$ASTS: It’d be a real shame if someone fired up the Wayback Machine and pulled up all those deleted @TMFAssociates blog posts from his defunct website (which leads to 'Error 404 Page Not Found') — the ones where he confidently predicts SpaceX and Starlink’s complete failure and going full bear on its prospects since 2018. F*ck it. Here you go! April 5, 2020: SpaceX and the FCC’s $16B problem web.archive.org/web/20230208… "To date SpaceX has certainly not demonstrated anything whatsoever about the performance of its planned commercial voice and broadband services for consumers. Notably SpaceX has still not published details of its terminals (except to advise that the antennas will need mechanical steering, raising the cost significantly), and last year’s testing by the US Air Force onboard a plane did not even use a SpaceX antenna. Moreover, that test did not involve most of the operational elements needed to offer a scalable commercial service, such as provisioning and sharing of capacity between multiple users, because SpaceX simply dedicated an entire satellite to one user terminal. In particular, SpaceX makes great sounding (but carefully worded) claims in its submission to the FCC that “SpaceX also specifically designed Starlink to provide high-speed broadband service, using advanced phased-array antennas that allow the system to automatically optimize service to certain locations and dynamically adjust its throughput per user” when in fact many features of the supposed “design” have not actually been implemented in practice. While some of those discarded design features, such as crosslinks, are well known, I’m told that to date the satellites also don’t have any ability to dynamically reallocate capacity between beams, because that was apparently “too hard”. Perhaps that’s not surprising, when SpaceX is writing the software itself, rather than looking to companies with actual experience in designing scalable satellite broadband networks, like Hughes and Viasat." March 31, 2020: Why SpaceX desperately needs a government bailout… web.archive.org/web/20230129… "However, the recent equity valuation of $36B is now completely untenable (especially if OneWeb collapses, as has been rumored this week), although a several hundred million dollar secured loan might still be a feasible option to tide the company over for several months. Nevertheless, unless Musk is proved right about the coronavirus and the markets improve quickly enough that new funding becomes available to SpaceX relatively soon, or alternatively the US government offers to bail him out (either publicly or with off the books money from the DoD), SpaceX is currently heading on autopilot towards a concrete wall of bankruptcy." December 12, 2019: Reality and hype in satellite constellations… web.archive.org/web/20230129… "I was surprised to see last month that generally well informed observers like Om Malik were taking seriously (and even describing as “astute”) a blog post by Casey Handmer that suggests Starlink is a “very big deal” that will “catalyze enormous positive change, bringing, for the first time, billions of humans into our future global cybernetic collective. On the other hand, SpaceX is planning to ignore the ITU spectrum priority rules (claiming merely that Starlink needs to initiate rather than complete coordination with other systens), which give OneWeb priority access to the NGSO spectrum and may block Starlink from gaining market access in many countries. And the low altitude of Starlink’s satellites, combined with the lack of crosslinks, means that providing services to ships and planes crossing the oceans and poles is not a feasible objective in the foreseeable future. When looking at the underlying costs of data delivery, it is also clear that Starlink’s costs will be meaningfully higher than the cost of terrestrial data delivery in areas with access to broadband, giving terrestrial rivals plenty of room to compete to retain their existing customer base (and ensuring that additional cost sensitive markets like cellular backhaul will remain out of reach). So my conclusion is that while Starlink may be a “big deal” for the satellite industry (and for astronomers), it certainly isn’t a big deal for the terrestrial broadband market. In essence, under any plausible set of cost assumptions, Starlink’s bandwidth will cost more than current terrestrial broadband connections, and Starlink’s ability to disrupt a retail market where existing providers have existing infrastructure with enormous gross margins will be very limited. That’s nothing like Handmer’s nonsensical claims that “further launches will be funded entirely by providing better service to high density cities”. April 8, 2019: High times web.archive.org/web/20230129… "SpaceX is seeking to complete a near term equity raise (apparently limited to existing investors) at a valuation of $32B, and has made some outlandish claims about the potential for Starlink, similar to (if not even more exaggerated than) the widely ridiculed business plan published in the Wall St Journal back in January 2017, with many tens or even hundreds of millions of subscribers relying on the constellation. Jumping onboard with others, but exaggerating further, Starlink’s flat panel terminal is claimed to be capable of 100Mbps, but will cost only $500 at launch, falling to $150 over time. Moreover, the cost of the 4000+ satellites is said to be around half a million dollars each, including launch, implying total capex of less than $3B." November 9, 2018: The New New Space Thing web.archive.org/web/20221205… "But the poster child for the bursting of the bubble can be seen in SpaceX’s increasing frantic attempts to raise money in the face of a rapid decline in launch demand, and increasing competition from Blue Origin, which doesn’t need to make a profit. Firing your bankers because they are nervous about how much additional debt you will take on in the future is a bad sign, and redesigning your constellation to hide its problems seems even more bizarre. September 28, 2018: Fake it till you make it web.archive.org/web/20230101… "Unsurprisingly such a failure would put SpaceX in a very awkward position, when there were already many questions about whether Starlink would go forward, not least because the satellites may not reach the correct orbit to bring SpaceX’s ITU filing into use, and the FCC’s experimental authorization was based on the assumption that mission operations would be conducted at 1125km. And if SpaceX cannot build satellites with a reliable propulsion system, that would reinforce concerns expressed by FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel in SpaceX’s license grant that “the FCC has to tackle the growing challenge posed by orbital debris.” September 18, 2018: 420,000 km. Funding Secured web.archive.org/web/20221201… "Last night’s SpaceX event raised a lot of questions for many observers, not least because it “caught some SpaceX employees off guard” and was rushed out so fast that some of the promotional imagery was incorrect. However, I suspect that the reason for this surprise announcement was to distract from impending bad news about the Starlink project, namely that the project has for all intents and purposes been put on hold.'' Ironically enough, the principal mention of Starlink last night was as a source of funding for the BFR development. It makes no sense whatsoever to think that Starlink will generate profits to fund a $5B+ BFR development between now and 2023, so the only logical conclusion is that money raised for Starlink will now be diverted to the BFR. Another hint that Starlink is going away was the statement that BFR is expected to consume the majority of engineering resources after the commercial crew development has been completed for NASA next year, despite Starlink supposedly costing more to develop than BFR ($10B+ compared to ~$5B) over the next 5 years." ---- AND NOW SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST 👇 September 8, 2022: Starlink has won the race for LEO broadband – what now? 😂😂😂 web.archive.org/web/20221207… "Up until 2020, I was very skeptical about the LEO broadband opportunity, and whether any of the planned systems would be able to raise enough money and build out a constellation that could deliver a service that is competitive with existing GEO operators. That skepticism seemed entirely justified after the failure of LeoSat in late 2019 and OneWeb’s spiral towards a bankruptcy filing in March 2020. SpaceX had also given wildly over-ambitious forecasts for Starlink’s revenue and timing, with projections for $6B of revenue in 2021, rising to over $30B in 2025. I didn’t think that SpaceX would pull this off, but they did, and today too many people in the industry, who are rightly skeptical of Elon Musk’s litany of unfulfilled promises, remain far too complacent and are continuing to dismiss Starlink as just a consumer service that won’t threaten other parts of the satellite market, or are even suggesting that the network remains economically unviable and is doomed to failure."