sea
and aircraft in flight starlink's
initial focus on consumers
is a byproduct of the way that the
satellites are launched
and the coverage that they provide
currently starlink is not able to
provide an
enterprise-grade service so the company
is leading with consumers that are a
little bit more tolerant
in the past starling's been used by
emergency responders in washington
where the satellites are manufactured to
set up an internet connection in areas
devastated by wildfires
the us air force and the army are also
both testing starlink
there is a huge hunger for investment in
satellite internet the sector could be
worth 412 billion dollars by 2040
and it's not just vcs that are investing
satellite internet is ripe for
government subsidies
in canada the government of quebec has
invested millions in telesat
in china satellite maker comsat received
a massive government investment as part
of the country's new infrastructure
drive
the us ii is betting big last year the
fcc awarded starlink nearly one billion
dollars in subsidies to bring internet
to rural areas
and in late march president biden said
that his administration would spend 100
billion dollars to expand
broadband access to americans as part of
its 2 trillion
infrastructure plan spacex is also in
talks with the uk
where starling could earn funding as
part of the country's 6.9 billion dollar
internet infrastructure program
but one place where starlink may not be
welcome is in russia
where the government is reportedly
considering enacting fines for
individuals who sign up for the service
russia is working on its own satellite
internet constellation which it hopes to
begin launching in 2024
starling's potential is huge provided
that the project can overcome some major
hurdles
satellite broadband as a whole is a
industry
and a sector that is just littered with
warning signs
and the corpses of former companies that
have tried to go out and do
what starlink is is doing already it's a
little discussed secret that
all of the successful satellite
operators today were subsidized either
through
government subsidies or through the
bankruptcy court in the case of
companies like
iridium and orbcom that went bankrupt in
the 1990s only to recover and come back
for a second act
one of the challenges of building out a
new satellite network is
all of the capital expenditure needs to
go up front before the very first
customer can be signed up
and that creates a really tough
financial model
in terms of generating the revenue to
both pay for the existing constellation
as well as the follow-on satellites that
will be needed to continue the service
spacex's leadership about two or three
years ago estimated that they thought it
would cost upwards of 10 billion dollars
to get starlink running in an
operational capacity
that's a probably a pretty fair estimate
still today
starlink is still fairly early on in
development so it's not perfect
spacex makes this clear on its website
saying that there may be periods when
customers experience no connectivity
but service will improve as the company
launches more satellites
however having thousands of new
satellites orbiting the earth comes with
its own set of problems
initial launch of spacex's starlink
satellites
in may of 2019 took astronomers by
surprise
they didn't realize how bright the
satellites would be especially as
they're raising up to final orbit and
how many there would be
so if you looked up you would see this
long line of like what looked like
slow-moving shooting stars
all in a perfect line going across the
sky so
people call them starlink trains now
that brought up a
pretty significant issue which is that
because they were so bright they were so
clustered together
and there was increasingly more and more
and more of them covering different
parts of the sky
astronomers started seeing them pop up
and really ruining different imagery and
and causing all sorts of distortion and
effects and things like that
this image taken from a telescope in
chile in november 2019
illustrates the problem the telescope
meant to see images of distant stars and
galaxies
instead captured the light trails of 19
starlink satellites
while some image processing tools can be
used to remove the trails
walker says it's not 100 effective but
spacex has not ignored the problem
the american astronomical society the
double as
and noir lab and others contacted spacex
and ever since then they've been so
generous with their time
and what was just a passing interest in
our concerns became
about a half a dozen people that they
have on staff that are dedicated to
finding out
mitigation solutions spacex originally
tried to
paint them like this dark material the
problem was
they were still too bright generally and
they also got pretty hot they instead
came up with what are known as sun
visors
and it helps keep the reflectivity of
the
solar panels from creating a lot of
light and a lot of brightness
the other thing they did is they changed
the orientation of the satellites
themselves
so that they were more on like this
knife's edge so instead of the whole
panel catching the sunlight and
reflecting it down to earth
it was just only a piece of it the huge
concentration of satellites
also worries radio astronomers who say
that the interference from radio
frequencies of internet satellites could
hinder the ability of their instruments
to look for organic and water molecules
in space
then there's the problem of congestion
since russia first launched sputnik in
1957
over 10 600 objects have been sent into
outer space
if spacex were to launch all the
satellites that it's requested
the company would by itself be
responsible for almost
a fourfold increase in the number of
spacecraft launched by all of humanity
and with the lifetime of starling
satellites only being around five years
experts are also worried about space
debris an idea known as the kessler
syndrome summarizes just how detrimental
having free-floating junk in space can
be
the kessler syndrome can be described as
two satellites that collide and they
create
more debris that will collide with other
satellites and this creates orbits that
are just unusable
for its part spacex has said that it
plans to deorbit satellites that are
nearing the end of their life
by pushing them back into earth's
atmosphere where they burn up during
re-entry
all of spacex's satellites have
propulsion systems on board which
theoretically
are more than sufficient to deorbit a
satellite in a very reasonable period of
time
however if the satellite communication
is lost
which has happened in certain cases you
lose the ability
to tell the satellite to de-orbit itself
in other cases the propulsion system
itself may have failed
and when you're launching over 4 000
satellites all it takes is a very small
failure rate
to create a lot of space debris jonathan
mcdowell an astronomer at the harvard
smithsonian center for astrophysics
has been tracking starling's failure
rates and says they've improved
for now dealing with space debris is
still largely left up to individual
companies
there is no enforceable law that can
cause a company to deorbit a satellite
that has failed
generally speaking the fcc along with
other
governmental agencies have rules out
guidelines to deorbit satellites within
25 years but there's no enforcement
mechanism
that could cause a company to spend
money to actively deorbit a satellite
at least today but experts like walker
are pushing for more national
and international oversight of satellite
makers the united nations office for
outer space affairs is already looking
at ways to mitigate the effects of light
and radio pollution coming from
satellites
in the us the biden administration
recently announced that it would
continue the national space council
which will assist the president in
setting national space policies
plans to spin off starlink into a
separate company have been swirling
since last year
and earlier this year musk confirmed the
idea elon musk again making headlines
this morning this time
with spacex saying its broadband
satellite business will go
public eventually musk tweeting quote
once we can predict cash flow reasonably
well starlink will ipo
but warning that the business will need
to pass through a quote deep chasm of
negative cash flow over the next year or
so to actually make that financially
viable
spinning off the part of spacex that has
the most earning potential may seem
counterintuitive
but experts say there could be some
benefits right now
starlink is a huge cash use for the
spacex business
and if it were spun out independently
and charging back
paying spacex for those launches it
would
obviously boost the revenues of the
remaining spacex business
if spacex is still the majority owner of
starlink
after it spins off then the company can
still see that revenue stream
still see the benefits of that service
but it's
then de-risking the overall space
company if you will
by having it operate as a separate
business so that if startling does
fail or does go bankrupt or something
bad happens to startling
then it's not damaging the core spacex
business
as much as it would as if it was still
in the entire private fold of the
company
spacex is currently the leader in low
earth orbit satellite internet
but competition is heating up amazon has
said that it will invest over 10 billion
dollars in its satellite internet
network known as project kuiper
uk satellite maker oneweb recently
launched another 36 satellites into
orbit bringing its total number to 146.
the company says it expects to begin
limited service by the end of the year
though unlike spacex its service is
geared towards enterprise customers
finally canadian satellite company
telesat has said that it will begin
commercial services for its satellite
internet in the second half of 2023
if starlink is successful it may
ultimately do more than just fun musk's
vision for a colony on mars
spacex put in these starling terms and
agreements
that there's a bylaws in regards to how
their service
will be treated for people on mars and
so
spacex is already looking down that path
and seeing okay well we can have
startling satellites around
earth in orbit but then we can also put
them in orbit around mars
and then just connect the two and and
have you know this
expansive not just a global satellite
system but a multi-planetary satellite
system
but for now earthlings are glad that
starlink exists even if it's not yet
perfect
when they first reached out to us they
did label their beta tests as the better
than nothing beta tests and for people
like me it's 100
better than nothing
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you