SpaceX launches another batch of Starlink satellites
SpaceX today successfully launched more Starlink satellites (either 22 or 23), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its 17th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The 2025 launch race:
14 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
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SpaceX today successfully launched more Starlink satellites (either 22 or 23), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its 17th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The 2025 launch race:
14 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Retirement and replacement of Starlink fleet seems to have begun.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mass-retirement-spacex-spotted-deorbiting-dozens-of-starlink-satellites/ar-AA1y8sMa?ocid=BingNewsVerp
As the linked article notes, this retirement and replacement process has been going on for some time. The number of retirements has risen at roughly the same rate as the overall Starlink deployment cadence but is low enough that the total population of the constellation continues to rise.
As the article also notes, the retirements are heavily skewed toward the oldest and least-capable birds, especially the ones that lack intersatellite laser link hardware. At the reported rate of retirements, those will probably all be gone by mid-year.
That is also about the time one can reasonably expect initial deployments of V3 Starlink birds via Starship. A new, more capable and lighter-weight version of the V2-mini birds launched on F9 has recently debuted as well.
So 2025 will see continuing upticks in both the total number of sats in the Starlink constellation and in the average capability of the active birds. This trend will continue for at least another decade or more. SpaceX is still looking to top out the Starlink constellation at about 42K birds. Getting there will require both Starship and F9 launching at their maximum achievable rates into the 2030s.
Significant improvements to the specs of the birds being deployed can be expected every year or so as well. That process will continue even after the maximum constellation population is reached and the F9, itself, retired with all further upgrade deployments done via Starship.
Dick Eagleson–
Do we have any idea of how much it costs SpaceX to build the starlink satellites?
Wayne…..
Google AI Turd Speel on Starlink Sats….
The cost of a SpaceX Starlink satellite depends on the generation and size of the satellite.
V1 satellites: The first generation of Starlink satellites cost around $200,000 each.
V2 mini satellites: The latest version of Starlink satellites cost around $800,000 each. This is due to their increased size and capabilities.
Other costs associated with Starlink satellites include:
Launch costs: The cost to launch a Falcon 9 rocket to put satellites into orbit can be around $67 million.
Satellite replacement: SpaceX needs to replace about 1,000 satellites each year that fall out of orbit.
Ground stations: SpaceX needs to maintain ground stations to support the Starlink network.
Research and development: SpaceX needs to invest in research and development to improve the Starlink network.
Satellite loss: SpaceX may lose satellites due to geomagnetic storms or other factors.
wayne,
There are no firm numbers available but the consensus of guesses seems to cluster at or below a million bucks per pop. Starlink satellite production appears to be at least as vertically integrated as Falcon 9 and Starship production so the one thing it is possible to be sure of is that the cost per unit of capability of Starlink sats is on a continuous downward slope. That’s because more and more are built each year which reduces the share of fixed overhead assignable to each bird. The rising production rate also means SpaceX can make larger – and, therefore, more economical – buys of all of the materials that go into Starlink sat production.
There are also cost reductions from modifying the bill of material for a Starlink sat. SpaceX realized early that xenon, for example, was too ruinously expensive to use as thruster propellant for the sats in a megaconstellation. So the initial sats used krypton – much cheaper than xenon, but still pretty pricey. The V2-minis now use comparatively dirt-cheap argon, readily available in large quantity as it constitutes about a half-percent of Earth’s atmosphere and is a by-product of air liquefaction and has a large established market as a shield gas for welding. Plus, looking ahead, argon is even more readily available on Mars than it is on Earth.
Anent Alton’s researches:
The launch cost quoted is the retail second-party cost of a standard Falcon 9 launch. SpaceX does not pay retail for its own in-house launches. Leaving out the cost of the stack of sats that constitutes the payload of a Starlink mission, the main additional cost items are the cost of a new 2nd stage, the cost of a full load of LOX and RP-1 for the vehicle, the apportioned share of fixed overhead costs assignable to a given launch – including the reused booster stage – and the comparable fraction of the wages of F9 launch crews. The more launches that are accomplished each year, the lower all of these numbers get.
Falcon 9 second stages are now truly mass-produced items. The more of these that get produced, the cheaper each is as their production infrastructure is, itself, part of a fixed overhead that is divisible by the number of units produced on it annually. The more flights SpaceX gets from each F9 booster stage, the lower is that part of the total cost per Starlink mission. With boosters now routinely lasting for 20 or more launches, that number is already well south of a million dollars. The total non-payload costs to SpaceX of each incremental Starlink launch probably come to no more than $3 – 4 million – possibly less.
SpaceX does need to replace Starlink satellites every year, but not because they simply “fall out of orbit.” SpaceX has been deliberately deorbiting its oldest Starlink birds at a pretty good clip – thus far, mainly those which lack inter-satellite laser data links. This is simply the cost of constellation maintenance and upgrade. Once Starlink reaches its proposed maximum of 42K sats, SpaceX will be needing to replace roughly the oldest and least-capable 8,000 of them every year going forward as the plan is for the entire constellation to “turn over” every five years.
Starlink needed ground stations during its early, pre-laser cross-link days in order to make the network operate at all. Those stations are still of modest importance as connection points to terrestrial networks, but will soon no longer be required to get data from one end-user antenna to another. That point seems likely to be reached around the middle of this year.
R&D is always baked into the end-user cost of any communications technology. But it drives profits as newer, more capable, less expensive sats make it possible to add more paying subscribers to the network.
Satellite losses due to space weather events are trivial in a typical year. More satellites are lost to “sudden infant death,” so to speak, than to space weather and neither is a significant drag on the network.
Dick Eagleson wrote: “the consensus of guesses seems to cluster at or below a million bucks per pop.”
Early on, I heard that Version 1 cost $1 million but expected to cost less with time. One way to reduce unit costs is to skip the expensive environmental testing. Iridium did this in the 1990s, only testing the first five satellites and saving time and money on the rest without that testing. Ultimately, an original Iridium satellite was said to cost only $5 million each. My department thought that we could use one for a space science experiment, but upon investigation we learned that the low price was the relatively high volume of the production run reduced costs, and we would have to spend much more than $5 million for one, so our proposal was never written (but I did get to see the composite structure of a chassis up close, so for me it was not a complete waste of time).
In addition, as SpaceX gained experience with V1, they would need less engineering attention to problems, and the engineers could be assigned to V2 instead, reducing costs on the first version.
I would not be surprised if a V1 Starlink dropped from $1 million to the $200,000 that Alton said.
“The launch cost quoted is the retail second-party cost of a standard Falcon 9 launch. SpaceX does not pay retail for its own in-house launches.”
If the investors who have supplied around $10 billion to SpaceX over the past few years are investing in the Starlink operation or the launch operation rather than the company as a whole, then internal cost accounting should be using the retail price to determine Starlink costs for return on investment reporting. Otherwise, those who invested in the launch side would be subsidizing those who invested in the Starlink side.
“The more launches that are accomplished each year, the lower all of these numbers get.”
I have heard cost per launch anywhere between $40 million and $20 million each. The earlier numbers were higher than the rumored launch costs I have heard more recently. This may be due to that efficiency in fixed costs as well as the reduced need for engineering staff to solve problems on the block 5 Falcon. The last I heard was an estimate that the upper stage cost around $20 million, but that was several years ago, and I don’t know if that included the fairings, which are now also reused, saving around $6 million per launch. I would not be surprised if the upper stage were down to $10 million each. I have difficulties wrapping my head around Dick’s $4 million number per launch, but if that is true, then Starship may end up being as shockingly inexpensive to launch as Musk suggested a few years back, at $2 million per launch (in pre-Biden dollars).
“… the plan is for the entire constellation to ‘turn over’ every five years. ”
It may seem wasteful, but part of the idea of using constellations of small satellites is the ability to replace them as new technologies make them obsolete. Small satellites are inexpensive, can be built quickly, and do not cost much to launch. They have great advantages over the much larger satellites that the space industry had grown into, back in the 1970s and 1980s. Part of this is the new availability of launch access, because when launches were hard to get, it was better to pack as much capability or capacity on each launch, meaning on each satellite, and to make each satellite last as long as practical.
Friday’s “This Week in Spaceflight” video from NASASpaceflight reported that only 827 Starlink satellites have reentered so far. I don’t think that SpaceX is up to 1,000 reentries per year, yet.
“Satellite losses due to space weather events are trivial in a typical year.”
Space weather is more of a concern for the higher orbits, such as geostationary orbit. The space “weather” is largely the solar wind, as affected by events such as coronal mass ejections, what were once called ion storms. These tend to not be so harsh in the lower Earth orbits, largely protected by Earth’s magnetic field, but over the years they have killed several geostationary satellites. Polar orbits, such as the popular sun-synchronous orbits, can also be affected by such space storms as the electrons and ions follow the magnetic field to the North Pole and South Pole regions of space. I haven’t yet heard of sun-synchronous satellites being killed by space weather, so maybe they are being built properly to withstand that environment.
Great information from all!
“I Can’t Change the Laws of Physics…”
https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE
1:16
Edward,
At SpaceX, everything costs less over time as the company is both constantly improving its processes as well as increasing its production volumes.
Interesting story about your encountering the real-world economics of mass production compared to one-off production anent the Iridium sats.
I’m certain SpaceX takes the same testing shortcut and simply allows for a low level of early failures. That’s one of the reasons deployment is done into a very low orbit and then the on-board thrusters raise the orbits to operational altitude over a period of weeks. At recent launch rates, SpaceX has roughly 800 sats in transit between deployment orbit and operational orbit at any given time. This number will increase along with launch mission cadence and recent design changes that allow more birds to be stacked for each launch.
Starlink is not a separate corporate entity. SpaceX investors buy into the entire company. They do not invest ala carte. The cost of Starlink launches is whatever it costs SpaceX to do them and has no relationship to its retail launch pricing.
There are a lot of “estimates” of SpaceX internal costs floating around out there and have been for years – and most of them are complete garbage. A complete Falcon 9 has never cost more than $15 – 20 million in standard satellite launching trim. An upper limit on F9 1st stage costs is half the difference between the retail price of an F9 launch and the retail price of a Falcon Heavy launch with side boosters recovered as an FH is just a reinforced F9 core with two normal F9 booster stages strapped on. Based on the earliest quoted prices for both, that 1st stage cost number came out to be less than $15 million. And that’s the upper limit. I figure the actual number is at least modestly less than that. With the 1st stage accounting for 2/3 to 3/4 of the cost of the whole vehicle, one arrives at that $15 – 20 million number for an entire F9.
A 2nd stage is far cheaper than a 1st stage as it has only one engine compared to nine. The most expensive single part of a second stage is the exotic alloy engine bell. I don’t think an F9 2nd stage has ever cost more than $3 million to make and is certainly cheaper now being several hundred units down the production learning curve and with the production rate still rising.
I think that is at least as true of payload fairings. Perhaps the first few cost SpaceX $6 million a pair to fabricate, but that was long ago, if ever. There are composite-hulled motor yachts whose hulls are appreciably larger than a Falcon 9 payload fairing half that sell for a bit over $2 million apiece fully fitted out.
In short, about 70% of the retail price of a Falcon 9 launch is profit even when all the parts are brand-spanking new. With everything but the 2nd stages reused many times, the variable cost of an F9 launch using flight-proven parts is almost comically miniscule. The F9, despite being far and away the cheapest retail priced ride to orbit yet engineered, is still a license to print money with a genuinely obscene gross profit margin.
These suppositions of mine were buttressed when the Wall Street Journal published some purloined internal SpaceX financial reports almost a decade ago. These showed SpaceX to have been modestly profitable on a net basis as early as 2012 and that the only year covered by the reports that SpaceX lost money was 2015 when the CRS-7 cargo mission to ISS was lost on ascent. The losses were the result of the six additional launches SpaceX would have done that year had CRS-7 not failed. The total loss for that year matched very closely with what I had computed SpaceX’s gross profit to be for six F9 launches.
The “usual suspect” estimates of SpaceX’s internal Falcon costs are so badly off because those making them simply assume SpaceX’s internal costs are only modestly less than those of legacy launch vehicle producers. They’re not. Not even close.
So the costs for Starship missions will be lower than for F9 missions, especially given what the eye-popping launch cadence of Starship will be a few years hence. The most expensive Starship missions have already been flown. It just gets cheaper and cheaper from here on out.
About space weather, the main effect that has had on Starlink missions is one entire load of sats being lost due to heating and expansion of Earth’s atmosphere by a solar mass ejection that was enough to cause the drag in SpaceX’s then-standard low deployment orbit to exceed the ability of the satellite thrusters to counteract. SpaceX has since moved initial deployments to a slightly higher orbit.