With 500k orders, and X?% of those fulfilled. (Is x100k? 300k?)
A facility that cranks terminals out at 1M/y effectively grows the business by $1B/y, each year. (Assuming supply constrained business which I assume Starlink will be for a long while).
my lingering question is- do we know if there is any part that disproportionately constrains build speed? (For example - In Tesla it is battery cells). Is there any part that requires massive COGS innovation? Because if there isn’t a gatekeeper part or manufacturing process or material, 1 million per year could be trivial. Lots of complex electronics get cranked out at rates of 1M/year.
maybe this is not a ceiling.
You also mention capacity “all the system can handle”-
And to increase demand (consumer) by growing capacity , all they need is to crank out ground stations and meshable birds.
For regulatory reasons, lawful intercept, etc
and assuming huawei doesn’t lobby starlink out of Africa and South Asialet’s assume same country (people in country x are only served by ground stations in country x). (Big assumptions: each station can scale bandwidth indefinitely and add antennas while amortizing site and regulatory work.) many countries will be fine with 2 stations. Some will need 4. With 10 stations you can cover all but the biggest, most complicated countries like USA, Canada, Australia, etc. (Check our Chile with horrible topology for overland ISP but full coverage with <10 starlink GSs).
If you are the ground station manager you may be looking at 1000 stations and 200ish country contracts to call your job done globally before taking a weekend off and moving on to Mars and moon first thing Monday. At a conservative $5M each, with 5B investment you are set up to grow your TAM to “locations on earth that can pay for internet for use or resale and can install a medium sized device”
tldr: is there a key part of the terminals that would constrain manufacturing to <2M/y?
will they ever be bandwidth-supply constrained?
If the answer is no to both of these,wow