David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I think the biggest one is what if NASA hadn't changed their tune on how we bid stuff out? Without that, the smallsat market, I think it probably will materialize in the future and is materializing now. But during the time period that SpaceX needed to do it, just wasn't going to. This is actually I think a big point related to. We didn't really talk about Starlink at all in this episode thus far, but I think one of the reasons besides Starlink, providing satellite internet access being a big market and attractive in and of its own, that SpaceX decided to launch this division internally was to stimulate the smallsat market and demand for it. Now they are going to be their own first and best customer for smallsats and the Rideshare program that they launched when they're sending up big stuff having space available for little seats as well. I want to give a little bit of detail on both of those things that you just described now that we've tipped our hand a little bit. For people who don't know what Starlink is, which is me probably two months ago and mostly me even a week ago, SpaceX is going to put 12,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. so way closer than the DirecTV satellite that needs to be out in geosynchronous which is 22,000 miles away. These things are on the order of 200-ish miles away. It takes a rocket to get it up there but it's not as far away as the old stuff is or as a lot of the fixed geosynchronous stuff. SpaceX was going to launch these 12,000 satellites and they are all going to have a line of sight to each other. They are all going to be able to provide broadband internet anywhere on Earth at any time to anyone in a cost-effective way. The way that it works is a miracle. The fact that all of them have this line of sight to each other and can communicate in high bandwidth between one another, it means that the latency can be way less. Since they're way closer right now, the problem with using satellite internet is it has to round trip all the way out 22,000 miles and back. Even at the speed of light, that's still time. You're getting dog crap slow speeds on satellite internet. If you have a whole bunch of them pretty close here and they can all communicate with each other, it's okay if there's not a single same one above you all the time as long as there's something above you all the time and they can communicate with each other.…

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