SpaceX Lapping The Field In Satellite Production

Elon Musk is quite an individual. There is really no middle of the road when it comes to how people feel about this guy. One either loves what the guy is doing or feels he is a total scammer. Few have a "meh" opinion of him.

That said, it is getting hard to ignore his mounting successes. While he does get way too aggressive in his timelines, he does eventually come through.

Tesla is what Musk gets most of the attention. However, his SpaceX company might end up having a bigger impact on humanity and be magnitudes larger than Tesla.

At this point, one of the main focuses is to get the Starlink project up and going. This is an eventual constellation of tens of thousands of satellites that will blanket the planet with Internet coverage. It is seriously going to disrupt the present Internet Service Providers.

Musk is far from the only player in this field. OneWeb which include the likes of Richard Branson and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos project, are also vying to provide similar service.

The challenge for these other companies is that Musk and SpaceX are lapping the field. They are banging out satellites at a pace which exceeds the present competitors.

According to one SpaceX executive, it is an order of magnitude faster than the next competitor.

An executive says that SpaceX’s Seattle-based Starlink factory is building satellites up to four times faster than OneWeb, the company’s closest competitor in the new low Earth orbit (LEO) internet space race.

The company already boasts the largest satellite constellation which will likely be around 350 by the end of the week after their next launch.

What is so interesting is the present pace of production. They are producing 6 satellites per day which means, excluding their own system, they are producing a constellation each month larger than any that is out there.

In addition to faster production, SpaceX is also destroying OneWeb in a number of different ways. Learning from Tesla, Musk has set up SpaceX with a great deal of vertical integration. This is producing the company with many advantages in the Starlink system.

Compared to OneWeb, SpaceX Starlink satellites thus weigh 75% more, offer at least 50% more bandwidth for internet services, can be manufactured for less than half the cost in a quarter of the time, and likely cost – per satellite – at least three times less to launch. These are the fundamental, unavoidable benefits of SpaceX’s preferred strategy of vertical integration writ large. End-product quality and functionality held equal, it’s numerically impossible for a more traditional company like OneWeb to compete head-to-head with a vertically-integrated competitor like SpaceX. (Bold mine)

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-production-faster-than-competitors/

So the satellites are bigger, provide 50% more bandwidth, built in a quarter of the time for half the cost, and cost 1/3 to lauch? How is a traditional satellite company going to compete with that?

At the end of the day, Musk is already leading this race and, it appears, his lead is only increasing with every launch.

The only remaining questions are when will the new Internet service be available to the world and what is the cost?

With SpaceX going at such a pace, it is likely we will see this by the end of 2021.

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Posted via Steemleo