From the outside it seems that a commercial failure of Starlink would bankrupt all of SpaceX.
He has said many times the slower-than-ideal ramp for the Model 3 assembly line very nearly bankrupted Tesla (it was within a few months).
When the first two SpaceX launches failed he spent all their remaining money on the next one - if it failed, SpaceX would have too.
He has also said if either Tesla or SpaceX go bankrupt, so does he.
He is literally betting the house with every major decision.
They currently pay $70 a month for their phone lines, and I bet a couple million Americans are in the same boat. They could probably cancel their entire bill with ATT if Starlink is reliable, as digital phone service is extremely cheap.
Can you clarify this? I don't know much about it but can't see how they relate.
12 were Starlink.
About half of SpaceX's launch manifest is launching their own satellites for Starlink.
The satellite service business is much larger than the launch business and this is why SpaceX is attempting to enter.
Little immediate impact. Of course, if launch gets way cheaper, the things you do to maximize longevity, fault-tolerance, and mass efficiency start to matter less...
That is, payloads are expensive in part because launch is expensive.
Small sats have become so powerful, that on a SpaceX Rideshare you can deploy basically a whole constellation in one shot potentially. Most sats today are no longer that large and heavy that you have dedicated launches.
Many of their launches are government, both domestic and foreign.
SpaceX has not reduced the price 'that much' in the last couple of years. They were already the cheapest on the market and opted for more profit, so they could have better cashflow when going into Starship and Starlink.
What also has to be considered is that even that 12 is a pretty large number. Large rockets usually didn't fly that at the rate SpaceX flies them.
The sat market is slow the respond, 4 years are very little in it. Hopefully people will come up with more great ideas how to use the capability SpaceX offers.
Falcon 9 launch prices are about $62M.
So, Skysat probably paid 3-7% of the rate for an entire launch.
Indeed, see https://spacenews.com/spacex-rideshare-program-putting-downw...
It's likely the cost to launch is significantly lower, especially as they are often the 3rd/4th/5th/6th (has there been a 6th yet?) launch of a booster.
Assuming the $62m pricetag covers the cost of the booster, the marginal cost of the Starlink launches is recovery of booster and fairings + refurbishment of booster and fairings + stage 2 + fuel + operations.
A smallsat rideshare may well be paying a significant portion of those costs.
Yes, SpaceX probably has OK margins, but when we're considering how much of SpaceX's manifest is Starlink, this is not really relevant. There's been 9 launches + 3 launches that are 5% not Starlink = 9.15 launches worth of non-Starlink revenue.
And even having this different argument you're triyng to have, SpaceX's margins are not so good that collecting 5% of nominal market price will put them in the black for that launch... That's just fantasy.
On the broader point, I agree that SpaceX is sinking a lot into the Starlink, but even if it fails I doubt bankrupts the company. Part of that is just how cheap launch is for them, but it’s also because I can’t see a catastrophic fail mode for them. The satellites are clearly already working, worst case they have to sell the constellation to someone else. Probably a failure of imagination on my part though.