>>14219046>>14219015Basically, Starlink at full deployment of say 12k satellites has the potential to print SpaceX about $15Bn (on the conservative estimate) in revenue annually. Each satellite amortizes cost across a 5 years (as the fuel store dictates) life-cycle, but can be decreased relative to orbital location. Most sats are between 300 and 500km in their shells. If they drop that by 50km to 250 and 450km that could improve latency (this is a guess) by ~3ms. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're moving vast amounts of data or say are getting paid for moving financial data between stock exchanges, a 3ms delta could mean the difference between a trade executing and turning over a few billion in gain vs few billion in losses. So over the life of say an average 4 year cycle, the entire network can make SpaceX $60Bn. If you assume that half of that will be lost to network maintenance, overhead due to infrastructure, ISP activities, regulations and legal hurdles, and simply payroll and material cost ($30Bn in OpEx essentially), that still gives SpaceX $30Bn every 4 years to put towards next-generation transport and communication platforms AND Mars.
Across a 12 year period, that's ~$90Bn that can be dedicated towards putting dry mass into lunar and martian orbit/surface. Elon said during the presentation that he expects total flight cost of Starship to orbit for 100T to Moon or Mars to be <$10M per flight via economies of scale. For this example, let's increase that by 5x to $50M for all costs per flight (SS, Tanker, Cargo). So $90Bn/$50M = 1800 ships to orbit. Let's further assume that 30% of that will be dedicated for refueling tankers, which leaves 70% on the table for pushing useful payload (relative distance of astrological bodies is irrelevant here). That means: 1,260 ships or 126,000T to either planet/surface per 12 years.
SO: Elon is 50. Another ~40yr till he dies. 126kT * 3.5 = 441kT to Mars. 441,000T.
