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Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that launch costs went down fast but satellite costs haven't gone down as fast and still have long development timelines. The other problem is the market for satellite services hasn't developed as fast as anticipated, except for starlink.

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Starlink for all intents and purposes is the market for satellites now. All the other launches are nice to have extras.

Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.

Having enough lift capacity to take a shot at putting a pair of telescopes out far enough to exploit solar gravitational lensing to resolve exo-planet surfaces would be a hell of a thing. Orbital refueling would mean we could reasonably build something big enough to be able to boost out that far (would still take decades to arrive).

Isn't that 500 AU out?

Yes, but the trick with getting there is building the vehicle. Time takes care of the rest (you'd do it using ion thrusters).

The whole design process for them is based around launches being expensive and taking a long time to plan. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the whole process gets used to launches being relatively cheap and frequent. No need to spend years making sure the design is perfect and will definitely last a long time if you can launch a new one in a week if you make a mistake.

Starlink is predicted to have something like 6.6B in revenue. SpaceX isn't a rocket company they are an ISP that launches rockets.

Is that long term or this year? Because honestly 6.6B is not a lot for their scale of operations.

That is projections for this year only with a target closer to 10 billion revenue next year.

SpaceX is profitable from that income alone, even allowing for starship development costs.

Things can only be cheap if you mass produce them. That tends to require standardization of components, and inevitably standardized components are a compromise between requirements, where up until now, saving mass was a critical requirement. If you don't have to care nearly so much about mass and volume, then that opens up many avenues for much cheaper standard satellite components.

I'm disappointed that you still can't order ten cubesats from Shenzen Satellite Supply Co via AliExpress.

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