In contrast to Moore’s Law, which is based on time, Wright’s Law predicts that with every doubling of cumulative product output, costs per unit will decrease 20 to 30 percent. SpaceX continues to ride down the Wright’s Law cost curve for satellite bandwidth capacity. ARK Invest estimates a 45 percent decline for every cumulative doubling in gigabits per second in orbit. They report:

Since 2004, the cost of satellite bandwidth has dropped 7,500-fold, from $300,000,000 to $40,000/Gigabits per second (Gbps). Thanks to Starship, costs could fall another 40-fold to ~$1,000/Gbps by 2028. Because 1Gbps can serve 200 customers at a capital cost of ~$1,000/Gbps, SpaceX could recoup its Starship investment with a one-time charge of $5 per customer.

SpaceX’s Starlink V3 program delivers 1 terabit per second (Tbps) of downlink speed, 10 times that of V2 Minis. A Starship V3 launch should add 60 Tbps to the network, over 20 times a V2 Mini launch.

As of September 2024, Starlink had reported four million customers globally, up from a million subscribers in December 2022. This means Starlink is growing by 100 percent each year. At this rate, everyone on the planet will be using Starlink in 14 years.

Today, Starlink Residential costs around $400 for the hardware and $50 a month for unlimited data service. If you’re a typical blue-collar worker, you’re earning $37 an hour in wages and benefits. The monthly time price is 1.35 hours ($50 ÷ $37), or around 2.7 minutes a day. For this time, you get access to a multitrillion-dollar communication-information system. Nice.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

“The first humans to Mars might someday ride a rocket propelled by a nuclear reactor to their destination. But before that can happen, nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) technologies still have quite a way to go before we could blast astronauts through space on a nuclear rocket.

However, earlier this month, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS), in collaboration with NASA, achieved an important milestone on the road to using NTP rockets. At NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, General Atomics tested a new NTP reactor fuel to find out if the fuel could function in the extreme conditions of space.

According to company leadership, the tests showed that the fuel can withstand the harsh conditions of spaceflight.”

From Space.com.

“On Thursday morning, at a time when most people in the United States were sleeping, Jeff Bezos’ space company sent its first rocket into orbit.

At 2:03 a.m. Eastern time, seven powerful engines ignited at the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. The flames illuminated night into day at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, barely moving at first, nudged upward and then accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, lit up in blue, the color of combustion of the rocket’s methane fuel.

Thirteen minutes later, the second stage of New Glenn reached orbit.

The launch was a major success for Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos’ rocket company. It should quiet critics who say that the company has been too slow compared with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has dominated global spaceflight industry in recent years. New Glenn could prove a credible competitor with Mr. Musk’s company and win launch contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense, as well as commercial contracts.”

From New York Times.

“India said it has successfully executed the first space docking experiment, becoming only the fourth country in the world to master a critical technology required for other ambitious projects…

For the Space Docking Experiment mission, or SpaDeX, India had put into orbit two small satellites on Dec 30 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Andhra Pradesh state. The technology allows India to transfer payloads, lunar samples, or eventually humans in space from one satellite or spacecraft to another.”

From Bangkok Post.