Starlink Is Riding Down the Wright’s Law Cost Curve

Elon Musk is using his billions to relentlessly discover new knowledge

Gale L. Pooley — Feb 11, 2025

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.

Cato Institute | Communications

Starlink Connects Millions of People in Argentina

Apr 13, 2026

“When Javier Milei became president of Argentina in December 2023, one his first measures as part of a package of wide-ranging deregulations was to open up the economy to satellite internet. (I wrote about that and his broader deregulatory push here.)

At a meeting I attended last month with a small group of economists, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, presented the graph above. It shows how satellite internet use exploded once the government lifted its ban, which had, until then, benefited a politically powerful local internet provider.”

From Cato Institute.

New York Times | Space

Artemis II Successfully Kicks off 10-Day Lunar Mission

Apr 3, 2026

“A towering orange-and-white NASA rocket blasted off from Florida on Wednesday evening, lifting four astronauts toward space and transporting spectators’ imaginations to a future in which Americans may again set foot on the moon.

As they did during the heyday of the Apollo program, which first put men on the lunar surface, spectators squeezed onto the beaches along Central Florida’s Space Coast. The crowds cheered when the powerful rocket launched into the clear sky at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time. It traveled eastward, over the Atlantic Ocean, on a journey that will take astronauts around the moon but not land there.”

From New York Times.

404 Media | Space

Complete Set of DNA Ingredients Discovered on Asteroid

Mar 27, 2026

“Scientists have discovered all five nucleobases—the fundamental components of DNA and RNA—in pristine samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The finding strengthens the case that the ingredients for life are abundant in the solar system and may have found their way to Earth from space.”

From 404 Media.

New York Times | Space

Asteroid-Smashing NASA Mission Sped up Space Rocks’ Journey

Mar 20, 2026

“In 2022, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid named Dimorphos. The goal of this interplanetary smashup was to prove that if a killer space rock ever threatened Earth in the future, humans could deflect it and save our world.

The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, worked: The crash shortened Dimorphos’s orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos, by 32 minutes. It also generated a giant cloud of dust and debris captured by telescopes around the world and in space.

A new study shows that DART achieved more than that. Scientists found that the spacecraft’s impact shifted not only the orbit of Dimorphos around its parent asteroid, Didymos, but also the trajectory of the pair around our sun.”

From New York Times.