bit by bit, and one of the major useful properties of platinum itself is that it's so heat resistant and inert.

It's also useful to have some heavy metals off world for further expansion.

> There is absolutely zero meaningful competition to Starlink in the maritime, aviation, and remote internet markets.

There are roughly 100,000 ships at sea. There are roughly 15,000 planes in the sky.

The remote internet markets are remote because either A) exceedingly few people live there, or B) exceedingly poor people live there. (And usually, both at the same time)

This just isn't a big market. That's why the telecom giants haven't bothered. To justify a trillion dollar valuation you're gonna need a billion users. SpaceX would be better off putting fiber into the ground in Africa.

>> The EU is even building their own Starlink equivalent.

> No they aren’t.

That’s exactly what IRIS [0] is though…

[0] https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space/iris2-s...

Rocket launch ex-Starlink is a small $N-billion market; a few dozen flights at $50M per flight. Starship is revolutionary and I can easily believe that it will expand the market by a remarkable order of magnitude. Multiple tens of billions. How does that justify a valuation over $1T?

Starlink Mobile is more significant, but it's still unlikely to double Starlink revenue -- most mobile traffic will always be transited by local cell phone towers.

P.S. I think somebody is going to make a lot of money from Starship. The money in space is not from launch but from the services it enables. Starlink >> Falcon9. But I don't think SpaceX is going to be the ones to find the next Starlink. It's much more likely to be a third party who launches on multiple providers to keep costs down.

I'd love to know what your analysis. This is a genuine request. No snark. I'm genuinely curious of other view points.

'If don't agree with me it's because you don't understand' is such a tired, worn trope.

Do you have anything to add to that sentiment? Maybe a pro-forma, rather than feelings?

Srsly?

Just to be very clear about Starship: We have a very limited amount of payload we are sending up in space every year.

The biggest jump in payload is starlink itself. Starlink though doesn't scale very well. V2 can only handle a certain amount of customers and has only a lifetime of 5 years.

Space-X has to build Starship to even being able to send v3 up to increase the margin of this setup. But even then, every 5 years that thing has to be replaced and new build.

Every mobile tower, fiber cable etc. underground has a lot higher lifetime than that.

Starlink also has the issue of latency handover. Every few minutes you have to do a handover which leads to package loss. I can't do a Teams Call through Starlink fyi.

And Starlink already exists and is relativly affordable despite that, they only have 9-10 Million customers and they had to increase the price.

And while all of this 'magic no one gets' is happening, Starship hasn't profen non leo orbit with proper payload AND reusability. Without reusability, they will not get the costs down that much anymore. Its already relativly cheap.

And in parallel all of this 'trillion dollar future margin magic' gets opposition by other companies like eutelsat and Amazon.

Ah yes the world changing product of starlink mobile. Which doesn't get booked in the USA, is slow and needs a lot of energy. Whatever you think this is, 500km mobile range is 500km and this on a planet were normal people already have a very very well working mobile setup for at least 10 years by now.

Is space-x some kind of business gap? yes sure. Will they make billions with this? Depending on other companes, yeah sure. Is it a trillion dollar business? No

Yes yes i'm fully unaware of this.

Btw. Musk def sells you the story of Mars and dyson sphere and stuff to keep the magic but while he does all of this, he rents out colossus 1 and 2 to his competitors because he is unable to sell his OWN AI product.

Isn't Spaceship an requirement to make starlink profitable?

"You just don't understand bro" has been the trite handwaving of criticism for a over decade now. It already wore out when the bitcoin bros kept saying it to all their critics.

> I can tell you are in the unaware group, since you don't mention nor analyze two of SpaceX's world-changing products (Starship and Starlink Mobile).

Just because I did not mention Starship by name does not mean it's not in the reply.

And Starlink Mobile is still an ISP. "It's worth a trillion dollars because it's mobile!" Haven't heard that one since the Dotcom bubble.

But more to the point:

> Meanwhile, people who understand SpaceX's product line, and the implications these products in five or ten years, can analyze the situation more accurately.

They are looking 10 years forwards. I am looking 10 years back.

This exact same "just you wait, in 5 years there'll be a miracle technology that generates infinite profit" rhetoric has been used for those 10 years.

Still waiting on the miracle self-driving that was supposed to justify Tesla's $1.6 trillion.

Enlighten us then, please. What are we missing?

I guess we'll see, because most 14 year olds don't have a lot of money to put into SpaceX.

You could also transfer the heat to tungsten rods and drop them on rivaling earth-bound data centers.