NASA has selected the platform for supply to the Lunar Gateway.
SpaceX wants to use it to take humans to Mars.
But it's also a decent platform for just getting lots and lots of mass into LEO.
Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Rockets are still expensive enough that you can't afford one unless you have a really valuable payload to launch.
Expensive but reliable rockets gave us useful things like communications satellites, GPS, and weather satellites. An order-of-magnitude reduction in launch costs may have given us slightly better satellite services (like Starlink) but nothing qualitatively different. Another order-of-magnitude reduction could plausibly bring bigger changes.
Eh, but upmass is significantly up, despite it taking less mass to do stuff in space and stuff lasting longer.
Not to mention that it may take a long time from launch getting cheaper for payload to really start to take advantage of it. If launch stays sustainably cheap, it may be time to start analyzing the economics of space power stations, etc, again, which were almost feasible with worse technology at much higher launch costs.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-pl...
People and the necessary life support for people are quite massive compared to robots. Once one can get lots of mass to orbit, one can think about things like sending people past low earth orbit (around the moon, to the moon, or to Mars). So far, NASA has committed to sending people to the Moon, but no farther. Elon Musk says that the goal is Mars, but any craft which could be used to start a Mars colony also has the ability to start a much larger moon colony, or perhaps to land on the moon and take off again without leaving (expensive) parts of the rocket behind.
There is some applied science research, such as around methods for reentry, but the final goal is establishing human colonies.
Apart from that, Musk is great at marketing and sometimes full of crap, but when you listen to some of his converstions it's not hard to believe that the Mars mission is earnestly what drives him.
Exceptions I can think off:
- military application, but they have their solutions
- on high seas, no idea how that works now
- regions maintaining ground stations is risky (war zones and so on)
Maybe I am wrong, but I have the impression Starlink is for SpaceX is what FSD is for Tesla, a way to "raise" money. And that is working. I am just not sure if I like it, since it would mean innovation success depends more on the founders ability to raise money than actual product market fit or profitability.
Most of my extended family lives in rural Tennessee where their internet options are still dial-up and 5G. Comcast isn't interested in laying additional fiber to remote houses. There are options through AT&T, but I think they end up paying close to $20/GB.
Several of my relatives are pretty pumped about StarLink as a potential option.
I think the niche for StarLink is this - outlying communities where traditional ISPs are uninterested in building out infrastructure for the 'long tails' of the population.