SpaceX

Impressive. In the world of high-amounts-of-capital-required-to-start businesses, I think space internet is up near the top. That gives de-facto monopoly status to anyone who can launch.

I guess it helps when you also control the rocket company, which had government money to help develop.

There were a number of high profile attempts before this and they all sucked or failed.

Either way I'm pretty uncomfortable with Elon being in charge of this thing and hope he gets some competition soon.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

SpaceX began launching operational Starlink satellites five years ago this month.

SpaceX has now launched about 6,000 satellites with its Falcon 9 rocket and has delivered on its promise to provide fast Internet around the world.

In addition to rapidly growing its subscriber base of about 3 million, SpaceX has also managed to control costs.

Based upon its model, therefore, Quilty estimates that Starlink's free cash flow from the business will be about $600 million this year.

Are there credible competitors to Starlink in OneWeb, Amazon's Project Kuiper, or other planned megaconstellations?

During these discussions, reporters and editors at Ars Technica speak with industry leaders about the most important technology and science news of the day.

The original article contains 324 words, the summary contains 116 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Three major caveats here:

1 - Free cash flow doesn't actually mean profitability. It doesn't include, as a prime example, expenditure of satellites, only the actual replacement sats launched. Starlink satellites have a life expentancy of about 5 years, so to calculate profit, you need to add 1/5th of the cost of your satellite network to your yearly expenses. For free cash flow, you only have to take account of the actual expenses. So, if you buy a 100k car every 5 years, your profit-statement will show 20k in car-costs per year. But your free cash flow will show 4 years of nothing, followed by 100k.

Starlink had very few sats 5 years ago, so they're barely replacing anything yet, the FCF is 4 years behind the yearly costs of the Profit.

2 - A lot of Starlink income currently is from selling terminals, which is a very finite market. You only sell terminals to new customers, not existing ones.

3 - Nobody can actually check these numbers, since they're not public. We have no idea how realistic they are.