分析师质疑马斯克星舰每日发射与星链V3需求

08.10.26 Musk’s daily Starship problem… As I pointed out in a Wednesday interview on TITV, the most startling claim in last week’s SpaceX results call was Elon Musk’s assertion that “probably a year from now, we will be doing at least 1 flight a day [of Starship], possibly more”. A smart Bloomberg piece by Liam Denning on Thursday highlighted that “Musk is on an accelerating treadmill of prediction” and while “moon factories may be taken seriously-not-literally by investors”, both robotaxis and Starship launches are “quantified and verifiable” so “Musk is on the hook to deliver ever more and, crucially, ever more quickly”. To date, daily (or even hourly!) Starship launches have been most easily been explained by the supposedly unlimited demand for orbital data centers. But those are dependent on two things: 1) a Starship launchpad suitable for sun-synchronous orbits (for which land is now being acquired in Louisiana) and 2) new chips made at Terafab that are suitable for operating at much higher temperatures (this is in order to maximize radiative cooling in space, since increasing the operating temperature by 100°C will shrink the required radiator size by ~70%). However, neither the launchpad nor the new Terafab chips will be ready until 2030 or beyond, so they won’t contribute to Starship demand next year. That leaves Starlink as the only realistic source of demand for frequent Starship launches next year and so Musk has been on a rant for much of the weekend on X, seeking to justify demand for 100K+ Starlink V3 satellites (since 365 launches of 60 Starlink satellites each year, times a five year lifetime would be ~110K satellites on orbit) as opposed to Gwynne Shotwell’s far more rational forecast in March that “I don’t think we’ll have more than 15 or 20,000 Starlink satellites” (she instead leaned on the FCC application for “up to a million AI satellites” as the primary driver of Starship demand). Musk has been egged on by cheerleaders such as ARK and Mach33 fawning over the supposed 100x increase in bandwidth (although the latter are at least aware enough to acknowledge that the space industry is now “replete with grifters”). But remember that current Starlink V2 mini satellites can each serve around 2000 consumers globally, and even if the provisioning rate is doubled, each Starlink V3 satellite should be able to serve 10,000 consumers. So 15K-20K V3 satellites would be enough for 150M-200M customers (fewer if some satellites are devoted to D2D), w…