DEBUNKING STARLINK

[Music] welcome to this episode of the common sense skeptic this episode is going to be dedicated to musk's internet constellation called starlink which we touched on in our colonizing mars series we touched on it because this is the service where musk wrote the outline for free and independent mars into one of the sections of the service agreement we are going to take this topic on from a couple of different angles the economic model the benefits over competitors and the hazards that this system presents if it is allowed to continue forward musk has convinced his followers that starlink will provide the economic boon that spacex needs to finance all their future space endeavors several articles believe that this is a 30 billion dollar cash cow for the company by the year 2025 so just four years from now we are going to demonstrate that they are kidding themselves if they think this is going to happen and we're going to start with an historical precedent apparently the core of his followers suffer from a lack of long-term memory because they've been played like this before it wasn't that long ago that they believed musk when he was selling them leases and ppas for solar panel systems through solar city while claiming to be revolutionizing the entire solar industry to recap that model subscribers to solar city would get a free installation and solar array with no upfront costs by signing a long-term contract the company fronted the equipment and the installation cost and they collected lease payments on those systems another option was to allow solarcity to install a system on your house for free and then they would charge you for the power by the kilowatt hour that you used like any other utility this was called a ppa which was short for power purchase agreement both of these scenarios required solar city to cough up the initial equipment investment which they financed by selling bonds which were supposed to be secured by the future customer payments against these systems where the solar city model failed was that the installation and the equipment were costing more than the company could ever hope to recover through the subscription fees and the more people that signed up for the service the more bonds musk had to sell to cover the new installs as it turns out a lot of those bonds were purchased through his other companies using government money that was earmarked for other purposes in the case of spacex musk used money he received from nasa to develop crew dragon we covered this in detail in our two-part episode on solarcity what musk sold tesla by the time musk bailed himself out using tesla shareholders money solarcity was 3 billion dollars in debt because this model had failed miserably this whole situation was so bad that there is presently a conflict of interest class action moving forward next month in delaware and we will be covering that as closely as we can all other plaintiffs on that case have already pleated out and paid fines because they could not defend their actions in allowing tesla to buy solar city now here we are with starlink and musk is planning on doing the exact same thing and the result will wind up being identical because that is pretty much unavoidable first off what is starlink starlink is an internet receiving and transmitting dish about the size of a large pizza and the package they sell includes the accompanying mount with the router and the cables that they require customers order the kit arranged for the installation on their own dime or they do it themselves and those service personnel apparently are assigned they can do this for you from the looks of it most people are just putting it on the ground the dish you're buying is a sealed unit that not even experienced electronics technicians can take apart without completely destroying it this video on youtube dubbed by ken kiter shows the destruction required to access the hardware to see what makes it tick or to make any repairs and the dish for whatever reason has the cable leads attached directly to the dish instead of plugging in like a dac or hdmi cable so when the cable needs replacing it is possible you'll have to buy a whole new dish same thing if anything goes wrong with it toss the old one away and order a new one and their very limited warranty runs out after one year so keeping the things safe and sound and out of the dirt might be a better idea than keeping it somewhere where your dog can pee on it the interesting part about this array is that starlink sells these directly to the customer for five hundred dollars according to tear-down experts in the field most likely these units cost the company about two thousand dollars to manufacture and that manufacturing is outsourced not done in-house the numbers you can find in articles online range from about fifteen hundred dollars to over three thousand dollars per dish so we're going to use the two thousand dollar figure to be middle of the road and conservative so if it costs the company two thousand dollars to build the unit and they sell it for five hundred dollars well that means that starlink is losing about fifteen hundred dollars per dish that they've put out and they can only recover that cost through the 100 a month subscription fee since the company claims to have 500 000 customers on a waiting list at this point in time that suggests the company will have to carry 750 million dollars in equipment costs just to send out those kits but that is just the leading edge of the money pit where starlink is concerned that dish affectionately referred to as dishy mcflatface is useless without a satellite to bounce signals off of musk has declared his intention is to launch 42 000 satellites into orbit as a constellation to serve as customers this is something we're going to revisit later but for right now we'll just take him at his word for the foreseeable future starship is nowhere near ready to deliver such payloads to orbit and while we're showing this frame let's just acknowledge that this has to be the dumbest configuration for a deployment bay ever single hinge point on around the surface no clear exit for your payload no robotic arm those satellites are going to bounce off of everything and probably smack that front door open permanently no star link devices have been delivered to orbit using a falcon heavy wonder why that is since it's apparently a functional system with a far greater payload capacity yet to date the only things that's launched into space were the roadster that musk stole from martin eberhardt in 2018 the arab hat 6a mission in april of 2019 and a dod mission the same june dragon heavy hasn't flown for over two years leaving only falcon 9s to make these orbital insertions carrying 60 of these satellites at a time and they want to launch 42 000 satellites meaning they will need to launch 700 falcon 9s to get the job done cost of a falcon 9 launch as charged to the u.s government who paid them to develop the technology is 50 million dollars for a reused booster or 62 million dollars if they're using a new one again we'll split the difference at 55 million dollars per launch and assume that covers every aspect of launching the vehicle including pad lease fees staff paychecks and every other associated cost with a launch 700 launches later that simple map totals 38.5 billion dollars just for the launch vehicles the satellites have a reported aspirational cost of 250 000 per unit again that's an aspirational target for the manufacturing cost not the cost to date which has been reported to be as high as thousand dollars per unit to stay on the conservative side will once again use their dream number the cost of forty two thousand of those carries a price tag of ten point five billion dollars current failure rate of the starlink constellation in orbit is three percent and most of them are less than a year old to keep the eventual constellation full that will require launching an additional 1 260 satellites per year to keep up performance requiring another 21 55 million dollar launches additional cost to replace the damaged units will total 1.155 billion dollars for the launches and 315 million dollars for the satellites so call that 1.5 billion dollars annually just for upkeep then there's a staff at spacex to consider the company claims to have 10 000 workers under its umbrella and they expect starlight to become a major income generator for their company we discovered that starting wage for a starlink junior production position is a fairly weak 32 000 per year per employee salary cost but the cost of employee to the company including deductions benefits insurances etc increases that cost by up to 40 so the entry positions will actually cost the company about six hundred and seventy five dollars per head if all they're making is entry level wages which comes to about half a billion dollars per year in salaries to service only five hundred thousand subscribers combine that in with the annual failure rate and that's two billion dollars per year that's not counting any lease spaces utilities licensing fees or the network of ground stations that this system requires in order to actually access the world wide web at 100 per month the company will need 1.75 million subscribers just to cover the extra launches and salaries without biting into the initial cost of setup at all and remember we use the conservative estimates on all these numbers if the satellite costs are five hundred thousand dollars per and the launches run 62 million dollars per launch these numbers jump significantly just to get the constellation in place but here's one more thing to throw into the mix according to gwen shotwell presented at spacex the entire array will have to be replaced every five years a five-year life span on the satellite modules so in five years we'll have 42 000 pieces of space junk floating around in orbit being replaced by another 42 000 every five years the entire premise is asinine and then the company expects to make 30 billion dollars per year on top of this at 100 per month subscription fees that will require another 2.5 million subscribers which will need another 2.5 million terminals which will cost the company another 37.5 billion dollars in equipment costs which means they will need more customers that will cost them more money and the cycle will never end the second part of this is going to compare the service customers would receive against other services currently offering internet in north america of course we're going to deal specifically with the satellite service providers since starlink specs can't and will never match specs on a typical telecom provider internet service in case anyone is unaware generally speaking satellites have little to nothing to do with providing normal internet service through your local cable or telecom provider the internet is transmitted around the world using a submerged cable that stretches from north america to europe well that's not entirely true this is the network of submarine cables that we use to get data around the world on the internet this system gets the internet to most of the places in the world that need it this is the current map on the fcc website for number of providers per service area in the u.s and if you remove the telecom cable and fiber providers that leaves this map behind the coverage currently provided by satellite internet providers which is the entire country from shore to shore since there are already satellite service providers covering the entire country starlink will merely be an option to one of those services starlight manages a max of megabits per second transfer rate that is the best result according to these results compiled by tesla north with a low end at around 11 megabits per second in the same city of seattle los angeles results range from 60.24 megabits per second down to 35.49 with much slower upload speeds in comparison the best upload speed in any of these results is 17.7 megabits per second in la which is half of the download speed pings on this chart range from 20 to 94 milliseconds so how does that compare to broadband provided by cable using ucla we tested the connection we used to upload our episodes with the results of 820 megabits per second download 915 megabits per second upload and a seven millisecond ping with half a dozen devices connected to the same system that is a program with unlimited data that cost us about 80 us per month that being said the 61 megabits per second best result on starlink is suitable for video calls or gaming as stated on the starlink website so the 61 megabits per second is a decent rate for those purposes for a single user if there are two devices using the same link that speed drops and drops again every time you add a device to the system if you have four devices and one of them is streaming netflix at 25 megabits per second as recommended by netflix your experience will vary and the same is true as more and more users tap into the starlink constellation the network will have a maximum amount of data it can transfer over a specific amount of time and each new user interface diminishes its ability to keep the data rate per unit constant if you have 10 000 people on a system they will enjoy quicker rates than someone on a system with a hundred thousand or a million people that's just fact so the more people that come online the more your data rate is going to suffer now the question is how does that data transfer rate compare against other satellite internet providers the top two satellite internet providers in the us as of march 9 2021 are viasat and hughes net viasat is the faster network with packages starting at 30 dollars per month data rates up to 100 megabits per second and a 2-year price guarantee they employ 5 900 people and they service 687 000 customers in the us viasat currently has two satellites in orbit to service their north american customers and their util sat satellite services europe along with parts of northern africa if you've ever used the internet while on a transatlantic flight you've likely tapped into their viasat too their next generation of satellites the viasat-3 constellation coming in 2022 will expand their reach globally using get this three satellites global broadband 100 plus megabits per second transfer rate using only three satellites operating at a distance of 22 236 miles geostationary orbit that's around 36 000 kilometers for everyone else using metric hughes net is the company that claims to have invented satellite internet and currently has over 1 million customers serviced throughout their network their packages start at 59.99 with data transfer rates at a steady 25 megabits per second and they offer free installation hughes net covers the entire continental us including alaska through their gen 5 constellation of 20 hts satellites in a similar geostationary orbit to the viasat satellites neither of these services requires the customer to buy the equipment that is being installed for free up front both of them have caps on their data which can be increased for additional subscription fees so starlink does not offer a significant speed versus price advantage to either of these competitors someone moving over to starlink from viasat would be out of pocket 500 for the rig paying significantly more for a basic package have to install the system themselves and they would lose up to 40 percent of their data rate someone on huesnet could possibly double their speed depending on their location but they would also be doubling their basic monthly fees and they would have to cough up 500 on top of that there is one reason and only one reason why musk would be positioning his satellites closer to earth than any other established provider and that is latency or ping time this metric measures how long it takes for one computer to talk to another over the network obviously signals take longer to get to and from a satellite 36 000 kilometers away compared to the starlink satellites orbiting at 550 kilometers above sea level even with the signals moving at the speed of light if you've never heard the term ping before then you're probably not a member of the only community that statistic is vitally important to and that is gamers the gaming community lives and dies by their ping rate having too much lag in a system means the player will be delayed in reacting to critical game situations that require quick reflexes and that really is the only scenario where pain comes into play to cut the leg the satellites have to be closer to earth to shave off those precious milliseconds the closer they are to earth the more of them they require to have planet-wide coverage because they require line of sight the more of them there are the more cluttered the orbit becomes however back the satellites away from the planet to say 36 000 kilometers and you only need three satellites to cover the entire globe that works perfectly fine for everything else now let's be perfectly honest no self-respecting amateur gamer is playing fortnite or call of duty tournaments on a system with more than 25 milliseconds ping time so they're not going to be relying on a satellite connection let's just remind everyone how many satellites does musk want to launch 42 000 of his starling satellites compare that to the may 2021 data from pixelytics and the union of concerned scientists indicating there is a total of 6542 objects orbiting the earth presently 3 372 of which are active so a little over half if you add musk's plan into this mix that is a seven-fold increase of the entire population in orbit jumping from 6542 to almost 50 000. in terms of operational satellites that is a 14 times increase it's a little ironic that one of musk's most quoted pieces of pseudo-wisdom for his followers is the best part is no part yet he is proposing a system of 42 000 satellites to do the same thing one of his competitors is going to do with only three from a safer distance from earth so as not to block launch abilities and then according to shotwell they'll have to replace all of these units in five years so that number will jump to 92 000 and all of a sudden orbits start looking way more crowded which brings us to something called the kessler syndrome in 1978 nasa scientist donald j kessler proposed a theoretical scenario wherein the earth's orbit would become so cluttered with satellites and space trash that the collision would occur between two objects causing a cascading effect that would eventually cause the destruction of every object in orbit of course this would now include the iss the film gravity dealt with this topic in a very cinematic way where the russians decommissioned one of their satellites using a missile launched from earth and in no time this explosion set off a chain reaction in the hubble orbit elevation initiating a shooting gallery of debris that knocked out all communication satellites in a matter of minutes such an event would be devastating to global communication networks gps systems military surveillance and any other industry depending on satellite function and it would leave a debris field in various orbit elevations that could prevent future launches in the movie a great deal of destruction happens in the first act alone in reality this degree of destruction would happen over a much greater period of time in 1978 when the world was launching 100 or so satellites per year most of which were short-lived kessler determined there was a non-zero chance of this future event occurring this is a graph from aeroengineer.com that takes the trackable objects in orbit and breaks them down into categories of unknown rocket mission related objects rocket debris rocket fragmentation debris rocket bodies payload mission related objects payload debris payload fragmentation debris and payloads that gives a present total somewhere in the neighborhood of 23 000 known objects and you can see some spikes around 2007 for payload frag and again in 2015 when tracking tech improved to find more unidentified objects now let's shrink the graph down and add 42 000 starlight satellites to these totals just the satellites no associated pins fairings nuts bolts or whatever this thing is just the satellites the musk announced for the system that non-zero chance of collisions occurring just got a whole lot bigger it is a concern and the argument musk makes about his satellites being in a significantly lower orbit than others are no argument at all if two objects collide in orbit pieces are going to be flung in every direction at 25 000 kilometers per hour that debris will not stay at the same elevation of the original object and musk's promise that as starlink satellites go offline they will deorbit by themselves and burn up in the atmosphere seem to be empty promises since a significant portion of his satellites have failed and yet those dead units have not fallen from the sky thanks going out to tori bruno from ula for posting this on twitter it is a timeline for how long it takes dead items to deorbit on their own and it certainly doesn't work in musk's favor satellites at the 550 kilometer orbit that he plans on occupying take years to fall back to earth if contact with them is lost and the entire time they're in orbit they're a hazard in 2017 the us government logged 308 984 potential space junk collisions 655 of them were emergency reportable so call it 850 potential collisions a day with two serious situations daily that is not insignificant the kessler syndrome is a hotly debated topic you have astronomers on one side warning of the dangers of cramming our orbits with tens of thousands of additional satellites and then on the other side you have clueless people arguing with the astronomers accusing them of being alarmist shotwell is without a doubt on the clueless side of this debate in a live interview between gwen shotwell and billionaire investor ron barron he asked her this question so when you have tens of thousands of satellites in orbit how will you know you're not going to run into other satellites her response think about 30 000 people on earth spread out fairly evenly you could spend your whole life and never see another person the degree of ignorance and arrogance in her reply is staggering first the number is 42 000 not 30 that's how many satellites you want to put up second humans don't move at 25 000 kilometers per hour third if they ever did run into each other at that speed they would completely liquefy each other and finally these satellites cross each other's paths constantly just as they're doing in this video on this pass these two trains of star links zipped through each other without incident but it will only take one time where a non-responsive satellite knocks another one out of orbit and that will accelerate the kessler syndrome prediction we say accelerate rather than initiate because the kessler syndrome has already begun on june 1st 2021 nasa and csa reported finding a five millimeter hole blasted through the iss's canadarm2 the canadarm booms are made of graphite epoxy and are protected by bulletproof kevlar sleeves so whatever projectile this was went straight through two layers of each material that is just the latest object collision on the iss it certainly will not be the last one the point being made here is there are already collisions happening in space every time there is a collision in orbit additional pieces are flung into space as a result if every collision results in the original piece knocking loose one additional piece that would double the number of projectiles if it knocks too loose now you've tripled the number so this becomes an exponential function not unlike those shampoo commercials where you tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on and so on in the early days where we are now that function is in the early stages since we are adding to the population of orbital debris at a greater rate than we are subtracting from it we are increasing the rate at which this is happening this is why some space agencies like jaxa are looking for solutions to clear earth's orbit from the tens of thousands of pieces of orbital debris they can track and the millions of smaller pieces that are too small to be tracked but still carry the potential energy of a cannonball once the castler syndrome starts picking up speed in the middle of the scenario these collisions will become more and more frequent creating more and more shrapnel and at the end of it we could well be left with a field of debris surrounding the planet that prevents any launches to any orbital elevation since the declared intentions of musk are to launch humankind to the moon and to mars where he intends to ascend to the emperor's throne he should absolutely be completely protective of those orbits by keeping them as clear as possible especially in light of the thin-skinned starships that he's planning to use to fulfill his christopher columbus fantasies this is what happens when a 14 gram piece of plastic moving at orbital velocity collides with a solid block of aluminum and this is the result from the same test using a one centimeter sphere of aluminum instead of plastic for illustrative purposes let's compare these impacts with a 50 caliber round hitting a stainless steel plate velocity of this round is 3 000 feet or about 1 000 meters per second and the projectile weighs about 50 grams these rounds go straight through a stainless steel plate that's three quarters of an inch thick around two centimeters or 20 millimeters straight through and the thickness of the stainless steel skin on starship is currently at four millimeters with plans to go as low as two millimeters every single object in orbit will breach that skin like paper since everything in orbit moves about 10 times faster than that bullet time to take a look at what the global market for this satellite service might be in a recent interview gwen shotwell indicated that starlink is looking to tap into what she described as a trillion dollar market with their satellite network here's what a trillion dollars looks like as a number now this number is the current population of the earth as of the end of june 2021 which is approaching 8 billion people so ms shotwell the president of spacex musk's right-hand person and personal ventriloquist dummy thinks that somehow they're going to extract on average 127 dollars per year out of every man woman and child on planet earth or about 635 dollars per year for every family of five we have to wonder if she does much traveling it would seem that ms shotwell living the executive lifestyle to which she has become accustomed with a personal net worth in a neighborhood of 300 million dollars is unaware that the vast majority of persons living on planet earth don't have that kind of money to spend on the luxury of internet service this interactive map of the world on world data dot info allows the user to click on any country in the world and find out what the current average annual income is in that country the green countries make over twelve thousand dollars per year the dark green countries make over fifty thousand dollars per year per working person the red countries however make less than twelve thousand dollars per year and the deep red nations make less than one thousand dollars per year per working person both of the top two most populous countries in the world china and india are in the red so is mexico where world data reports an average annual income of nine thousand four hundred and eighty dollars per person if ms shotwell thinks she will be selling 500 signal boxes and 100 per month subscriptions to these large populations of people she needs to give that blonde wig a shake let's take that map and remove all the countries in red so all the countries where the vast majority make less than one thousand dollars per month that leaves canada and the us most but not all of europe australia new zealand japan and a handful of countries in the middle east and south america and guess what every single one of those countries is already serviced with global broadband internet through the existing oceanic cable system into which starship will have to tap anyway that's something else that people seem to have overlooked the starlink constellation will never outperform the ground-based nexus because it still has to tie into that same system it will never be faster or have a better ping rating than the core system itself people will always be better off with a cable connection it's cheaper it's faster and is more reliable which is probably why the worldwide satellite internet market while expected to be a growth industry is valued at only 3.424 billion dollars in may of 2021 and is forecasted to roughly double by 2026 to 6.896 billion dollars so if ms shotwell captured the entire global satellite industry put everyone else out of business and stood alone as the sole provider of satellite internet in the world she would manage to make about one half of one percent the amount of money she says starlink is poised to create for her boss in other words she's completely speaking out of her ass kind of like when she told that ted talk in 2018 oh no it's definitely going to happen this is definitely going to happen how anyone taking a hard look at the numbers can determine pretty quickly that they just do not add up you'd have to be completely oblivious to give musk any money for this at all you'd have to be almost as clueless as the federal government yep in december of 2020 the fcc announced that spacex was one of the satellite internet providers chosen to receive almost a billion dollars in taxpayers money to set up their constellation to service 642 925 locations across the u.s this is a musk project of course there's a government subsidy that he can bleed dry this is how much money the fcc earmarked for starlink 885 million five hundred thousand dollars this is how many locations musk needs the service six hundred and forty two thousand nine hundred and twenty five so this is how much the fcc is prepared to pay per location for musk to do what he promised one thousand three hundred and eighty dollars per location but that won't even cover the equipment cost of the kit that starlink has to send out to each of those addresses this fcc money is not guaranteed and it won't come in a lump sum it's based on performance and it will be split over the next 10 years payable in monthly installments in order to receive any of the money starlink has to prove the system's ability to service those customers maintaining a latency rate under 100 milliseconds while providing speeds of 100 megabits per second downstream and 20 megabits per second upstream something odd about this process is that in june of 2020 the fcc released a report throwing doubt on starlink's ability to make good on their claims they were not convinced that starlink would be able to provide the speeds and latency required to qualify for what they called the rdof or rural digital opportunity fund it's a concern that was seconded by ucla in may of 2021 as one of the top apps for measuring such metrics ucla believes that the system might eventually qualify for the upload speeds but is already falling well short on the download speeds meaning that starlink won't qualify for the rdof subsidy because they will not hit the benchmarks so it's a mystery why in december of 2020 the fcc suddenly announced spacex had won the low latency auction aspect of their subsidy program and they were tentatively awarding spacex almost a billion dollars spread over 10 years and monthly payments all of a sudden they apparently saw something that changed their mind and it made them think that this would be a good investment after all boy were they wrong on june 30th 2021 a year after the fcc expressed their doubts and six months after they changed their mind and announced spacex to be the auction winner musk is now telling the world that starlink is already flirting with bankruptcy and that he needs another 30 billion dollars to get starlink up and running or about 30 times what he's been promised by the fcc and he needs it quickly to avoid going under so how is he going to pull that off exactly we've already gone through the money losing machine that starlink is likely to be and when a company needs to raise a bunch of money quickly to stop the bleeding of red ink there are three little letters that they tend to turn to and wouldn't you know it musk is already teasing the idea of spinning starlink off from spacex with you got it an ipo on june 24th as we were finalizing the script for this video this article came out and to absolutely nobody's surprised musk is already teasing in initial public offering he said this will happen when star lake's revenue becomes more predictable an initial public offering is when a company decides to sell shares to the public and allow them to be exchanged on the open market this is often done when companies believe they are ready for the scrutiny and reporting practices that are required but it's also done to try to keep companies afloat with an infusion of shareholder money on the open market and the best way is musk knows to drive up the price of that ipo is with hype now here is the short list of reasons why you will want to stay the hell away from the starlink ipo first off as we've already outlined this system is unremarkable and will lose money hand over fist second the declared intention of musk is to use starlink revenues to finance future spacex operations they will be spinning off starlink offering an ipo on starlink not spacex yet the revenue stream of starlink is meant to benefit another privately held musk company of which the shareholders will have no stake in order to spin off an ipo for starlink it will have to become a separate entity from spacex but then it's going to send all the revenue that it makes to this other company these two statements made by musk are in direct opposition to each other if the idea of starlink is to create an unending source of money for musk to use to further his off-world enterprises then he will need to keep as much of that revenue to himself as possible if the company goes public then he would have to split that wealth in return for a lump sum earned at the release of the ipo the only way that spacex would be able to make money from those shares is either by declaring dividends that are payable to all shareholders in that share class or by speculating in the stock if musk intends to keep all of those dividends to himself then he and spacex would buy preferred shares and release only common shares to the general public here's the thing musk doesn't pay dividends ever tesla is supposed to be one of the biggest companies in the world by market cap but shareholders have never received one thin dime in dividends musk won't be able to pay out just one group of people unless he does a different series of shares where preferred shares will get paid out dividends while common shares will get paid nothing and again we'll use tesla as an example here the tesla shareholder agreement states quite clearly that tesla has never and will not be paying out dividends on their shares in the foreseeable future this also takes us back full circle to solar city solar city went public in december of 2012 with an ipo price of eight dollars raising 92 million dollars for the company to put towards purchasing the equipment that they were then leasing to their customers the hype surrounding this supposedly groundbreaking revolutionary new company drove the share price well over eighty dollars from the eight dollar ipo but from there the stock lost over 75 of its share price to close at 20.36 when tesla bailed musk and his cousins out on november 1st 2016 about four years later turned out those shares were still way overpriced as the company was insolvent at the time of acquisition on top of the 2.8 billion dollar purchase price tesla also had to take on three billion dollars in solar city debt this company that had been found over by the press for years promising the most efficient solar panels in the world was actually using cheap chinese components in their installation and they were losing money on every contract this is what will happen with starlink as well it is the same model and it will have the same result another hyped up musk fantasy you'd think that people would learn and one more thing about musk and the prospect of an ipo for starlink musk hates the sec hates them ridicules them taunts them he's been fined heavily by them for his past antics but he will have to deal with them on a whole new level if this ipo were to move forward he would have to kiss their ass and keep his mouth shut which as we all know are not his strong suits all things considered if starlink splinters from spacex and musk is forced to go that route it's pretty much going to be a last-ditch effort to bail him out again and this time investors would serve themselves well to stay clear of it as it goes down now if you're thinking this assessment is biased in any way ask yourself this can you name a single publicly traded company that siphons all of its profits and revenues back to the original private enterprise if you can leave that information in the comments with regards to the starlink system itself there are additional concerns we've already mentioned that these sealed units are not user serviceable or in fact serviceable at all even by professionals considering that according to the terms and conditions of the starleak agreement these dishes are being sold to you completely as is that should be a real red flag and caveat emptors should be waving you off from that purchase here are some of the other reasons why choosing starlink probably won't be a good fit for north americans one of the first things you need to realize is that the service is not suitable for people living in high density areas the satellites do not have the bandwidth required to handle that type of traffic and they will work best only for people who are well removed from the cities reports are common across social media now that single trees can cause you to lose your internet connection with starlink which is fair enough trees block signals but not everyone is going to want to clear cut their property around the house before they can netflix and chill and for that matter the tree that's blocking your signal might not even be on your property additional issues include reports that are now out indicating the system is unable to perform in conditions lower than minus 30 degrees celsius and above 40 degrees celsius in fahrenheit that's minus 22 to 104 as the internal temperature of the dish now the lower end of that scale will not affect most of the lower 48 but alaska and many parts of canada do get well below minus 30 degrees celsius during an average winter but the high end of that definitely creates a problem for the continental us something a beta tester in arizona found out the hard way when his dish overheated and it had to be hosed down by the owner who decided to build a canopy for the device to give it shade and save on his water bill temperatures across the southern u.s often go north of 40 degrees celsius southern california arizona new mexico texas they have no problem hitting that mark in a normal year so on the hottest days of the year you can expect to lose your starlink connection and in areas prone to electrical storms it would appear that customers who don't use professional third-party installers might be lining themselves up for another shock as dishes have already been hit and destroyed by lightning we'll wrap up this segment with a question when you have to buy another dish from starlink because the one that you had got buggered up is the company going to charge you the same 500 for the replacement system or are they going to charge you their full cost of it so that they don't lose another 1500 on you maybe somebody could ask musk that question on twitter to see what kind of response you get and then you can share it here so we can all get a good laugh if all the other aspects of this system weren't bad enough starlink satellites are posing an additional threat to the entire planet through their destruction of land-based astronomy over the past year there's been a steady stream of pictures show up online from amateur astronomers demonstrating how the starlink satellites in orbit are already making it difficult to do time-lapse photography that they require for hobbyist photos or skywatching perfect example here would be when people last year were trying to capture images of that once in a lifetime neo-wise comet but it's not just the amateurs are having difficulty with this the professional land-based observatories are having the same problems trains of starlink satellites sweeping through a time-lapse capture completely destroy the image but those images are not just to put up on somebody's facebook or instagram pages these images are studied and poured over to detect near-earth objects and to make things even more difficult the best time to detect these objects is during the twilight hours which happens to be when the starlink satellites are the most visible in the sky and of course the starlink constellation will only become more and more of a hindrance as its population in orbit increases but not to worry because elon musk has already told his followers that starlink won't affect ground-based astronomy at all way to ignore the indisputable evidence you jackass so after all the analysis all the digging article reading video watching and calculating here are the conclusions that anyone paying attention should come to regarding starlink first the starlink constellation adds no new product to the marketplace second according to one of the top latency measuring apps starlink is unlikely to provide a significant speed advantage to the existing products third the market for this product is pretty much restricted to the remote locations of north america europe and australia all of whom are already covered by other providers the rest of the world needs running water more than it needs satellite internet fourth the number of satellites being proposed by musk significantly accelerates the incident rate required to realize a full kessler syndrome annihilation of objects in orbit which at 550 kilometers leo could create a shroud of shrapnel around the earth that prevents any other spacecraft from being launched fifth this is not a trillion dollar industry that they're trying to tap into in fact it's not even projected to be a 10 billion dollar industry globally in the next five years sixth the constellation as is already jeopardizes ground-based astronomers ability to detect asteroids threatening to collide with earth and make other scientific discoveries and seventh musk promising an ipo issuance on a spun-off starlink will pretty much signal to the world that this model is yet another musk failure requiring bailout just wait until rocket jesus tells you this is a no-brainer and that's when everyone will know for sure thanks to all of you for tuning in to this first year anniversary episode of the common sense skeptic what a ride it's been watching this channel turn into a like-minded community and it's incredibly rewarding for all of us here we are going to be doing a special episode to commemorate our past year so keep an eye out for that your continued and growing support for what we do here amazes us every day and to our patrons through patreon thank you so much for your direct support of our channel we do have some big changes coming in the next few weeks and you are helping make those possible as always give the video a thumbs up share it with your friends spread it on social media and ring that notification bell so that you'll know when the common sense skeptic returns [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Common Sense Skeptic

Views: 534,988

Keywords: Musk, Shotwell, Starlink, Spacex, Scam, satellite, fire, lightning, IPO

Id: 2vuMzGhc1cg

Length: 43min 14sec (2594 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mazius]

Starlink was created for one and only one purpose - to create constant demand for SpaceX launches. Before Starlink (2017-2018) SpaceX was making 18-20 launches a year. Last year SpaceX completed 14 launches with Starlink sattelites, this year 15 launches of Starlink satellites already complete (and way more to come). And constellation has to be renewed every 5 years.

[u/Opcn]

This video breaks down the costs and benefits of starlink to show that it isn't really an effective system and why it's in the red right now and projected to stay in the red in perpetuity.

[u/DukeRukasu]

Lol, are the cultists brigading?

[u/Rage_Your_Dream]

I wonder how long it will take untill even the lowest intelligence people notice the pattern that has been repeating for over a decade now.

How long can you go making new scams untill people catch onto it?

[u/ThingsBlueLikes]

6:07 - They don't use Falcon Heavy because they're already filling the fairing with Falcon 9. There's no point in launching on Falcon Heavy.

6:30 - SpaceX doesn't need to launch 42,000 satellites to "get the job done". The filing for up to 30,000 additional satellites is for a second generation of the system. There are already enough satellites launched(although they haven't finished deploying) for full coverage between the ~60° latitude bands. Continuing with the 42,000 satellites figure throughout the video continually messes up cost figures.

6:44 - CSS quotes a contract price as the internal cost for a Falcon 9 launch. A launch of a reused booster was quoted as "substantially less than half" way back in 2017, with just one reflight. We now have boosters with up to 10 launches under their belts, $55 million is a terrible figure to use.

7:40 - CSS uses old data and questionable sources many times in this video. This source is a bad futurism copy of a Business Insider article that is based on Jonathan's tracking page. It's far too early (and a bit silly to include things like the v0.9 and earlier sats) to come up with a failure rate per year. Then extrapolating that to an annual upkeep figure for the full Gen 1 and Gen 2 constellations(see the problem with including Gen 2 in all calculations?) is not sound.

8:10 - There's no reason to include all of SpaceX's operation costs in its Starlink costs. Not every employee works on Starlink.

(this is getting too long, just two more)

11:10 - Comparing Starlink to other internet ISPs and calling it "merely another option" doesn't jive with anybody who has ever used one of the existing satellite ISPs. $150/month for 50GB at 14mbps(reduced to 1-3mbps after hitting 50GB usage) down, <3mbps up, 600+ ping? Starlink in its current form isn't "merely another option".

11:24 - CSS keeps using old data for this video, I wonder why? This is the source he uses to claim a max speed of 61 down, 10 up. Why not this link from the same source, a month further into the beta, showing up to 194/25? Why not results from this year? Also, why go into detail comparing Starlink capability to high speed cable/fiber, when that's not what it's competing against? They should have compared Starlink to existing Satellite offerings, but that wouldn't make Starlink look as bad as it does. Starlink isn't made for people like CSS, it's made for people like me. I pay over $100/mo for 25 down, 2 up, and that's not even satellite.

[u/ThingsBlueLikes]

Continuing from yesterday.

13:23 - It's incredibly disingenuous to compare Starlink's actual speed test results from before the public beta even began to the advertised speeds for HughesNet and Viasat. Here's a comparison from CSS's own source on Starlink's "max 61mbps speeds", comparing actual results between the three services, and it's not even a competition, and these results are from the first month of the public beta.

In my zip code, Viasat offers 12 Mbps download, capped at 45 GB, for $99/month for 3 months, increasing to $149/month. In Phoenix, you can get the same plan, but 30 Mbps down and a 100GB cap. Apparently the best you can get is 100 Mbps down for $200/month after the 3 month promo period. That $500 for Dishy doesn't seem so bad after a year, does it? None of this even accounts for ping, which is so much more of an issue than CSS makes it out to be, but that's another point.

So let's be honest, putting up a graphic showing that you can get Viasat for $30/month is ridiculously dishonest. Plugging in zip codes from around the country, I can't even find an available plan for less than $69.99/month after the 3 month promo period.

15:24 - Latency. CSS claims this only matters for gamers, which indicates to me that they've never used traditional satellite. 600-1000 ping doesn't just ruin gaming, it ruins video calls, and basic web browsing. It's incredibly frustrating to have to wait several seconds for every action you take online(The ping isn't just a one-time payment, there's that huge delay for every packet. Initial handshake, this packet of data, that packet of data. Check out videos of people recording their experience, and watch how long it takes for just a simple webpage to fully load. It's ridiculous. The first one I checked, it took 14 seconds for an Ookla speed test to start after clicking 'go'. Second video took 23 seconds.)

18:00 - Kessler Syndrome is a serious problem we need to avoid, but PBS Space Time has a much better video on it. Statements such as "at the end of it we could well be left with a field of debris surrounding the planet that prevents any launches to any orbital elevation" aren't really accurate. There's no realistic situation where Kessler Syndrome gets that bad, the worry isn't for passing through orbital elevations in a launch, it's worry for satellites spending years at a given altitude.

25:30 - Shotwell said the addressable market for global broadband is about $1 trillion, not the addressable market for satellite internet.

​

But the addressable market for global broadband is $1 trillion. If you
want to help fund long term Mars development programs, you want to go
into markets and sectors that are much bigger than the one you're in

29:00 - Why would CSS divide the FCC subsidies by service locations? That's not how Starlink works. They don't install dishes in every cell, they launch the satellites that provide service to their entire orbital path. "Adding" an extra service area wouldn't actually cost anything extra for SpaceX.

Yes, if SpaceX were measured now, during their beta, they wouldn't meet the RDOF requirements. However, the RDOF requires Starlink to deliver their 100 Mbps speeds within 8 years. It hasn't even been 1 year. The service is still in beta, and the first orbital shell isn't fully online yet. It's extremely premature to make an issue out of this, let alone make statements like "Meaning that Starlink won't qualify for the RDOF subsidy because they will not hit the benchmark."

31:18 - CSS again just grabs some eye-catching quote or headline without understanding it. Here is the actual sequence(15:27-ish). "What's the total amount of investment before Starlink becomes positive cashflow... I think probably before we go to fully positive cashflow... it will be at least 5 billion dollars, and maybe as much as 10." The 30 billion figure is his estimate for all-time investment, to keep up competitiveness over time. CSS takes this and spins it to say "Starlink is already flirting with bankruptcy and that he needs another 30 billion dollars to get Starlink up and running... and that he needs it quickly to avoid going under."

It should be very, very clear, that this is not healthy skepticism. These are not careful, well-thought-out arguments. This is, frankly, garbage.

Oh, another note is that Musk said in that same speech(and if CSS is going to accept Musk's word in this speech about total investment costs, he should accept Musk's word in this same speech about manufacturing costs) that the dish is down to $1000 per unit.