Elon Musk’s space company hopes to draw from its constellation up to $ 30 billion per year, six to seven times more than all its other activities.
per Dominique Gallois and Alexandre Piquard
SpaceX is the integration champion: the company builds its own rockets, with its own engines, it launches them, it works on a mooning module, sends tourists in space … and it has put In Orbit Starlink, the largest constellation of low altitude satellites, intended to connect to the internet the badly served regions.
Starlink is not an activity like any other in the SpaceX portfolio: central pillar of her economic model, she is a bit of fuel that must finance her activities and the dream displayed by her boss: go on Mars.
Société not listed, SpaceX does not publish its accounts… but as early as 2015, An internal document that leaked in the Wall Street Journal The magnitude of its ambitions for Starlink, then in the state of simple project: a launch was to be scheduled in 2018, and its income had to exceed in 2020 those generated by rocket launches, and reach $ 30 billion in 2025 ( About 28.4 billion euros), with 40 million customers, for an operational benefit of 15 to 20 billion… in comparison, SpaceX provided only $ 1.8 billion in total turnover for 2016.
a quick calculation
Gwynne Shotwell, the number two of SpaceX, confirms the central nature of the constellation, with a rapid calculation: “The world market for space launches weighs $ 6 to 8 billion per year. That of the Internet connection can be Valued at $ 1,000 billion. Imagine that SpaceX gets 60 % of the launcher market and only 3 % of that of the connection … Starlink is our biggest potential revenue source, “she said in September before journalists in Paris.
Indeed, according to this scenario, launchers (for satellites, astronauts, equipment, etc.) would generate $ 4 to 5 billion in turnover per year, against 30 billion for the constellation, or 6 to 7 , 5 times more … It is better to have a very small part of a very large cake than a large part of a cupcake, reasoning SpaceX. “Starlink is a huge opportunity for monetization. And we see more and more synergies with SpaceX”, also decrypts the financial analyst Dan Ives, from Wedbush Securities bank.
In the mind of Elon Musk, Starlink is therefore a “crucial step” to realize his dream of establishing a city on Mars and a base on the moon, as he explained in 2019 to the space.com >. “We think we can use Starlink to finance Starship,” he added, referring to his giant rocket designed to go to the red planet. “If we want to take people to the moon and on Mars, we must make sure they can communicate on the spot and with the earth,” said M me shotwell.
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