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SpaceX financial strength and success is as critical as a working Super Heavy Starship. There is a lot of valid and competent talk about the technical milestones on the critical path to meeting Musk goals for Mars. SpaceX will need to get to about $200 billion per year in profits to sustain spending $40-50 billion per year. SpaceX and Elon need to make $5-8+ trillion to spend $1-2 Trillion for the Mars City Program. NASA and others cannot be counted on for more than $100-200 billion maximum. NASA and the US could step up to $500 billion but this is not likely or reliable funds.
A simpler rounded metric is Elon needs to have $10 trillion so he can safely spend $3 trillion for a Mars City Program. The extra trillions are for the inevitable surprises and difficulties.
SpaceX has launched over 7000 Starlink satellites and there are 6317 working Starlink satellites. We will review SpaceX launch success and increasing commercial success so that it can be understood how this will translate to success for the Mars goals.
What Must Be Done for a Mars City?
SpaceX must bring the costs for Starship and bringing each person to Mars down from $10 billion per person to go to Mars down to $500,000 per person or less. If this was all in costs then one million people would be $500 billion. However, I think the $500,000 per person is just one way transportation costs. There is multiple cargo trips and other aspects of a sustained program. Ideally, there needs to be revenue and financial value generated on Mars for financial viability and long term (centuries) of sustainability.
In the top picture, the key words are one million person city and sustainable. It is not climate sustainability but financial and technological sustainability for centuries.
SpaceX must be able to create and pay for a fleet one thousand Super Heavy Starships to send to Mars every two years.
If the Raptor engines each cost $250,000 then each Super Heavy Starship will have $10 million in engines. If the total Starship rocket cost is double the cost of the engines then one thousand Starships will cost $20 billion every two years. The supplies and equipment would be double that so $40 billion per two year mission and send the full Mars city fleet ever two years.
There should be an allowance that costs are higher. $80 billion per two year mission for a sustained 20 to 40 years.
SpaceX will need to get to about $200 billion per year in profits to sustain spending $40 billion per year. This will be 20,000 Raptor engines per year.
NASA from 1975-2023 only had inflation adjusted budgets in the $15-25 billion range and there was a maximum of about $4 billion per year for things like ISS or Space Shuttle. SpaceX cannot depend upon the US, NASA or any other country to fund the vast majority of the $80 billion per two years.
The situation where the cost of Starship is not $20 million each but $40 million each adds $10 billion per year for the cost of 1000 every two years This would mean $100 billion per two years or $50 billion per year.
Each eventual manned Starship will need to take an average of about 40 to 100 astronaut Mars colonists.
Bringing 1.5 million tons to orbit means about 6 orbital launches per Mars vehicle. This would mean five refueling tanker missions for each Mars Vehicle.
SpaceX wants to launch about 10 times per day for two years ahead of the fleet departure every two years.
Every day about two Mars Starships would get fueled up and then wait for the departure. In one year, there would be 500 Mars Starships in orbit.
The ships will need to be able to prevent fuel loss while waiting in orbit. There is a lot of flight operations and technology.
Angry Astronaut talks about possibly missing the timeline for making two Super Heavy Starships and getting then refueled in orbit to send to Mars. This is like the talk about Waymo (Google self driving car company) getting to free robotaxi rides without a driver in 2020 and the first paid rides in 2021. Waymo loses $2 billion per year while Tesla is profitable and despite spending $3-8 billion per year on AI car hardware and software. Waymo and other robotaxi companies are not planning to go for Uber scale. Uber has 7 million drivers who have brought their own cars into the Uber fleet. Waymo has about 500 robotaxi vehicles and offers 50000 rides per week Tesla will have made its 7 millionth electric car. An FSD software upgrade will enable Tesla to scale to 10,000 times the size of Waymo and get instantly to the size of Uber.
Timeline slippage on the first Starships to Mars is regrettable but is not a major impact on the 40,000 Starships that need to be sent. Elon’s main goal is not an Apollo program with six moon landings. It is not Lief Erickson making one trip to North America. He does not want to just land on Mars once or six times. It is colonization.
The first Virginia settlers came on 3 ships in 1607.
The Mayflower that brought the Pilgrims was a single 180-ton ship in 1620.
As colonization increased, more ships were involved:
By 1676, 730 ships had been built in Massachusetts alone for colonial trade and transport.
Hundreds more ships had been built in other New England colonies by that time.
The ships used for colonization were generally small by modern standards:
Early ships ranged from 20 to 400 tons.
The Mayflower was 180 tons with a 90-foot length.
The America’s is on the same planet as Europe. The water and farming was the same.
As of 5 September 2024:
Satellites launched: 7,001
Satellites failed or deorbited: 663
Satellites in orbit: 6,376
Satellites working: 6,317
Satellites operational: 5,770
SpaceX’s Starlink is being used by:
• Over 2.5% of all homes in Australia
• Over 10% of all households in Alaska
• 400,000 users in Canada
• 150,000 users in Mexico
• 1.4 million people in the U.S.
• On contract to connect more than 1,000 aircraft all around the world, including commercial airlines
• And many more people around the world
In June, 2024, Comcast has signed a first of its kind deal with @SpaceX’s Starlink to provide satellite-based connectivity to business customers in regions with limited network access, they announced today. Comcast has 2.5M business customers for broadband in U.S. Starlink provides annual business service for $1740/year, $3000/year and $6000/year.
SpaceX Starlink should have nearly 4 million customers already. They passed 3 million in May. SpaceX at 9 million regular residential customers and 2 million premium customers (Starshield and business) with an average of $3k/year would be about $15-20 billion of annual revenue. This can happen by later in 2025. SpaceX launch contracts and work are about $3-5 billion/year. SpaceX at $20-25 billion per year in revenue is about $10-15 billion per year in profit.
This would mean about half of NASA’s budget in SpaceX profits.
SpaceX getting to 40 million Starlink customers by the end of 2026 would mean about $80 billion/year in revenue and $60 billion/year in profit. This would over double the budget of NASA and can start getting to $20 billion per year needed to get close to SpaceX Mars program at full $40-50 billion per year runrate.
Multiples of NASA budget in sustainable and growing profits is needed for SpaceX to support a Mars City program.
NASA’s budget in inflation adjusted dollars has been $15-25 billion from 1975 to today. SpaceX would always have to split the NASA money with other companies and 80% of NASA budget goes to non-project based costs.
Starlink is connecting more than 3M people with high-speed internet across nearly 100 countries, territories and many other markets.
Thank you to all of our customers around the world! 🛰️🌎❤️ → https://t.co/D6L8BSisQq pic.twitter.com/yo6f2gtJCJ
— Starlink (@Starlink) May 20, 2024
SpaceX Starlink operational execution and Falcon 9 and later Starship flight operations is primarily dependent upon SpaceX COO Gwynn Shotwell and 20-60 hours per week of Elon Musk’s time. Elon Musk is engaged in making the Starship Super Heavy fully and rapidly reusable.
There are hundreds of Starlink satellites that are already able to directly communicate to unmodified cell phones. Soon all new Starlinks satellites will have the capability to directly communicate with cellphones. This will soon enable T Mobile and other cellphone partners (Rogers in Canada) etc… to reduce reliance on remote cell towers in rural areas.
There are now over 60 Starshield satellites for military and high government security communications. Starshield will eventually be used for highly secure financial communication.
SpaceX sells and provides the high bandwidth services (100mbps or more) and will be offering the cell service. they also can offer services at far higher rates for cruise ships, airplanes, civilian and military. the laser communication between satellites is useful for backhaul – commercial movement of large amounts of data for internet etc… they must be replaced every 5 years (fuel in the satellite to maintain orbit). But each new version would have upgraded tech and more bandwidth.
As they pass $10 billion per year in revenue as they are doing now then the margins on returns will head up towards 80-90% margin. $100 billion per year in revenue will have about $20 billion per year in costs. They can eventually displace/replace about 30% of all high speed (fiber, cable modem) and cellular communication and enable new communication services that existing systems cannot.
Certain physics. Sending a laser link through vacuum is 2.5 times faster than laser through fiber. Any communication over 3000 miles will have less latency (ping to first data). Needed for high rate automated financial trading. $150 million/year paid for microwave communication between New York and Chicago. Linking all financial city pairs (London/NY, Singapore/LA etc…) will be its own market. the current limit to SpaceX increasing revenue is building distributing and selling more satellite dishes and soon getting texting, low speed internet and voice calls anywhere in the world with no dead zones.
100,000 to 1 million satellites will support global direct to cellphone 2G service everywhere (arctic, deserts, woods etc…) and a billion high speed satellite service customers. 90% of everything launched into space (including by China) is SpaceX. this is with Falcon 9. With fully rapidly reusalbe Starship it will head to 99% and then 99.9%. Tesla can mass produce 2M cars per year and is headed to 20M cars per year. SpaceX needs to Mass produce 100K satellites per year ($250k each) and 20M/year (dishes at $300 each). Can go to 1M satellites per year and 200M dishes per year).
If SpaceX makes anywhere phones or smartwatches. they can provide 2G comms for everyone in Africa and Asia who have no infrastructure now and they can provide that to everyone who want a remote office -always connected staff or devices.
What are the Economics for Starlink Satellites versus Cell Towers
There are about 5 million cell towers in the world.
The cost of a Starlink satellite is about $250,000.
