Seems to me like the long term viability of Starlink (if it's not already profitable) will be assured if Starship meets its goals. They'll be able to launch way more satellites at once, for less per launch, and with faster turnaround.
If they're losing ones that were close to their max. life anyway that's possibly no great loss, however if they were newer satellites on top of expected attrition that's more of a concern.
https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/17055628292254106...
https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html
There has only ever been 350 starlink satellites that have deorbited, and only 8 within the last two months.
This is just wishful thinking without any data backing it up.
Which data are you looking for?
Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets
And while they raised a lot of money, it isn't actually that much. If they had 0 or negative margin on launches the company wouldn't be nearly sustainable.
That they made any profit at all is a damn miracle.
> Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets
There very clearly is. Every launch company has talked about this. The fixed cost for infrastructure, boats, launch teams and so on is absolutely huge. That is why so many New Space companies bet their company on launching often.
At the same time SpaceX is now recovering fairing on almost all launches. Landings have been perfect. Development is done. And Fixed cost are distributed over a whole lot of launches. They can now fly the newer cores 15-20 times.
The Upper Stage is the biggest cost, people estimate it between 5-15M. And then 10-20M in fixed cost, labor and recovery hardware amortisation. I think it can't really be more then 35M, I would guess less.
So if the company is breaking even, then its manufacturing & launch business must have good margins.
Which means, self launched rockets cost SpaceX noticeably less than their commercial pricing.
Beyond that it's mostly people's times and materials they have stockpiled for economies of scale.
I would guess the lost satellites cost a bit more to manufacture that to launch in a reused Falcon 9.
Some losses might be intentional for safety after damage or low propellant. They really can't afford to put any debris on their orbits.
Satellite phones (and I’ve confirmed this applies to the Huawei Mate 60) connect with satellites in geostationary orbits, meaning an altitude of about 35,786km, adding latency of around 240ms (35786km*2/c ≈ 238.74ms). This can be acceptable for some purposes, but harms things far more than you might imagine. (Source: personal experience with the Australian NBN SkyMesh or whatever it was called before NBN took it over, only once, about five years back. Look, a lot of the internet is located in the USA, and many things perform vastly worse from Australia than from the USA, e.g. several second page loads instead of under one second, and this satellite connection was basically that but even for stuff in Australia, and several times as bad for stuff in America.)
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
But messaging is only a small part of their task, the main one is geolocation. They're only able to supply short message service where latency isn't really relevant.
I imagine it's preventable since the ISS and other large orbiters stay functional forever.
They could be bringing down the earlier versions of satellites intentionally to replace them with new ones.
Yes, the Sun doesn't care when the satellite was launched, but the current orbit of the satellite and drag profile will decide which ones come back down, if not also applied thrust.
https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/17055628292254106...
https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html
There has only ever been 350 starlink satellites that have deorbited, and only 8 within the last two months.
