SpaceX Plans 100,000 New Starlink Satellites for 100x Bandwidth

When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms.

While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.

SpaceX needs to claim there’s a need for 100k more satellites to prop up unreasonable valuations. This is no different than Elon claiming Tesla owners would be renting out their cars as FSD taxis while at work (next year, we swear guys!!!)

In a functioning economy he’d have faced criminal charges for knowingly misleading investors and customers about a dozen times over by now. It’s one thing to set lofty goals internally to keep your workforce motivated and innovative. It’s something else entirely to state things publicly with a targeted date when you know there’s absolutely no chance it will ever happen.

I just finished a long RV trip and I can tell you it's hard to underestimate the importance of internet access (which also means Wi-Fi calling and access to maps and weather) across our entire, enormous nation.

It's important not only for individuals but even more for businesses. Despite cell phone company ads with handsome celebrities in the desert, cell phones actually do not work in many places. But people do need to live and work in those places.

A couple of billion people are doing to join the global middle class over the coming decades. They don’t have pre-existing cable and phone networks that have been in the ground for 50+ years they can incrementally upgrade to broadband. Rich countries spend trillions getting to the point where most people have some sort of wired broadband option. If newly middle income countries want to pursue the same route, it will take decades.

Starlink short circuits that process. It means newly minted middle income people my dad’s village in Bangladesh can get broadband now instead of in 2050. Replicate that story all over South and South East Asia and Africa.

I think most of this thread is missing the part where this will also work for cellphones and give you truly global coverage.

At what point are people going to have a conversation about all the pollution and the consequences of so many satellites burning up (metals and other toxic stuff) in the atmosphere and fragments falling wherever.

100k... how much can we keep putting up and let keep falling around the world? Multiple other companies and countries want to do the same as SpaceX.

Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?

One cool thing about Starlink is that it can potentially improve latency across the world. In optical fibers the light travels only two thirds as fast due to the index of refraction. But in space you can use a laser to send the data in a straight line in a vacuum.

On twitter yesterday, someone posted a question about SpaceX/xAI making a poor financial decision and Musk answered saying SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of the Earth. His megalomania is really running wild so I would not put much stock in this. They are asking the FCC for permission to launch 100k satellites which puts this very much in the "aspirational" category. They neither have plans nor approval to do it. This is a combination of ego and signalling to SPCX investors because it's down nearly 10% from IPO.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:57vlzz2...