Thunderf00t
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2025
31:46 · 486K views · Jul 14, 2021
Thunderf00t critiques Starlink's economics and technical claims alongside other unfulfilled Musk promises. It argues Starlink is a poor business.
Mostly cited as a contrarian critique of Starlink's viability; some defend its economics argument while others dismiss it as repetitive.
5 comments from Hacker News
Probably a good idea to do it now, because Trump has made sure SpaceX is about to have yet another European, a Chinese and an Indian competitor soon. 2 out of 3 have already demonstrated landing a rocket, as has Blue origin in the US with the New Glenn launch + landing. Plus a few countries are thinking about it, at least Switzerland, South Korea and Israel if you can believe it. Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on "old" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one. Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video: this video TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com "We lose on every sale but make it up on volume" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed. Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the "ESCAPADE" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically r
[LINK] Edit: Just out of curiosity, I looked up his video about Starlink, and his point was it's a bad business, not that it's physically impossible to do it: this video I'd actually love it if you could find a single thing he says in that video that's provably false. I'm quite confident history will judge Elon Musk properly, as the "Too Big To Fail" version of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
>They claim they're going to get these laser communications between the satellites which will make things faster for a long distance... [this is because light travels faster in a vacuum than through fiber optic cable you up to London a very important one for the Global Financial system Starlink latency is under 50 milliseconds while the current Internet is around 70 milliseconds] yeah Starlink can't do any of that at the moment. >Probably something to do with the fact that the satellites are hundreds of miles or kilometers apart and you're trying to hit a tiny moving Target from another moving target with a laser and then and chaining those together that doesn't sound very easy but they're promising to launch some satellites that can do it in the next generation [getting close to launching satellite 1.5 which has laser interest satellite links] >Now where have I heard that before... Let's just call me skeptical on this one this video This entire video is just the same thing over and over. As is usual with him, he doesn't actually make any strong enough claim and just goes on endless sneering. But in the context of the video, it is absolutely clear that he's saying it is just another lie and that it's basically impossible. Remember, this was mere months before the laser network went up. He also claimed that the bandwidth is never going to be usable, but it absolutely is. Also, that's just the fallacy fallacy. This isn't some sort of debate club, it makes perfect sense to discredi
I recently started researching into Starlink as my next (cheap) internet solution and stumbled upon these 2 videos below. The worst part for me is that once this becomes more popular the bandwidth will die down to crumble. I don't buy they will be able to upkeep with bandwidth sharing it from satellite to satellite using a.. laser beam (is that even possible to sync 2 satellites and send signal thru laser beam that has radius of 10 nm at distance of 1,000 km from one object to another traveling at 20,000km/s ?) this video [LINK]
Does this make starlink any more feasible? I thought that the math just doesn't work out. Not to mention the massive amount of space garbage (40k satellites replaced every 5 years?) See for example a "busted" video this video