December 18th saw two SpaceX launches; the first, from California saw the successful launch of an additional 52 Starlink satellites from the Vandenberg Airforce Base, meaning that Elon Musk’s broadband constellation now has some 1880 satellites in orbit, and mostly working. The second, from SpaceX’s traditional launch site in Florida, saw the successful placing of […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is scheduled to launch 52 of its Starlink craft into circular orbits today (December 17th). This is an unusual move from Musk’s team but is designed to fill gaps in the constellation’s existing coverage. The launch will take place from SpaceX’s facility at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (at 09.26 […]
Dataxis has published its latest report on the Fixed Satellite Services (FSS) civil communications market. After years of significant growth, the decline in traditional video activity in the most developed countries is being sustained, resulting in a limited but steady decline in the turnover of FSS operators. The outlook for the future is equally becoming […]
Tim Farrar of TMF Associates says the recent “breathless” valuations for SpaceX (ranging from between $80 billion to $100 billion) are inconsistent. He says the quoted company valuations have near-tripled over the past year, and with SpaceX’s share price – albeit privately held – rising from about $200 per share to $560 over the same […]
India’s telecoms regulators recently issued a ‘cease and desist’ notice to Starlink to stop the SpaceX business from soliciting and taking pre-bookings for the broadband-by-satellite service. Starlink’s local country director Sanjay Bhargava has responded by saying that the company will file a formal application for a commercial licence allowing receive/transmission rights in India “on or […]
Up until now all of Elon Musk’s efforts related to SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket have been focussed on its headquarters base in South Texas at the Gulf coastal Boca Chica village, near Brownsville. But Musk’s team have now started pouring concrete at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre part of the Cape Canaveral […]
Investment bank Morgan Stanley says that its base case valuation for Elon Musk’s Starlink broadband-by-satellite low Earth orbiting constellation stands at $81 billion (€71.8bn). It backs up its thinking with assumptions of a longer-term 2040 position when the system can offer some 250 Gb/s per satellite of capacity of which 4.5 per cent is “saleable” […]
SpaceX successfully placed 48 of its Starlink broadband satellites into orbit on the evening of December 2nd, plus two paying satellites for client BlackSky, who is using its satellites for Earth observation tasks. A few minutes after launch the Falcon 9’s rocket booster was successfully recovered on its floating drone barge in the Atlantic. The […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX team postponed the planned December 1st launch of another batch of Starlink satellites for 24-hours until around 6pm (Florida time) on December 2nd. However, Musk was again Tweeting over his concerns about raising more capital and the potential risk of failure. “If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability […]
Elon Musk has admitted in a memo to staff that problems with his massive Starship places SpaceX into a “genuine risk of bankruptcy”. SpaceX has let go a number of senior executives and adding that development work on the crucial Raptor engines has created a “disaster” for the company. “The Raptor production crisis is much […]