Spacex has launched 8,000 Starlink satellites in five years, but they are not enough. And we are beginning to understand why

Starlink satellite Internet service is the golden egg chicken that is helping Finance the Starship program and other ambitious Spacex projects. But for it to work, Spacex cannot stop launching satellites.

Starlink is a commercial success. Spacex announced Friday That Starlink had exceeded 5 million customers, two more than he had a year ago. The satellite Internet service is now available in 125 countries, and has also been integrated into more and more aircraft, ships and cruises.

With the deployment of the first Direct To Cell constellation, satellites that in addition to the usual connections include cell connectivity, Starlink has also started working as a service for telephone operators. T-Mobile already offers in the United States The option of never running out of coverage. A sum and follows for the Golden Eggs of Spacex.

Spacex numbers. According to a Payload reportSpacex invoiced $ 13,1 billion in 2024, 8,200 million of which came from Starlink. It is almost double what Starlink had entered the previous year.

More difficult to calculate is how much it costs Spacex to put the satellites into orbit. We know that Starlink is a profitable businessbut we do not know the internal cost of launching a Falcon 9 rocket full of satellites. We know that it is much less than other rockets cost, because their first stage is able to land and take off at least 26 times; But not how much.

We have, yes, a starting point. Elon Musk said a few years ago in an interview they aspired to A cost of 15 million dollars by launch. Taking into account that Spacex launched 134 Falcon 9 rockets last year, and that 96 were Starlink missions, at least 1,440 million dollars of Starlink’s revenues were used to cover the launch expenses of the satellites, to which the manufacturing costs, jobs, etc.

The elephant in the room. In total, Spacex has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites, of which 6,000 are still active. The others no longer work or have burned in the atmosphere. Except for failure (such as the geomagnetic storm that caught a Starlink lot), satellites have a five -year -old useful life.

The elephant in the room is that this useful life depends mainly on a physical appearance: satellites unfold in the low terrestrial orbit and reduce their height due to the effect of orbital decay, until disintegrating by friction with the atmosphere. Spacex cannot stop launching satellites. And you have to do it at an even greater pace to continue adding customers, while replenishing the satellites that are resenting.

100 reentrades in a month. Five years have passed since Spacex began to regularly launch Starlink satellites, and the effects are being noticed. According to an analysis by astrophysician Jonathan McDowell, At least one Starlink satellite He resents in the atmosphere every day, but January beat the record with 120 resentments.

Many occur during the day, so they are not visible. Those that occur during the night are often a show of fleeting stars produced by the metals that vaporize In the atmosphere.

The economic and environmental implications of all this are about to see, because Spacex is the only company that usually reuses its rockets and, therefore, the first to build a satellite constellation as large as Starlink. Perhaps the entry into Starship service changes the equation, but the order of the factors is clear: Starlink and the constellations that arrive later are condemned to eternally replenish the satellites that come out for those who enter.

Image | Spacex, that

In Xataka | Now any US smartphone can be connected for free to Starlink satellites. From July it will have a price