SpaceX gets $886M from FCC to subsidize Starlink in 35 states

That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.

The problem is over-run and underestimation, and the govts' lack of flexibility with regards to contract termination in most instances.

2) Defense spending has been historically hovering between 15-25 percent in the United States.

'Taxpayer savings' does not, nor has it ever, indicated more money in the hands of the taxpayer -- it indicates how many new projects will be budgeted.

In other words : The tax payer saves nothing, but the military is given extra toys within the same budget.

Now, whether or not you are for or against the further arming of our troops and allied fighters -- that's a personal question.. but let's not pretend this equates to saved cash for the citizenry.

“You get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after awhile,” he said. “And of course pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of sauce. And that can go pretty far, too.

“So it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, if I can live for a dollar a day then at least from a food cost standpoint, well it’s pretty easy to earn like $30 in a month anyway, so I’ll probably be okay.’ “

This isn’t the only example of a young Musk roughing it. When he started his first company, Zip2, he and his brother slept in their office instead of renting an apartment. They showered at the YMCA.

“We were so hard up, we had just one computer so the Web site was up during the day and I was coding at night,” Musk recalled during a commencement speech at USC. “Seven days a week, all the time.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/03/2...

And if reality doesn't actually line up with that, hey why not just invent a bunch of stuff.

We can do this infinity. Somebody that grew up poor in the US has success. Well, he had food as a child, 100s of starving African could have done the same, but 'who don't have the privilege necessary'.

So lets not give credit to anybody ever. If you were not a slave in Somilia at 13 that swam across the ocean by yourself and then build a new technology from the ground up, you deserve nothing and you are just one of those no good privileged people.

That's because they are framed as a more immediate existential threat. Humans are present biased and don't like to spend lots of money on low-probability events until they are unavoidable (see: attitudes towards pandemic preparations in 2019).

If your plan is to be carried out, then there is ripe opportunity for a politician to come to these areas an say, "vote for me, I will protect your internet access" and then fight for the funding instead.

Inter-satellite optical links aren't ready yet (and they're only barely getting to MVP on their initial generation sat shell). When those come online yes, Starlink should have a latency advantage over most any distance sufficiently long enough to make up their fixed RTT mileage cost with their 40% speed advantage vs standard optical fiber [1]. But for the current and near future deployment Starlink satellites act purely as "bent pipes" connecting terminals to a groundstation, both with LOS to the sat.

HFT gets cited a lot but probably one of their biggest bonanzas once intersat links are up will be marine and aviation internet. If you think rural pricing is bad...

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1: Possibly with a very few rarified exceptions that use terrestrial microwave links or if someone went to the trouble of using photonic bandgap fiber.

See also USPS's Universal Service Obligation, which requires it to have a minimum level of service to every single address/user in the US.

This is common in developed countries (e.g. the EU requires all its member states to have universal service for both post and telecommunications). China isn't there yet, but is working towards that goal.

I could be wrong but my guess is they will blacklist areas near cities entirely at least to begin with and focus on very rural areas with literally no alternative (no LTE etc).

Personally I think Starlink is going to have capacity crisis quickly if takeup is anywhere near as strong as demand seems to be and I'm sure SpaceX know this, so by fcoussing almost entirely on very rural areas (and maybe niche commercial/govt uses in more urban enviroments) they have a chance at managing demand a bit. Or they will start ramping up cost of service and/or putting very punitive bandwidth caps on (like all other sat providers).

I still think Starlink is an amazing breakthrough, but it really is a solution only for the 'last'/most rural 1% of households (or less).

By definition I think the places that need Starlink the most won't hit density limits. But I think a lot of people will buy Starlink just because it's Starlink -- anything so their dollars aren't going to Comcast.

These are often because of a bottleneck such as a traffic right (particularly left turn signal) or stop sign. If autonomous vehicles can be tweaked to increase throughput (better reaction times, shorter follow distance, less accidents, higher speed through chokepoints like tolls, not distracted or not accelerating slowly on light changes) you might see significant traffic reductions as a result. Little's law is applicable here.

The problems with bus or commuter lines is it's hard to get people to share a route efficiently. I've had it work in the past but only where I picked my housing according to an effective commuter line for my school or work. But that's hard to arrange at scale.

Where effective commuters line don't scale instead if you combine the above wins with an uber pool like service where 3-4 people are efficiently routed together. You could be looking at 2-3x fewer cars on roads that have better throughput and fewer bottlenecks.

That is true in the USA, which has absurdly short on and off ramps, but in my experience, many other countries around the world don't have this problem.

Canada, Australia and the UK all have much, MUCH longer on and off ramps, and traffic doesn't back up onto freeways. Freeways still clog up, however.

>FCC funding can be used in different ways depending on the type of broadband service. Cable companies like Charter and other wireline providers generally use the money to expand their networks into new areas that don't already have broadband. But with Starlink, SpaceX could theoretically provide service to all of rural America once it has launched enough satellites, even without FCC funding.

>One possibility is that SpaceX could use the FCC money to lower prices in the 642,925 funded locations, but the FCC announcement didn't say whether that's what SpaceX will do.

SpaceX is still in the painful bootstrapping phase of things, and their cost structure right now is still higher then what they ultimately hope for. But from the sound of it they've got a lot of flexibility in how they deploy this money so long as they ultimately meet service targets, and they're only one player amongst many even for this subsidy money. If they're satisfied with service people don't tend to casually switch providers, so there is real value in being first. I think therefore SpaceX may consider using some of the money at least to lower the bar of someone signing up and try to get currently underserved households onboard as customers faster.

Additionally, don't forget this is only the first round, there is even more money available next time. Given the nature of bidding, I assume strategic calculations about how to win more next time will also play a role.

The $2.4B they paid to ST Micro is not for terminals, as ST Micro doesn't manufacture electronics, they are a foundry and so they only make the chips. The $2.4B includes the costs for the chips for the first million receivers, but the assembly and non-chip costs add a lot on top of that. So in that sense, $2400 per terminal is a serious underestimate.

But it's also wrong in the other direction, because the $2.4B didn't just include the chips, it also included the development and mask costs for those chips. This should be considered to be NRE and not considered as part of the price of the terminals, as SpaceX will not have to pay that for the next million terminals.

So the real number is above or below $2400 depending on what costs more, the motors, pcbs, the antenna layers, the chassis and the assembly of a terminal, or 1/1000000 of the NRE of developing the ASICs for Starlink. Who knows.

First, the fact that they have the money to launch more satellites does not mean that they have the money to launch ALL the satellites that the full system needs. Indeed their projected cost for fully setting up Starlink is $10 billion dollars, which is more than the projected operating profit that they have had over their entire history. So it is easy to see that they won't be able to complete unless they get more money along the way.

In fact there is a significant risk that if they make less than they hope, that the company runs out of money and goes out of business. This subsidy reduces that risk, and therefore makes them more likely to complete, and likely to complete faster.

To achieve this purpose, the subsidy should be sized to help them over the hump, and not to pay all their costs. (Whether we should be handing out subsidies is a different question that I'm ignoring. Our government has chosen to, and the question is how to succeed.) Therefore there is nothing odd about the fact that it is less than 10% of the total amount of money that they think they will need. They aren't doing Starlink in the hopes of getting the subsidy. But the subsidy improves their odds of succeeding at Starlink.

And finally, you claim that the subsidy will only go directly to their bottom line. Which is to say that it shows up as profit and goes to Elon and other shareholders in the company.

It is true that plenty of companies operate that way. However after 20 years of running companies, it is extremely safe to say that Elon does not. In fact he tends to take every scrap of money that his company is generating, finds ways to borrow or raise more, and then reinvests it into even more ambitious projects.

So he won't be taking it as profit. What will he use it on?

Well, the three big projects that Elon is working on right now is building Starship, building Starlink, and preparing to settle Mars. Of those, Starship is required to finish Starlink at a price point where it is a viable business, and Starlink is required to fund Mars. Therefore it is essentially certain that he will pour this money directly into Starship and Starlink, rather than taking any of it as immediate profit.

Therefore we have good reason to believe that this money will be used for its intended purpose. We have good reason to believe that this money will in fact improve the odds of success, and enable them to deliver that success sooner. And therefore this money actually helps achieve the goal that the US government has set.

City/population-center living is wildly inefficient for a host of reasons, and a dollar of urban development towards a major metropolis goes much less far than a dollar of urban development for a rural community.

We deal with the inadequacies of living in such big population dense areas because we want to; not because it's efficient.

Turns out it's not efficient to stack up as many people vertically as possible.

It over-burdens local municipal systems to the point of skyrocketing economic costs, creates more job scarcity due to sheer population and high real-estate costs, and creates untenable situations during times where population density is a net-negative, like during a pandemic.

Rural living has major problems too; lack of access to high quality services and travel come to mind -- but these are things that can be improved upon, and by every metric these things are improving.

There is no such game-plan for dealing with the burdens of heavy density populations mid-city; it's considered to be a fact of life.

cf. shuttle costs of $1.5B per launch.