Can Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites bankroll a base on Mars?
SpaceX is betting that there is money to be made in satellite telecoms
By Tim Cross: Technology editor, The Economist
ELON MUSK, SpaceX’s ambitious founder, has always been clear about why the company exists. Humans are currently a single-planet species. Mr Musk would like to change that by establishing a permanent base on Mars. Ideally, he would join its inhabitants. “I want to die on Mars,” runs his familiar joke, “just not on impact.”
Progress has been steady and spectacular. SpaceX’s partly reusable Falcon rockets have driven down the cost of launching things into space, a vital step for its Martian ambitions. The firm’s newest vehicle, dubbed Starship, is due to make its first orbital test flight at the end of 2021. If and when it flies, it will be the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V that took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Both the vehicle and its booster will also be fully reusable, reducing the cost-to-orbit even further. Starship has been explicitly designed with trips to Mars in mind.
Until now SpaceX has financed itself by providing rocket launches for NASA, on whose behalf it ferries both cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, and by launching satellites for private companies such as broadcasters and telecoms firms. But going to Mars will be expensive. To try to pay for it, SpaceX is getting into the telecoms business back on Earth. It plans to fill the skies with at least 10,000 low-flying satellites, or around four times as many as are currently active and in orbit. “Starlink”, as the service is known, was due to come out of its beta-testing phase in October.
The sheer number of satellites in the Starlink constellation will allow it to serve millions of users
Satellite internet is not a new idea. But, as he has already done with both rockets and electric cars, Mr Musk believes he can make transformative improvements to an old technology. Existing services rely on satellites in high orbits. That allows them to cover plenty of ground. But it also means that many customers must share a single satellite, which limits capacity, while the round trip signals must make to and from high orbit adds irritating delays. The result is that satellite internet is usually treated as a last resort when nothing else is available.
Mr Musk hopes to change that. The sheer number of satellites in the Starlink constellation will allow it to serve millions of users. And because they fly in much lower orbits, communication delays will be reduced too. Mr Musk says Starlink’s goal is to bring broadband to the unserved—those in poor countries, in remote parts of rich ones, in the air and at sea.
But it is not just the unserved who are interested. Some high-frequency traders reckon Starlink might offer a faster way for buy and sell orders to cross the Atlantic than existing fibre-optic cables do. That, at least, is the theory.
Starlink has competitors: OneWeb, a rival which emerged from bankruptcy in November 2020, plans to fly 648 satellites of its own. Amazon is developing a similar project called Kuiper, though it has yet to launch any satellites. Astronomers, meanwhile, worry that filling the sky with thousands of low-flying satellites will interfere with their scientific work. SpaceX has changed the design of Starlink satellites, and added an anti-reflective coating, in response to such concerns.
Previous attempts to sell satellite-internet services to consumers have foundered on the cost of the high-tech antennae needed to send and receive data (SpaceX reckons it has reduced the manufacturing cost of its terminals from $3,000 to $1,500 in the past two years). And Starlink’s price of $99 per month is not cheap, even for customers in rich countries.
No one knows yet how well Starlink will work: Morgan Stanley, a bank, assigns SpaceX a valuation of somewhere between $5bn and $200bn, with uncertainty about its success accounting for the wide range. More answers should emerge in 2022. Whether even $200bn would be enough to fund the establishment of a permanent base on Mars is not clear either. But that still lies some way off in the future.
Tim Cross: Technology editor, The Economist■
This article appeared in the Science and Technology section of the print edition of The World Ahead 2022 under the headline “The near frontier”
