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Comment by mypastself | Hacker News Reader

Owning Starlink shares is the closest you might get, but its IPO is still a few years away.

Fidelity has several funds with some SpaceX exposure.

https://www.mrmarvinallen.com/what-fidelity-funds-hold-space...

I've made this comment before, but I have always wondered if there are enough linearly independent SpaceX-holding funds to construct a SpaceX-matching derivative product using only publicly traded securities.

Not an expert, but I think one problem would be the redemption fees from needing to rebalance this portfolio of mutual funds

If only real life were as frictionless as arbitrage theory.

Sadly that means having to put your money in a mutual fund which one may or may not want to for various reasons

You're not wrong, but the exposure is around 0.039% last time I looked into it. Plus you have to own a bunch of Uber, too.

Google (Alphabet) owns a big chunk of SpaceX, maybe around $7B worth now? Given their market cap of 1.856T, that ends up being ~ 0.38% SpaceX.

Baron Partners owns a good chunk of SpaceX as well. Especially useful if you're buying from an account that can only purchase funds.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BPTRX/holdings?p=BPTRX

Unfortunately that fund holds around 40% of its capital in TSLA alone and only ~5% in SpaceX, so not a very good choice for investment. It also uses leverage. Great choice if you believe in Elon, not so great choice if you have any semblance of risk management.

Presumably someone could take other positions to hedge away all of the other holdings in the fund so that (to a first order approximation) their only exposure is SpaceX, right?

(I only know the basics of investing)

Honestly I'll be happy when it becomes available for mobile installations let alone their IPO. I know it's mostly aimed at land-based installations where the fixed infrastructure is poor, but they'll be making boat dwellers of various kinds very happy!

What's the current best alternative for boat dwellers?

Considering they are already in the process of certifying mobile terminals, I would say late 2022 for larger boats and planes. 2023 for something you or I could buy for RV/Boat use.

That's not bad at all! I do wonder how they're going to make the tranceivers rugged enough for the wet and salty environment your average sailing yacht is found in, and I suspect the motion of the waves makes aiming the dish a challenge. I suspect the speed will drop as soon as the boat goes upwind and starts heeling!

That's already built in, I think.

My reading of this news[0] is that they're using much larger phased arrays that sit flat on the deck/roof. 100% electronic steering.

Granted, that's speculation on my part based on a decade of military satellite operations. Starlink stated that they are larger, higher gain, lower power usage, and won't shoot below 25 degrees azimuth. That says to me a 2-4x surface area, lays flat, phased array panel.

I wouldn't expect much drop in speed, even in the worst waters, except for rain fade and if the roll of the boat causes a satellite to go out of sight to the dish. In those scenarios, I think most people can live with Netflix being barely functional.

0: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/08/starl...

Depends on the type of boat and what you're doing on it. Personally I'm moving onto a sailing yacht next year and I'm planning on being quite nomadic, I'm installing masthead 4G and WiFi aerials and sticking to marinas and anchorages I know for certain have decent coverage until Starlink becomes available for installations like these (I think it might be a while before you can rely on them - the saltwater might be an issue even when they do have mobile coverage). While your options are currently very limited once you're out of line-of-sight radio range from the land, doing your day job on passage as well as having a watch would be pretty difficult anyway for practical reasons so I'm just timing my movements to coincide with annual leave and weekends. My aim is to see the world but slowly and steadily!

If you're on a canal boat or something along those lines you've got a lot better 4G coverage depending on what country you live in. Having said that, none of the canal boat dwellers I've spoken to have worked in tech and most of them commuted into cities so their need for fast and reliable internet wasn't as strong. I imagine permanently moored houseboats have decent WiFi links as well, though I've never really looked into that kind of thing.

Probably an vsat with an appropiate domed dish. Your latency will be high, but I think you can get unlimited data plans at reasonable downlink speeds.

You'll need a fairly large boat to host the satellite dome I believe, and they aren't cheap.

Starlink on non-huge boats is going to be a bit of a struggle for a while. Since the "dishes" are actually phased array antennas they absolutely chew through energy. They take >100W continuously, which is out of the realm of most midsized to smaller boats.

Yeah, it is rather power-hungry but I'll likely be on shore power most of the time I'm using it. For the times I'm not, I've budgeted for much more battery capacity than a typical yacht would need as part of the liveaboard conversion work.

What? 100 watt solar panel is

> 100-watt panels vary in size based on their efficiency and design, but typically measure around 47 x 21.3 x 1.4 inches.

Says google. Add four of those and some lead acid batteries and you should be able to get 100 watt 24x7. Or only 200 watts of solar if you are ok with not using 24x7

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