[Starlink] a bit more starship news

[David P. Reed]

> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:48:51 -0700 (PDT)

> From: David Lang <david at lang.hm>
...
> the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2 satellites,
> they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a Falcon 9.
> 
> I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship later this
> year.
> 
> Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of Starlink having
> positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023


"Quarter of Starlink having positive cash flow" means what exactly? I.'ve never heard a quarter of a corporation having positive cash flow as any kind of business metric.
 
Of course, since Starlink and SpaceX are subject to completely weird accounting standards (including providing software assistance to Twitter for free, and other shenanigans in the accounting world according to Musk), it could mean anything.
 
I worked with Iridium and Motorola during the phase before it was sold for scrap to the DoD, essentially. What's fascinating is how "creative accounting" between then and the current Starlink continues to persist. Motorola's Chris Galvin was a lot like Musk w.r.t. not seeing clearly what was happening - he was isolated by sycophants who really wanted to believe that there was a business there. Then later Motorola completely screwed up its cellular tech business by betting against GPRS and the Europeans. Should have hedged and participated in the rapid cellular industry growth, but instead, basically drove a great tech company into the ground.
 
As a I watch Starlink and SpaceX play a shell game with their business economics, it's fascinating to watch a similar thing play out. 
 
Especially watching the "fan boys and girls" get taken for a ride as the Iridium "fan boys and girls" did - including stunts like showing that you could make a phone call from Mt. Everest, as if that was gonna fix the underlying lack of business strategy for success.
 
The current version of this "fan thinking" is the idea that somehow the satellites can route packets among themselves and provide a low-latency, high-quality Internet access service. As Dave Taht points out, we don't see the customer churn rates as people discover the bufferbloat effects as the customers scale, and which are largely designed into the Starlink systems architecture (the satellites' packet routing architecture).
 
But yeah, we might send a few people to Mars to die there.
 
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