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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

I think at those prices you'd have a boat big enough to have the power budget. It's clearly aimed at commercial or scientific use with a side of super yacht.

I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.

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Yes, you are right. I had not seem the price tag when I posed the question. This product is for merchant ships or yachts and does not make any sense for small boat owners.

> I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.

Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.

This is different. The problem of providing offshore satcom with LEOsats is a quantified engineering problem. IOW, the industry knows quite well what technologies will solve the problem and Starlink has those technologies in place. The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be.

None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude of unknowns, including unknown unknowns.

Cybertruck is yet another kind of problem. I don't know what the issue with that is but I'd guess it's about manufacturing capacity.

> The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be.

Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.

If the satellites are flying in formation, most link headings will be fixed or change very slowly.

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