SpaceX Expects Next Starship Launch in About 6 Weeks
SpaceX Expects Next Starship Launch in About 6 Weeks (msn.com)
SpaceX’s recap also notes that Starship’s upper stage couldn’t complete a planned re-light of one Raptor engine in space because of “vehicle roll rates during coast.”
As a result, while the company’s plans to launch future versions of its Starlink broadband satellites rely on Starship’s massive capacity, Shotwell cast doubt on the prospect of Starlinks hitching a ride to orbit on the fourth flight: “I don't think we're going to deploy satellites on the next flight," she said.
That constellation of 5,000-plus satellites in low Earth orbit also figured heavily in Shotwell’s remarks on the panel.
When asked by panel moderator Mark Holmes, senior editorial director of the trade publication and conference host Via Satellite, if SpaceX would need to start poaching customers from incumbent wired broadband providers to cover its capital costs, Shotwell brushed aside the notion.
Starlink fits best “in rural environments,” she said, adding that a third of the world’s people don’t have internet access at all.
“There's a lot of room to serve a lot of people,” she said. “Right now, we're selling everything we can produce.”
An IPO for Starlink is also not in the cards for now, Shotwell said, but SpaceX does want to bring down the service’s latency closer to the levels “that physics would allow.”
And the company also plans to commercialize one of the technologies it’s developed to speed up Starlink’s performance: the laser data links that allow these satellites to form a mesh network.
Shotwell was one of six satellite executives speaking on the panel. Many of the employers of the others—SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh, Eutelsat Group CEO Eva Berneke, Astranis Space Technologies CEO John Gedmark, Telesat President and CEO Daniel Goldberg, and Intelsat CEO David Wajsgras—have been around for much longer than SpaceX, but none has a low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation to match Starlink.
Eutelsat’s OneWeb (also a commercial partner of Intelsat and SES) comes closest but doesn’t market directly to consumers, while Telesat’s Lightspeed is years from a first launch. Astranis, meanwhile, aims to improve satellite broadband in remote locations with small, cheap satellites launched into much higher geostationary orbit that beam service only to specific areas.
The biggest potential rival to Starlink, Amazon’s forthcoming Project Kuiper, went unrepresented on the panel.
But all the speakers agreed that there are enough people still unconnected to leave enough of a market for new entrants. “The demand is effectively unlimited,” said Astranis' Gedmark. “There's no ceiling to how much capacity people will consume.”
SES' Al-Saleh concurred: “I think there's plenty of space for all constellations, for all orbits.” |
