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SpaceX Raising $500 Million To Help Build Its 'Starlink' Satellite Broadband Network (cnbc.com)
According to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is raising a $500 million round of fundraising to help build its massive satellite internet project, called Starlink. "The new funding puts SpaceX's valuation at $30.5 billion," reports CNBC. "The report says the capital comes from existing shareholders as well as new investor Baillie Gifford, a Scottish investment firm." From the report: Starlink -- a name SpaceX filed to trademark last year -- is an ambition unmatched by any current satellite network. The company is attempting to build its own constellation of 4,425 broadband satellites, with another 7,518 satellites to come after. SpaceX will begin launching the constellation in 2019. The system will be operational once at least 800 satellites are deployed. Starlink would offer broadband speeds comparable to fiber optic networks.The satellites would provide direct-to-consumer wireless connections, rather the present system's redistribution of signals, transforming a traditionally high-cost, low reliability service.
Thanks for the update. Let us know more when you learn more about it.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Hollywood mogul Ron Howard was found dead in his Pacific Heights home this morning. There weren't any more details.
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work as "Opie" on the "Andy Griffeth Show" , there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon
No Rei?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It was actually only $250 million (demand is softer than my cock when I see lena dunham doing the goatse). And they'll spend it propping up TSLA and The Boring Company.
IMHO, USA cost of broadband is from monopoly, and they'd simply drop the price to just below the cost. You cannot reliably deliver broadband by satellite, since television is no longer delivered by satellite primarily. This is wishful marketing at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
"Teledesic was a company founded in the 1990s to build a commercial broadband satellite constellation for Internet services. Using low-Earth-orbiting satellites small antennas could be used to provide uplinks of as much as 100 Mbit/s and downlinks of up to 720 Mbit/s. The original 1994 proposal was extremely ambitious, costing over 9 billion USD and originally planning 840 active satellites with in-orbit spares at an altitude of 700 km.[1] In 1997, the plan was scaled back to 288 active satellites at 1400 km.[2]"
"The commercial failure of the similar Iridium and Globalstar ventures (composed of 66 and 48 operational satellites respectively) and other systems, along with bankruptcy protection filings, were primary factors in halting the project, and Teledesic officially suspended its satellite construction work on October 1, 2002.[3] "
That SpaceX has Tesla shackled around it's neck. Their rocket technology is awesome but I don't think they will make it for that much longer.
Corporatism != Free Market
Great news everyone!
You can now preorder satellite internet that will totally be 100GB symmetric with a ping speed that exceeds the speed of light thanks to AI blockchain autopilot for 3,000 USD right now. You know all those routing problems when there's more than a couple dozen entries in the route table? No worries, thanks to machine learning in Elon Musk's hair plugs, over one hundred million links between thousands of nodes changing every 90 seconds wont be a problem at all.
Only a pedophile wouldn't take up this amazing offer.
Does anyone know what the latency of this network would be? That was one of the big problems with the old HughesNet (and similar). If the satellites are low enough orbit then it could be acceptable.
Elon Musk was so frustrated with high broadband prices!
Despite all the negative publicity surrounding Elon, Tesla, et al, the South African continues to have no trouble attracting capital for new ventures.
We could do much worse betting on a vanguard, since so few seem hellbent on guiding us to a better future outcome.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So its valuation earlier this year was externally estimated to be $26 billion and just two months ago was self-reported at 27.5 billion, and securing an additional half billion in funding suddenly pops it to $30.5?
Ali G would be jealous.
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Bound to be a HIT!
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I wonder if there is a chance that the much hyped 5G rollout coming to a light-pole near you has an Achilles Heel of sorts. Probably makes no sense (antenna or power issue for instance). But fun to think about.
Except for the horrendous lag youâ(TM)re going to get out of one of these systems.
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[visiting Dr. covfefe.....]
patient: Hey doc, I don't feel right. Maybe something has changed.
covfefe: Let me look at you.... organs in body, teeth in head, shoes on feet. Just like last year. Let me know when that changes.
The infrastructure ( boosters, satellites, up/down links, and the bundles of integration are not the problem ). And the economics of doing all these things can be aggressively improved. But the big brick wall every technology company has hit like a bug on a windshield with any sort of orbital communications is the regulatory environment. International agreements that favor incumbents, frequency allocations, and almost every company has a pet telecom owned by the government ( or wealthy family proxies ), and other political strangle holds. This political complexity is part of what hampered the original Iridium deployment.
And builds tunnels under LA at a slower rate and at a higher cost than competent tunneling companies.
Not sure about speed but the Boring Company just had a presentation - the 1.3 mile tunnel under LA (one of the trickier drilling locations because of soil and regulatory issues) cost about 10 million to complete, vs.2 miles of NYC subway costing $3 BILLION dollars, and 2.5 miles of LA subway expansion costing $2 BILLION dollars.
Going back to speed, the stated speed goal for the Boring Company machines is to be "faster than a snail", where traditional tunneling is 14x slower than a snail... so if they're not faster already, they will be soon now that they have fine tuned the drilling machines. The same way they fine-tuned rockets and "suddenly" started landing rockets regularly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
launching thousands of new satellites to join the massive quantities of active satellites, dead satellites, screws, bits of paint, rocket bodies, bits of metal, radioactive coolant and the innumerable other bits of junk flying around up there? At what point do all of the useful orbits around Earth become so junked up that any new satellite is quickly reduced to junk itself?
Teledesic? is that you again?
...but for sure the shadow produced by all these satellites will solve the global warming problem!
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You do realize that Solar City/Tesla/Boring Company/SpaceX is all the same thing, right? It is just a shell game and the different companies just shuffle money from one account to another.
I'm sure you want to believe that but it's quite simply not true and demonstrably so. Solar City and Tesla are one organization under the Tesla aegis. Boring Company and SpaceX are independent. They share Elon Musk with Tesla and that's close to all they share. The finances of SpaceX have no meaningful relationship to Tesla and vice-versa. If you have evidence to the contrary please provide it.
1) Paved streets. Asphalt. Street lights, painted lines. Nope.
Look a little closer. The chemistry of the pavement has improved. The street lights use LEDs. The paint has improved chemistry too and sometimes isn't paint at all.
2) Houses. Wood, plastic, foam, glass, bricks, mortar, aluminum, copper.... Nope.
You seriously think there hasn't been any improvement in building materials or technology?
3) Cars. Rubber wheels, chemical fuels, pistons. Some electric cars. They had those in 1925. Nope.
Umm, yeah, the state of the art in cars clearly hasn't advanced at all since the Model T. [/sarcasm]
4) People. They wear shoes. Clothes. Nope.
What are those clothes and shoes made of? How are they made? Do they look the same? Do they cost the same? Were you buried under a rock somewhere?
5) Airplanes in the sky. They had those in 1975. They even had supersonic passenger jets in 1975. Not anymore... Oops.
I think it's pretty clear by now you are an idiot if you think that aviation hasn't seen any technology improvements in the last 45 years. We stopped using supersonic passenger jets because they weren't economical to operate, not because we can't make a better one today.
6) Grocery stores contain food. Nope.
They contain more food, of generally better quality, for less money (inflation adjusted), and far greater variety. About half the fruit and veggies on the shelves in my tiny town literally could not be purchased for any amount of money in the 1970s and much of what could be bought was only available seasonaly.
Let me know when that changes anything to 1-6.
Ok, literally everything in 1-6 has changed in the last 30 years. Got any other clueless snark to add to the conversation?
Starlink?
Someone call Ted Nelson, Xanadu has been re-branded.
End of Line.
I wonder what all the despots will have to say about internet that touches nothing they own? I bet they threaten to shoot them down, space treaty or not.