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simcoder t1_ivlkxcf wrote

Got any evidence about Starlink fully funding Mars? It's funny how often that keeps coming back up.

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Harry_the_space_man t1_ivlqgpk wrote

Because it’s the stated plan. Starlink has roughly 900,000 paying subscribers (it was 100,000 at the beginning of the year). The average Starlink cost is 110 for residential, and 135 for movable starlink. With 100,000 users on mobile Starlink, that’s 162,000,000 a year in revenue, plus the 1,056,000,000 per year from residential, and they have 1,218,000,000 in revenue per year. Right now they are constantly launching satellites and combined with other Starlink related expenses they are spending roughly 1.5 billion per year on Starlink. So they are making a roughly 300 million loss on Starlink each year. But with there planned 13,000 sats all working at once with laser links, they could service tens of millions of people. According to a Microsoft poll over 70 million people in America alone would spend upwards of 100 dollars for good internet, and that’s just America. Even if you be pessimistic and say they can only manage 10 million subscribers, that’s a yearly revenue of 13,350,000,000. They can accomplish this by launching Starlink V2s on starship with 5X the bandwidth of normal Starlink sats for double the cost. And because of the laser links they can distribute the usage.

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