looking back at the history of starlink, when was it decided to pursue this project at SpaceX? Was it always the natural evolution, i.e. cheap launches = more communications sats? Or was there a specific communications engineer/person that brought it up to Elon or Gwynne?

▲

phonon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

SpaceX originally partnered with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Wyler and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat_OneWeb in 2014, then they eventually went their separate ways.

https://x.com/greg_wyler/status/1116101020675977218

	▲	inemesitaffia 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrey_Satellite_Technology You can clearly see the tech had an older history at SpaceX pre acquisition 2004 I believe they also signed up a teledesic exec Larry Williams around the same time

▲

bblcla 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not actually sure myself, but I was really surprised to learn how profitable it is. SpaceX made $15b of revenue last year and $8b of profit. Starlink was 60-80% of that!

It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.