Jeff Findley wrote on Sun, 18 Nov 2018
21:12:59 -0500:

In article ,
says...

On 2018-11-18 11:42, Jeff Findley wrote:

Obviously BFR would be cheaper in the long run since it will be fully
reusable, so once that's up and running they'll surely prefer to use
BFR.

I know the concept of BFR/BFS is meant to be fully reusable. But in a
context of launcing satellites, doesn't BFR act as a Falcon 9 stage 1
and there is still some need for some stage 2 to move stallites into
position and jettison each at the right time ?

Cargo BFS. BFR is sometimes used to refer to the entire two stage
vehicle.


Given reusability and the cargo capacity, BFR should cost around
$75/kg to LEO.

This
dovetails nicely with BFR. Essentially SpaceX will be launching
satellites every single year to keep the Starlink constellation up to
date.

Yet, people believe the claims that such services will be far more
affordable than current services.

Because the satellites will essentially be mass produced. The ground
hardware will be mass produced (a phased array antenna with associated
hardware that essentially acts like a high powered cable modem).


Hughes (Explorenet leases satellite capacity from them) says it costs
around $500 million to build and launch a satellite to orbit. They're
launching on ULA Atlas V as a single payload, so just the launch costs
are well north of $100 MILLION. Meanwhile, launch costs for a
Starlink bird should be well south of $40 THOUSAND. Explorenet paid
$200 million to lease their current block of bandwidth on one
satellite. The second satellite presumably has similar costs.

Have fund with your 1gbps speed on satellite when you monthly usage is
limited to 5 GB.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you just pulled that
"information" out of your ass.

https://www.xplornet.com/shop/our-internet-packages/ Postal ode X0A0R0
(Pangnirtung) (the "0" are all zeros in postal code)

The satellite services in the USA are not as bad. But Xplornet has been
promising amazing thinsg with its "4G" satellites when they launched and
nothing much changed with their rates and monthly limits when the new
satellites were put int production.

That company isn't SpaceX, is it? Again, how do you pretend to know
what Starlink's pricing will be like.

So sorry to rain on your parade, but don't expect Starlink to be that
different. Someone has to pay for lanching these thousands of satellites.

Things that are different, just aren't the same.


Yeah. Design and buildout of the Starlink constellation (7500
satellites) is expected to cost around $10 billion. That comes out to
around $1.33 million per bird, or less than 1% of what an Explorenet
satellite costs them (at $200 million). Bottom line is that
Explorenet paid $0.4 billion to get (apparently expensive and limited)
Canadian service in place. For around 25 times that cost, Starlink
will have worldwide service with much higher bandwidth.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw