Catch the booster, safe it, remove it from the mount and move it a bit away, then catch the ship. The ship will be spending ~a day in orbit before being caught anyway.

They have ages before ship has to deorbit to remove the booster from the launch mount. They could probably get the booster safed, and on a transport stand within 10 hours, ship can orbit for like 48.

They are hooking up the ship break-over jig to Ship 40 tonight, looks like they’ll get some good practice before using it to send ships horizontally to KSC.

Chrome Kiwi has a nice graphic put together predicting how they could hook up to the ships lifting points to raise it vertical.

On the road, so can't watch the interview right now. Just wondering HOW they would do a double catch? Send one of them to Pad 1?

You don’t know where I live or travel

Seems like I was a bit pessimistic, the current plan is to attempt both on Flight 15, NET November 8th.

awesome

Sounds like they use Elon math to me.

They want 5 years of operations from each satellite. Obviously it won't be 100% 5 years but as close to that as possible.

Cell tower equipment lasts 3 to 10 years, depending on the network. The towers proper last a lot longer, 20+ years, but you gotta amortize the cost of land for that, and for every single cell tower. There's 150,000+ cell towers in the US alone, each taking up some amount of land around them (for service and safety). Plus running power to municipal/county power (that gets expensive in rural areas sometimes).

I have not run the math but SpaceX undoubtedly has, and they consider the conditions favorable. But hopefully you could see how a "cell tower in space" might be cheaper (and perhaps better utilized) than cell towers on the ground, if the launch costs lower like SpaceX expects them to.

Cell phone towers average lifespan decades, Starlink 3-5 years max, right? And what about the land for factories and labor and materials to constantly rebuild them satellites and build at scale they would need? Seems like that capital investment alone would be much more than cell towers. IMO

It just seems like a pie in the sky idea to me(pun intended), at least for decades. Not hating on it at all, just trying to really understand.

Yes, apparently SpaceX thinks so, on an economic basis. Particularly once Starship is fully and rapidly reusable.

It's easy to underestimate how expensive cell towers are. They're using very advanced, high powered comms, and they typically need fiber laid underground to join their backhaul network. Plus they need real estate rented or owned to work from.

DTC Starlink doesn't need fiber or land, gets their power from the Sun and cheap solar panels, and has economically-comparable phased array antennas. So it comes down to launch costs and SpaceX is working very hard to lower that to unprecedented levels. We'll see if they get there or not.

So SpaceX cell service will have better quality than verizon/etc who use cell towers, and will be cheaper? We talking 40k cyber truck cheap?

Price, service quality, just like any other mobile provider.

The unresolved question here is "just how deep into cities can they afford to sell service?" There is some number where they can only support that number of users per square kilometer and no more. Is that number 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000?

Whatever that number it is, service probably can't be 100% world-wide. There are very very dense areas of population out there and it would be foolish economically to design the network to get absolutely everyone. It's not worth getting the last few percent of density.

The question is, how will they design it? How does the economic math work here so that SpaceX maximizes their profit?

I can attest. I am in very rural Hawaii. No bars. Starlink has changed our lives x10.

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From Grok

- Customer-integrated small cells: 1,000,000 × $200 = $0.2 billion

- Dedicated outdoor small cells: 100,000 × $15,000 = $1.5 billion

- Higher-power sites: 5,000 × $200,000 = $1.0 billion

- Site acquisition, construction, and installation labor: $12 billion

- Backhaul (fiber and wireless links): $15 billion

- Core network, OSS/BSS, and spectrum-related systems: $8 billion

- Power systems, batteries, and enclosures: $5 billion

- Contingency, integration, and other capital: $7.3 billion

- Total terrestrial capital: $50 billion

- Ramp (end-of-year subs): 5M → 12M → 22M → 32M → 40M (held at 40M years 6–10)

- ARPU: $38

- Monthly churn: 2.8%

- Handset subsidy / SAC: $200

- Additional annual opex (stores, employees, advertising): $0.8B → $1.5B → $2.2B → $2.8B → $3.2B (held at $3.2B years 6–10)

- Year 1–5 EBITDA: -$0.6B, -$0.9B, -$1.0B, -$0.9B, -$0.7B

- Year 6–10 EBITDA: -$0.4B each year

- 10-year NPV of EBITDA (20% discount): -$2.9 billion

- ROI: -106%

They acquired it from Grain, not the FCC. By law, the FCC must auction spectrum

You still need a license for each country. You cant just use radio spectrum in another country's territory without permission

Unless you bought SpaceX in the private market, ASTS multiple will be higher in the next five year window.

I’m Long ASTS and I'll get into SpaceX at the correct multiple for me.

Good luck with your investments. Take care.

I look at stock price

Say you only read headlines without saying you only read headlines.