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Comment by sleepyguy | Hacker News Reader

The US consumer cellular subscription service is around 185 billion a year and if you add business/enterprise it is around 225 billion a year. If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream. Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream. Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity.

If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....

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> If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream

There's practically no way there's enough RF spectrum to handle that many clients from even LEO. There's a reason why carriers are moving to smaller and smaller and smaller cells, and places like sports venues have highly directional antenna arrays to handle the number of active clients. Will there be customers? Sure. Probably a lot! Will it be an actually massive chunk of the overall subscriber base mostly using their networks? Not a chance.

They can't even get capacity up enough to support their rural customers on practically idealized antenna array hardware.

> Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream.

What applications demand that kind of premium on cost of running? Why choose that instead of terrestrial datacenters? What's the overall use-case for why one should bother deploying their applications into a space datacenter? I'm genuinely asking. Aside from needing to ensure low-ish latency to the most remote parts of the world and being willing to pay whatever to have that, I don't get it.

> Setting up data centers in orbit

Still have yet to hear how data centers in space are actually supposed to be a good thing when cooling them is much harder than on earth because they are in a near vacuum with much less heat dissipation.

> Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity

Also interested to learn how this is done without creating a death ray with potentially catastrophic consequences

So if all the current telcos in the US lose all of their customers and SpaceX captures 100% of them without degrading the current margin/pricing at all, they are 5% of their way to the $4.3t goal. And the only way I can see that happening is from government mandate - which if things don't change I guess never say never. But still a very very very long way off

SpaceX published their datacenter satellite plans, I think they assumed that if they hid their radiators from the sun, they can consider space temperature to be 3-5K. Which is a fairly good assumption if:

- you have a perfect shadow on all side (no light is reflected from a nearby celestial body)

- and nothing is radiating nearby. Earth radiate a lot, I space temperature around the iss is fairly high.

I'm fairly sure the current design either need high temp chips or needs to be far from LEO. Or they will have to make the radiators bigger.

Okay, so in 14 years they replace all cell phone service in the US achieving 6% of the revenue goal. Just have to find another 15 “all cell phone service in US” and do it all in 14 years and we are golden.

Just add a whole Apple worth of revenue yearly and they can just barely make it.

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