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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if they can launch multiple at once. I assume they can, and on top of that, once they can reuse rockets My guess is the cost might be as little as a million (or less) for a satellite in orbit.

That would be, what, $9 billion? That sounds like a lot, until you realize they can spread that cost over 2-3 years and have millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet. This would replace cellphone plans too remember...

So that means SpaceX could probably charge a nice $100 - $300 a month and people would clamor for it. Seriously, this would probably make 10x return (easy) per satellite, if not more. Even 10 million people at $100 per month is $12 billion a year. Multiply that across a two to five year lifespan of a satellite and you'll have a very profitable business.

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This is wild, wild overexageration.

>millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet

You're vastly underestimating the challenge in attracting millions (let alone "billions", that's so ridiculous it's not even worth commenting on) of costumers.

>This would replace cellphone plans too remember...

You can't just hope to replace 4bil+ users in a snap of the fingers... Even if you had a hypothetical magical product that was cheap, available and revolutionary, flipping 4,500,000,000 clients would be a grueling task.

>could probably charge a nice $100 - $300 a month and people would clamor for it.

Why?? Who would be willing to pay 300$ a month for internet?? Maybe wealthy people in developed countries would pay that for the convenience of replacing home+mobile internet, but you wouldn't ever reach the amount of users you project with those kids of prices.

You think $300 for internet at gigabyte speeds ANYWHERE is a lot? Are you serious?

Right now people are paying Comcast $100/month for 25mbps, and Verizon $100/month for 5mbps at a cap of 10Gb...

I grant you you wouldn't hit a billion users at those prices, but you wouldn't need to at those prices. I guarantee internet like this will start at a premium, maybe $500/month. Then as more people adtop it'll quickly drop to something more inline with $50/month (or less).

You say I'm exaggerating getting millions of users. However, Id like to remind you Tesla preordered how many cars? Google Fiber had how many customers switch over? This is a game changer, and one that makes financial sense on both sides. Honestly, this is going to be like the Model T or iPhone, they'll easily have a million users their first year, ten million the next, and so on until they reach market saturation.

The devices will be bulky, you may have them in your car and house but you won't want to carry them around with you.

It's a good bet Musk has done the math.

It's also a good bet Musk has done the math and thought about future math as well.

This won't just be profitable. It has the potential to be a political game changer.

After a while it's going to be possible to start running servers on satellites, to move them out of national jurisdictions.

The jurisdiction of the parent company will likely apply, also the us government controls US launches so no doubt they will make sure nefarious payloads are kept on earth.

The satellites are pretty low weight so it looks like the limitation is that only 20 or 25 can squeeze into a Falcon 9 payload faring. $20-25 million seems a reasonable guess for the cost (not price) of a reused Falcon 9 launch so $1 million a pop launch costs seem reasonable. But there's also the cost of the satellite itself. These are mass-manufactured and pretty low weight so I'm wildly guessing somewhere between $100k and $5m each.

I'm not an RF person, but I don't think this will be practical for cell phones in the near future. Smart phone batteries barely make it through the day as is, and inverse square laws aren't on our side when it comes to space (even low earth orbit). My phone would last about an hour if it was transmitting at 10 watts

Also, I'm pretty sure you will not want a 10 watts microwave emitter couple of inches from your brain

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