Spacex in talks to become part of the UK project Gigabit

[Suff]

To bring high speed Internet to rural communities in the UK.

Teslarati have the article.

Essentially the Starlink network, currently in beta in the UK, is bidding to connect to the UK's network for Rural Internet and to provide services in the UK.

Starlink is different from traditional satellite internet as the satellites can actually be closer than major land based Internet access points and, as such, have the same latency.

Latency is a word we use to describe how long it takes for your data to get to the other end and come back again. That is overly technical for something we see every day. Think of a correspondent in the news, the presenter asks a question, the correspondent looks blank for up to one and a half seconds, then responds. That is latency.

Being able to access starlink with normal land-line latency from anywhere in the UK at the same speed as anyone in the UK is a major plus for project Gigabit.

Spacex, currently, only gives speed of between 40mbits and 100 mbits. But then the phase 1 roll out of Starlink is expected to have 12,000 satellites and there are currently less than 1,000 active starlink satellites up there.

The final build out of Starlink expects some 36,000 satellites. So an investment in Starlink has headroom to grow.

It has been a long time coming but things are going to change radically.

The US Air force is also testing Starlink access on their planes so, theoretically, it could go with you on holiday, although probably only in country as different countries have different rules. Of course that is legally, it should still work but Spacex would know you broke the rules.

Interesting times.

[Workingman]

36,000 satellites! That's a lot of hardware floating about.

Of course OneWeb, which is 45% owned by us people of the UK, is doing much the same thing with 7,000 satellites in low earth orbit My personal opinion is that we, the UK, should be using our own assets before looking elsewhere. Isn't that what we voted for?

Also is £5,000 a throw to give people Gigabit speeds worth it? They might WANT it but how many of them NEED it?

[Suff]

Of course it is WM. So OneWeb should ditch their launch contracts with companies than have a launch cadence of 8 or 10 a year and sign one with SpaceX who are both cheaper and have a launch cadence heading for the 20's of launches a year.

As for £5,000 per user, that's the entire program.

OneWeb, at the current launch cadence, is going to have 648 satellites up by 2022, using a monthly launch cadence of 36 satellites per month.

SpaceX puts up 60 satellites per launch and is targetting a launch cadence of 2 launches per month. Giving 1,440 per year. However SpaxeX find it difficult to keep up the fortnightly cadence. Even with their re-usable launchers and cheap launches, the weather, sometimes, just doesn't cooperate.

I was wrong about SpaceX, they now have over 1,000 active satellites up there. By the time OneWeb hits 600 satellites, SpaceX will have over 2,000.

Then there is Starship, SpaxeX will have that operational for non human launches some time between now and the end of 2023. At which point SpaceX will be able to put up between 300 and 450 satellites in one launch and Starship is designed for multiple launches per day. Hence talking to SpaceX.

To be clear, SpaceX doesn't need this alliance to work. But if the UK is putting in base stations which, working with Starlink, bring this access to the rural areas years earlier and makes Starlink a better experience for the users. Why Not?

So, whilst I would love to see OneWeb getting our satellites up there and providing us with a service, unless they partner with SpaceX, who they are in direct competition with, they don't have a snowballs chance in hell of competing with Starlink.

At that point, it behoves the UK government to make sensible steps with the rural internet initiatives. Or we'll just be flushing more money down the toilet to make a point.

[Workingman]

Yeah, we all know, St Elon's projects are brill and everyone else's are crap. We get it.

But we don't all buy in to the hype, yet some fools do.

[Suff]

Let me see.

Create a private space company.
Engineer the impossible and create self landing re-usable boosters
Cut the cost of launches to the point where nobody else can compete
Be the first private company to put people in space and, in the process, also return human spaceflight to NASA
Take a design the Russians thought could never be delivered, as they failed and create the raptor engine for the Starship
Do a rapid iteration build which is delivering re-usable spaceflight in the SLS/Apollo category
Then there is Starlink. The impossible internet which is as fast as land based internet, or possibly faster in a few years.

I mean. His projects are crap.

Then there is Tesla. The only start up US car manufacturer to make it to global production in 100 years. In the impossible arena of Electric vehicles. On the way literally creating half the technologies needed to make this work. Including whole new alloys so he can die cast the back and front of his newer vehicles.

And, of course, there is the sidenote in history. PayPal.

Well, I know; he's crap and we all know it.

You don't need to like people who are this successful. In fact it is more likely than not that you won't like this kind of person because they do these things because they are driven in a very specific way which most people are not. It tends to make them acerbic and abrasive and extremely difficult to live with. But those who have ridden it out have mostly become millionaires on the back of his companies.

[Workingman]

Nobody said his projects are crap, except you, we just all don't buy into the St Elon hype as you do.

Some of us are not at all happy with his trashing of fragile environments to source the raw materials for his "eco" friendly Tonka Toys. Are we wrong to be apprehensive?

He is, without doubt, one of the world's innovation drivers, probably the best, atm, and for that I do give him credit, but let us not forget that he is also a user of poorer people and a destroyer of their environments at the same time, as are most capitalists.

He is certainly not my hero and never will be.

[Suff]

Not my hero either. But certainly a mover and a shaker.

Until very recently Tesla ignored many sources of Lithium and Cobalt due to concerns about the way they were mined. But the pressure became too great to deliver and something had to give.

That being said Tesla is nearly cobalt free on their batteries unlike VW who are miles away.

As with all things time will tell. In the end he will go to Mars and take both money and drive with him.

[Workingman]

In the end he will go to Mars and take both money and drive with him.

And that will be the end of him....except he wont go. He'll send some 'believers' to do it for him and then sit back in comfort in his Earthly pad and watch them suffer the cosmic rays, the extremes in day to night temperatures, the almost non-existent atmosphere, and promise them he will terraform the planet and make it liveable for all humans in X years. He'll even have gravity machines so that it's just like on Earth....in the meantime they can suck at St Elon's money trees from his plentiful orchard here on Earth - book your flight now! Bless.

[Suff]

I have found that people who criticise Elon (and I was one), don't actually know very much about him.

I took the time to learn about him and there are two things which stick out.

1. He almost always does what he says he's going to do.
2. He spares very little effort or focus on not doing what he says

Musk and SpaceX created Starlink for one reason and one reason only. SpaceX which stands for Space Exploration, not Exploitation, are determined to send a minimum of 1,000 starship rockets to Mars.

That will cost tens or hundreds of billions. They looked at probable sources of that income and decided the Satellite business was the way to go.

It takes companies years (sometimes a decade), to build satellites for space. SpaceX churns then out in months and has proven they work.

Musk is on record as saying that the first settlers on Mars will probably die quickly but that they will pace the way for others to stay and live.

It does not stop people signing up to go.

Starship is designed to land on Mars and take off again. The requirement for a settlement.

If you take the blinkers off that Musk is a charlatan, SpaceX is doing everything needed to colonise Mars. Without government grants for Mars. Yes they will take space station supply contracts and Artemis money for the moon. But SpaceX is going to Mars and everything they do today is simply one step on the ladder.

If you want to know how far people get betting against Musk, just ask the Tesla shorts. They lost $31bn in 2020 and have lost another $12bn in 2021 already.

When things need focus, Musk works 20/7 to get them going and brings the team with him. He is both design engineer and CEO for Tesla and SpaceX.

You don't have to like the man to recognise who he is.

Take a look at his wiki page.

He is the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor,[b] CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI. A centibillionaire, Musk is one of the richest people in the world

[Workingman]

I find that people who don't like St Elon, I am one, are not interested in learning anything about him, but thanks for trying.