>>12868566Unlikely to. Elon and Gwynne both want to establish a transport network across ALL of Sol. They also want to see fusion engines take flight in their lifetime if possible and be alive to fly on ships that can take humans from Earth to Mars in days instead of weeks and months. SpaceX would love to be able to yeet major infra hardware over to Titan and then drain the giant lakes of Titan for Methane along with water ice from Saturn's rings, get oxidizer from a joint solar source; and yeet massive tankers back to all other planets within the solar radii to fuel the transport network. All that is going to take an endless round of innovation and tens to hundreds of thousands of starships, cargoships, and tankers.
Honestly, in the next 30-40 years, I can see with SpaceX's transport infrastructure and Starlink networks in place, us starting to do preliminary asteroid and ice mining. That will, in addition to leading to the birth of trillionaires, also lead to potentially development of large scale passenger vessels that fly between Earth/Moon/Mars orbits. We're talking ships straight out of sci-fi, designed to ferry 10-25,000 people at once. The 18m or equivalent Starships would only exist at that point to ferry the initial payloads and humans from Earth's deep gravity well up to LEO for transfer. SpaceX is very likely to be the builder and manager of these vessels or having a significant stake in any that do.
People are forgetting that if Starlink doesn't bankrupt SpaceX, it's going to once it reaches saturation of consumers across rural, industrial, commercial, and military accessors, the entire network of 12-14k satellites will print SpaceX ridiculous amounts of monies. Starlink is expected to reach maturity (12-14k satellites (ignoring the larger 40k goal)) I think mid 20s, 2025-2027.
Ignoring Starlink, the total ISP revenue projected is: $647.2Bn. SpaceX said they want to service ~3% of that market. That's $19.41Bn/yr. *4 years (sat life) = ~$77Bn/4yrs.
