Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

SpaceX Internet Satellite Network: Starlink

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Q: manufacturing capacity of terminals . I have not reviewed all 80 pages of this thread, but was wondering if anyone has done some analysis of the terminal / antenna manufacturing velocity and ramp.

back of napkin, and sticking to consumer market of space intertubes, And direct delivery (not via MNOs or aggregators)
To get to. $1B/y revenue for consumer internet, Starlink will need to have ~833k customers. To get there within one year, it has to sustain 16k antennas manufactured and delivered per week. Let’s say the TAM is 10M consumers, at that rate they are taking 10 y to get there.

thoughts? Data?

Wow. That does put things into perspective. No wonder they aren't in a rush to get out of beta. Need to get their high volume manufacturing sorted out.

Starlink was always an odd duck for SpaceX. Don't get me wrong, it absolutely is the right idea. But the company had zero expertise doing this level of high volume consumer manufacturing.

In Sandy Munro's recent podcast (well worth watching in its entirety:
), he gets frustrated about companies run by MBAs. He said that the concept of a company's "core competency" should be taken out and shot. His point is that innovation should drive the company to where ever it takes it. If it makes business sense to add on high volume consumer manufacturing where none existed before, then do it.

The business case for Starlink was straightforward. SpaceX revenues are going to fall off a cliff since the launch market is lumpy and there aren't enough big projects being considered. So let's create a new product that will use lots of launches. This works since our launches are so cheap compared to everyone else, that we have a built in competitive advantage (a big one) over any competitor. The fact that this would cause SpaceX to get into high volume manufacturing, decidedly not a core competency of SpaceX probably didn't even register in Elon's mind as a problem. Which is as it should be. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
 
. The fact that this would cause SpaceX to get into high volume manufacturing, decidedly not a core competency of SpaceX probably didn't even register in Elon's mind as a problem. Which is as it should be. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
I think they fully get this- “machine that builds the machine” etc.
- maybe this is the roadster of antennas, and we are yet to see the model s / 3.
- 1M/y seems like a lot, but maybe it is not what would be the quantity constrained part?
 
- maybe this is the roadster of antennas, and we are yet to see the model s / 3.

That's probably a good analogy.

The main issue is simply the technology--they're surely pushing the envelope of space silicon for the sats and the envelope of terrestrial silicon for the UTs (smaller nanometers, lower power, higher number of beams able to be formed, etc), and by far the biggest cost of the UT is going to be the array chip. The rest of the UT is pretty consumer electronics level stuff...mostly standard PCB components, power supply, and housing.

I actually think a smaller/less powerful terminal is going to be the bees'. So maybe what we're looking at now is the S--it can do mad transfer rates at pretty low elevations. I realize statements have been made to the contrary (about going smaller for fixed terminals), but a smaller terminal will be able to still achieve mad rates, just at higher elevation angles (kinda like how the 3 does The Job for many Tesla owners, even though its not quite as fast, doesn't have quite the range, and isn't quite as comfortable as the S). With a gazillion satellites overhead the user doesn't need to push the lower limits of look angle. That smaller terminal's BOM will require fewer chips and/or less advanced silicon, and that's Pareto 101.
 
Also, their current rate of production matches their current launch capacity.
Things that will change that equation:
  • West coast (polar) launches starting this summer
  • Faster turnaround times for Falcon 9
  • Starship
Their current production facility can probably handle the first two.
 
Also, their current rate of production matches their current launch capacity.
Things that will change that equation:
  • West coast (polar) launches starting this summer
  • Faster turnaround times for Falcon 9
  • Starship
Their current production facility can probably handle the first two.
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 🤯
 
is there a key part of the terminals that would constrain manufacturing to <2M/y?

Steady state, its hard to imagine ElonCo designing a terrestrial 'basic' electronics gizmo with a supply chan/components that materially challenge practical demand.

Ramping up, its possible (= this is speculation) that there's an evolutionary roadmap of core processors that is still underway (as its fair to assume they're pushing the limits of at least the beam former) which may be cause for Starlink purposely limiting production.

will they ever be bandwidth-supply constrained?

In the context of service, yes. It all comes down to PFD on the ground. The spectrum is both regulated in max power by the FCC and ITU and is often shared across service providers, occasionally across those providing competing services.

There are a number of levers to pull which all have practical upper bounds (beam geometry, waveforms, spectrum channelization, etc.), but that PFD limit on the user forward link is what is really going to always bound service to any particular geographical group of end users and, ultimately, the practical upper bound of users within that geographical group. Of course that has nothing to do with the UTs, but it is still the ultimate bounding element.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: EchoDelta
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 🤯

Right. I remember when Google made a $1B investment into SpaceX and it was specifically on the strength of the early projections of Starlink (this goes back to when Starlink was only a white board concept). I'm sure it is looking even better now.
 
To scale Starlink, how many base station terminals need to be deployed for each hundred or thousand user terminals? From a manufacturing standpoint, how similar are the base station terminals to the user terminals?

The gateway antennas are completely different than the UTs. The gateway antennas, because of the massive amount of data transfer required over a wide range of elevations, they are 'regular' parabolic dishes...I think 1m diameter (but maybe a little bit less?). Those antennas can only track one satellite at a time as it goes from ~west to ~east (not counting the polar sats), and then the antenna has to fast-slew reset to catch its next satellite as it comes up over the ~western horizon. Somewhat related, there are 2 steerable gateway antennas on each sat, which is mostly so the sat can stay in constant contact with the ground over high value regions like the US (as opposed to send traffic to two different gateways)--one dish is locked on the active gateway antenna and the other dish is positioning for the next gateway antenna before ether current link is broken (in other words, 'make before break').

The UTs are an electronically steered flat array, which is really just a bunch of radiating antenna elements on a circuit board (like, hundreds--maybe close to 1000? I don't recall), with a processor that manipulates gain and other things for each individual element such that there's an aggregate "antenna beam" that at the most basic level is more or less what you might expect from a regular parabolic dish. This allows the UT to form a beam that can track a satellite across the sky without requiring physical steering the antenna (like you need to do with a dish) and it ALSO allows the UT to track multiple satellites across the sky, which is useful for capacity balancing as well as system robustness.

The number of gateway antennas required is an interesting thought experiment. For the 4000 satellite constellation There's probably going to be ~200-300 sites around the world, probably uniformly-ish distributed, each with some or many antennas (maybe 2-8?). While the ISL network theoretically allows global traffic to be equally split amongst all of those links, a more practical distribution will have more antennas in higher density/traffic/value regions, with the bounding case being the US, where the infrastructure will be close to imitating total service, and so there will likely be more gateway antennas on the ground than satellites overhead. Conversely very low traffic regions will have a smaller number of gateway antennas (even with potentially a similar density of gateway sites), pretty much just what's required for redundancy, since the user demand won't push the ground or space infrastructure.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: EVCollies
Are the uplink frequencies in such different bands that the RF circuitry would not be common between gateways and UTs as well?

Yes there's some spectrum overlap, but the very different antenna configurations and very different traffic profiles between the feeder links and user links mean there's not a ton of technology overlap.

That full sized pickup does indeed have four wheels and four doors just like your Tesla and drives on the same roads as your Tesla, but there's not much else in common (so to speak).
 
I mapped out the cell nearest me over the past few days if you are curious how big a cell is.

The gap on the left is a government facility, couldn't get starlink.com to give me results for anything inside that border.

I live just outside the cell (about 1 mile), so I can't get starlink yet without playing service address games.

 
Last edited: