03.06.26
Posted in Aeronautical, Operators, SpaceX at 8:29 am by timfarrar
Last Sunday afternoon (4.11pm Pacific time), March 1, Elon Musk posted a curious tweet:
This came in response to another tweet about use of Starlink on US attack drones, but that’s not the important issue (and in fact, as it applies to US-approved uses, the statement is somewhat misleading: Starlink satellites are widely used in Ukraine for military purposes, with funding from the US Department of War, it’s just that SpaceX uses the Starshield brand for these sales, not the “commercial Starlink” service).
Musk’s tweet states that “weapon systems” using Starlink are “shut down when discovered”. So what did Starlink shut down right after this tweet? That became clear on Monday morning, when general aviation users started complaining that their Starlink service had been affected because “effective immediately, the maximum supported in-motion speed for Roam and Priority plans is 100 mph”. Instead Starlink has introduced Aviation 300 and Aviation 450 plans (with much higher pricing) that allow for usage at up to 300mph and 450mph respectively.
But what is even more notable is that the rules for these new plans require you to submit a scan of your passport, as well as details of the aircraft that the Starlink service will be used on. In contrast, all you need to sign up for the Roam plan is a credit card.
So what “weapon system” flies at not much more than 100mph and shouldn’t be provided to certain passport holders? We all know that Russian attack drones have been an issue in Ukraine and Starlink introduced a whitelisting process last month to address this. But it seems no one thought about Iran at that point in time.
And the remaining question is how did Musk “discover” this on Sunday? God forbid that the Iranian drone which killed six US servicemembers earlier in the day in Kuwait (and was described as “flying slow and low to the ground”) was using Starlink…
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03.02.26
Posted in Aeronautical, D2D, Globalstar, Operators, Regulatory, Services, SpaceX, Spectrum, T-Mobile at 7:36 am by timfarrar
It was fascinating to see today’s announcement at MWC, that Starlink is partnering with Deutsche Telekom to “support over 140M subscribers across 10 European countries“. Most remarkable is that DT is explicitly confirming that “the service will operate only in Starlink’s MSS (Mobile Satellite Service) spectrum”, effectively treating renewal of EchoStar’s existing 2GHz MSS license in Europe as a fait accompli.
That’s perhaps not surprising, because I’m told that an announcement from the EU on the process for reallocating the 2GHz licenses after they expire in spring 2027 remains stalled, and may take several more months to emerge. As a result, the expectation is that the current licenses (held by Viasat and EchoStar) will be extended, probably by two years, to allow time for that process (with appeals and a need for subsequent actions by national regulators) to conclude.
But there is a wider context here to the alignment between Starlink and Deutsche Telekom here, which is seemingly happening with the implicit backing of the German government (and makes me wonder what will happen to Tesla’s factory in Germany this week).
Back in January, news broke that Starlink had struck a fleetwide deal to equip Lufthansa’s aircraft with connectivity. After the prior loss of IAG to Starlink in November 2025, Lufthansa was the last remaining anchor customer for Viasat’s European Aviation Network (EAN).
Lufthansa’s defection fatally undermined the case to retain EAN in its current form and therefore has called into question the need for Viasat to retain 2x15MHz for its 2GHz MSS license. In supporting Viasat’s application for renewal, Lufthansa had even gone as far as to claim that “The EAN is a critical building block in continuing our journey to offer an industry-leading connectivity solution to our passengers.” Of course, it will take some time to replace the EAN terminals on both Lufthansa and IAG, but that just reinforces the rationale for a two-year extension to the current European 2GHz licenses, before any changes take place.
Those changes could potentially reduce both Viasat and EchoStar to paired 10MHz blocks and free up a third license for a European provider (prompting a fight between the AST/Vodafone partnership and the SES/Lynk/Omnispace grouping). But now I wonder if DT might switch its position and suggest cutting Viasat to 2x10MHz, in order to free up 2x5MHz for IoT, while leaving EchoStar/Starlink with the full 2x15MHz. Though whether that would fly with EU regulators is far from clear.
What is interesting is that Lufthansa’s decision to defect to Starlink was apparently very sudden, in fact I’m told that Lufthansa had been negotiating a major deal with another IFC provider for the last couple of years, which was close to being confirmed publicly, and rumors suggest that the German government had a hand in the switch.
Now we have a similar major deal between Deutsche Telekom and Starlink that comes after DT reportedly vetoed T-Mobile US’s plan to buy EchoStar’s spectrum last summer to enhance the partnership between TMUS and Starlink. And last June, DT had been just as unenthusiastic about any changes to the 2GHz band, stating that “Deutsche Telekom AG plans to continue operating the European Aviation Network (EAN) using the MSS 2GHz spectrum beyond 2027…preserving the current spectrum allocation is crucial for the continued operation and economic viability of the EAN.”
So the natural question is “what changed”? I’m told that even after vetoing the TMUS-EchoStar spectrum deal (and then replacing the TMUS CEO while privately characterizing TMUS as “going rogue”), DT continued investigating D2D options and was one of three companies that looked at Globalstar when that asset was put up for sale last fall (the other two being SpaceX and Apple).
But nothing happened there, and now DT has decided instead to strike a major partnership with Starlink, preferring to rely on the 2GHz MSS band over Globalstar’s Big LEO spectrum. And there’s even a DT panelist (Jaroslav Holis) scheduled to speak at the Equatys event on Wednesday which raises the question of what DT might have been exploring there. So I’m left wondering whether there are wider German political factors behind the decisions of both Lufthansa and Deutsche Telekom to reverse themselves in short order.
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02.08.26
Posted in Broadband, Financials, Operators, Regulatory, SpaceX at 2:29 pm by timfarrar
On Friday, redacted versions of two SpaceX financial forecasts, one from 2021 and the other from 2023, were disclosed in the Delaware litigation between SpaceX shareholders.
While only very limited numbers in the financial projections remain unredacted (beyond the expectation in the 2021 forecast that “government” revenue for Starlink would grow to $5B by 2027), there is enough that can be extracted to determine that Starlink has exceeded the 2021 revenue forecast, but Starship has fallen dramatically behind expectations even in 2023. The 2021 forecast helpfully used redactions matched to the number of characters, showing that Starlink was first expected to exceed $10B in revenues in 2026, while in actual fact Starlink passed $10B in 2025.
The projected valuations on the last page of this document also make it possible to back into the total company revenues forecast in 2021 and 2027: the $102.8B valuation was 25x revenues, implying a revenue forecast of $4113M for 2021. By 2027 this valuation was expected to have increased 4.9x, to around $500B, which was said to be 20x revenues, implying a revenue forecast of ~$25B for 2027. That again is slightly less than SpaceX’s likely total revenues in 2027, even if you remain skeptical about SpaceX’s ability to meet the current published 2026 forecast of $22B-$24B.
However, the 2023 forecast shows how SpaceX was expecting Starship to start launching Starlink satellites to orbit in 2024, with Falcon 9 phased out for Starlink launches in 2026. Now even on Musk’s optimistic timeline from December 2025, Starlink V3 launches on Starship aren’t expected “at scale” until “around Q4″ of this year. So Starship launches of usable payloads have now consistently remained 12 months out for nearly three years.
It’s also fascinating to me how the ongoing debate about orbital data centers tends to ignore launch constraints. SpaceX is just beginning to scale up to develop these “AI satellites”, but until now the emphasis for Starship has been on getting it ready to launch Starlink V3 in volume. That’s meant building extensive launch pad infrastructure in Florida and seeking permission for a high launch tempo there.
Florida is ideal for Starlink launches to 40 and 50 degree inclinations, which will be much more difficult in Boca Chica. However, Florida is a terrible location for sun synchronous launches, which is where these orbital data centers are supposed to go, to utilize maximum sunlight. Back in 2020, SpaceX conducted the first sun synchronous launch from Florida in more than 50 years, and has continued to launch some Transporter rideshare missions to sun synchronous orbits since then, but this requires a very fuel inefficient “dog leg” maneuver and so is only suitable for light payloads, not bulk launches of AI satellites.
Similarly, undertaking sun synchronous launches from Boca Chica would be extremely challenging (and potentially cause an international dispute), as these rockets would need to fly completely across Mexico, not over the open ocean. That’s why Vandenberg is typically used for sun synchronous missions, but SpaceX hasn’t even begun building a Starship pad there, and a high launch tempo is likely to be very politically controversial in California. So how exactly does SpaceX intend to get these AI satellites to the desired orbit?
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01.03.26
Posted in Broadband, D2D, Financials, Operators, Services, SpaceX at 11:52 am by timfarrar
The reactions to my comments last month on The Information’s TITV program about SpaceX needing a new story for its planned $1.5T IPO were fascinating, mainly because no one actually disagreed with the fact that SpaceX has consistently missed its targeted revenue growth over the last three years. Back in July 2023 SpaceX originally estimated revenues for the year would double to around $8B, before this whisper number was raised in November 2023 to $9B, with a forecast of $15B in 2024. That caused analysts such as Payload Space to come up with a figure of $8.7B for 2023, which is still often repeated as the actual figure, despite the NY Times finally confirming in August 2025 that SpaceX’s 2023 revenue was only $7.4B (with Starlink generating “roughly $8 billion” in revenue during 2024, implying a companywide total of ~$11B).
In 2025, SpaceX once again appears to have missed the revenue prediction of $15.5B that Musk stated publicly back in June, with Bloomberg reporting in its IPO coverage that “the company is expected to produce around $15 billion in revenue in 2025, increasing to between $22 billion and $24 billion in 2026.” That’s despite surging broadband subscriber numbers, which reached 9.2M by the end of the year as SpaceX dramatically cut the price of its terminals and reduced US residential service pricing to stimulate demand. Of course Starlink’s revenue growth is incredibly impressive, as is the speed with which it has come to dominate the satellite industry, but justifying an $800B current valuation (let alone a $1.5T IPO valuation), usually requires outperforming revenue guidance, not missing it.
Even so, it seems likely that SpaceX’s revenue target for 2026 will once again prove too optimistic, because ARPUs on those millions of customers are much lower than most analysts think (especially now there’s a $5 per month service option for suspended terminals). And the next generation D2D/DTC system won’t start launching in volume until “around Q4″ 2026 (at best since that depends on rapid progress with Starship), while SpaceX can’t access EchoStar’s AWS-4 spectrum until November 2027, so it can’t start offering a Band 70 DTC solution in the US with existing handsets until then.
It’s also undeniable that SpaceX needs more than just Starlink to justify a $1.5T valuation, given that even its expected lead investment bank, Morgan Stanley, only thinks Starlink revenues will get to $126B in 2040. So its understandable that the proposal for space-based data centers took center stage in last month’s reports of IPO preparations.
Curiously, however, data centers didn’t even rate a mention in Starlink’s end of year progress report, which focused instead on talking up the Starlink V3 satellites and the DTC constellation in particular as the key payload for Starship. And interestingly, in this progress report Starlink also modified the company’s September 2025 comments that “in most environments, [DTC] will enable full 5G cellular connectivity with a comparable experience to current terrestrial LTE service,” to instead promise that “in most environments [DTC] will enable full 5G cellular connectivity with a comparable experience to current terrestrial service.”
In many ways, Musk’s plan for space-based data centers offers a Rorschach test for potential SpaceX investors, just like Optimus does for Tesla investors. Both allow for near term demonstrations that look impressive but aren’t meaningfully revenue-generating, while allowing Musk to make long term projections of “infinite” revenues that can be (nearly) infinitely postponed.
In the case of Optimus, he’s claimed “humanoid robots will be the biggest product ever. Because everyone is gonna want one, or more than one,” while for space-based data centers, he’s claimed that “satellites with localized AI compute, where just the results are beamed back from low-latency, sun-synchronous orbit, will be the lowest cost way to generate AI bitstreams in <3 years. And by far the fastest way to scale within 4 years, because easy sources of electrical power are already hard to find on Earth."
Or put another way “Optimus and space data centers are two sides of the same coin…Optimus promises to provide all needed physical labor (and even better than a human!), while space data centers promise to provide all needed mental labor (and even better than a human!).”
But if you read yesterday’s WSJ piece on Optimus and think that Musk is simply lying again because “in public appearances, the robot is often remotely operated by human engineers” then you’ll believe the same is likely true of his plans for SpaceX’s space-based data centers. Conversely if you read that article and think that Tesla is making continued progress in opening up an untapped market opportunity where Adam Jonas “predicts that by 2050, humanoids will bring in $7.5 trillion in annual revenue across the industry globally,” you’ll probably have the same reaction about space-based data centers. And of course the latter are the investors that SpaceX actually wants for any IPO.
This is not to say that the market for either is non-existent: just like many companies are working on robots (with or without legs!), there is plenty of interest in space-based data centers. Both will also be particularly useful to the DoD, and especially in the space market the US government is seen as the best source of new revenue by many players right now.
And SpaceX has substantial advantages both in access to cheap launch, and in the ability to build a distributed network of data centers based on the Starlink V3 bus (which is a much better solution than a handful of extremely large space-based data centers several km in diameter, not least because achieving low latency requires the data center to be in view). However, that’s very different to saying revenue will be “infinite” or that this market can justify a $1.5T valuation for SpaceX.
But to return to my original interview, its particularly amusing to note the CEO of Starcloud suggesting in a subsequent TITV interview that this was “the dumbest thing I’d heard in a quite a long time”, because the dumbest thing I’ve heard in quite a long time is Starcloud’s business plan, which (if you take their story about launching huge arrays into space at face value) is essentially totally dependent on gaining access to Starship launches at cost.
Of course that means sucking up to Elon Musk is a necessity, but when one of SpaceX’s key competitive advantages for Starlink (and a key source of value in any IPO) lies in exploiting the huge difference between the cost and price of Falcon 9 launches, there’s no reason to believe that the same wouldn’t be true for Starship. In other words, SpaceX will be able to launch its own space-based data centers at a much lower cost, compared to the price of Starship launches for third parties, allowing SpaceX to gain far more scale than any other player at much lower cost, just as it has done with Starlink. In fact, I understand that all Starcloud has is some interesting in-space cooling technology, which only becomes valuable in extremely large arrays, and that’s unlikely to be useful if SpaceX’s distributed space-based data center architecture proves more cost effective.
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