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4 months agoThis is really annoying for me 😇 . I am not one who would believe words of the Elon and I would say that intuitively it didn’t make financial sense but I’ve looked into it and to my surprise the numbers are actually getting kinda close:
- they claim they have 4 million customers - at 100 USD per customer / month x 12 - 4.8 billion USD. There will be some tax, but they have also deals with US military (StarShield) or GSM Operator and wide range of “enterprise services” , so I suspect the income could be at around those 5 billion USD from starlink alone.
- they did 90 launches last year maintaining and expanding the network. It’s hard to say how much a falcon 9 launch cost - but CNBC says it was sold for 67 million USD in 2022. Not sure how much margin Elon gets on a single launch, but 5 billion / 90 is over 55 million USD - which is right there in the area…
Now this is ignoring the cost of the satellites, the maintenance of 150 ground stations, development of the HW /SW, advertising and god knows what else - but still at least in the “ballpark numbers”.
To my unpleasant surprise - the Elon might not be joking on this one 🧐 - the Starlink might be one day paying for the development of the Starship - if it isn’t already 😲 Also - this is bloody cool 🤬
True. It should be notes though that India has its own “Gaganyaan” space capsule with it’s HLVM3 rocket. First uncrewed test flight hopefully 4Q this year and first manned fight planned for early 2027. But there have been delays before - space is hard.