Starlink

I've been wondering why Starlink (SpaceX's plan to create a global high-speed internet using satellites) has been so slow, and with so little publicity, given SpaceX's more usual go-go-go and let-the-world-know proclivities.

From Reuters:

SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company’s growth.

Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven members of the program’s senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites, according to the two SpaceX employees with direct knowledge of the situation.

Known for pushing aggressive deadlines, Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in California to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX’s first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of next year, the sources said.

The management shakeup and the launch timeline, previously unreported, illustrate how quickly Musk wants to bring online SpaceX’s Starlink program, which is competing with OneWeb and Canada’s Telesat to be first to market with a new satellite-based Internet service.

Those services - essentially a constellation of satellites that will bring high-speed Internet to rural and suburban locations globally - are key to generating the cash that privately-held SpaceX needs to fund Musk’s real dream of developing a new rocket capable of flying paying customers to the moon and eventually trying to colonize Mars.

“It would be like rebuilding the Internet in space,” Musk told an audience in 2015 when he unveiled Starlink. “The goal would be to have a majority of long-distance Internet traffic go over this network.”

Among the managers fired from the Redmond office was SpaceX Vice President of Satellites Rajeev Badyal, an engineering and hardware veteran of Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard, and top designer Mark Krebs, who worked in Google’s satellite and aircraft division, the employees said. Krebs declined to comment, and Badyal did not respond to requests for comment.

The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. 

Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk’s famously short deadlines.

“Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites,” one of the sources said. “Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner.”

[Read more here]

Starlink and SpaceX's BFR/BFS go together.  The market for satellite-based broadband and TV services is $128 billion, the satellite launch market is just $5.5 billion.  So this will be a substantial new revenue source for SpaceX, revenue it will need to develop and build the first BFRs and BFSs, whose development costs Musk estimates at $5 billion.  At the same time,  launching 10,000 satellites needs the huge capacity of the BFR/BFS.  Needing to launch so many satellites in fact creates the market for the BFR/BFS.  And using re-usable rockets cuts launch costs by a factor of at least 10. 

The first 900 satellites will have to be launched on the Falcon 9, and even at 10 satellites per launch that will more than double the number of launches globally each year, from 66 to over 150.

Let me say at once that the chances are that I will subscribe to Starlink when it becomes available.  Out in the bundu where I live, the broadband connection to the wider world is pretty feeble.  And not exactly cheap.  An ultra-high-speed connection would be excellent.  Musk is talking of starting the service in mid-2019, but that will prolly be just in the US (though come to think of it, since the satellites orbit the world .....)   What such a network of satellites means is that anywhere in the world--the Sahara, the Amazon, Antarctica, as well as cities and rural backwaters--will be connected to the internet, for phone calls, TV, and everything.  This will be an extraordinary creation.  And in developing countries it will combine with cheap rooftop solar to bring the whole world into the 21st century.