Introduction to Starlink - Elon Musk's SpaceX launches Starlink, a broadband mega constellation providing global high-speed internet coverage.

Starlink's Importance to SpaceX - Starlink is crucial to SpaceX's goal of making humanity multi-planetary and exploring bodies like the moon and Mars.

Starlink's Rapid Adoption and Global Reach - Starlink has over 2 million active customers and is available on all 7 continents and in over 60 countries.

Expansion to Enterprise Markets - Starlink expands its offerings to serve enterprise markets, including the maritime and aviation industries.

Cellular Satellite Connectivity and User-Friendly Equipment - Starlink plans to offer cellular satellite connectivity and has user-friendly equipment for easy deployment.

Geopolitical Concerns and Controversies - Starlink's growing influence raises concerns about geopolitical interference and its impact on astronomy.

Competition and Future Challenges - Starlink faces competition from Amazon's Project Kuiper and future challenges in maintaining growth.

## Newsletter

### The Rapid Growth and Impact of SpaceX's Starlink

- Elon Musk's SpaceX is known for its frequent launches, which now dominate the space industry.
- SpaceX's Starlink is a broadband mega constellation that provides global high-speed Internet coverage.
- Starlink is seen as crucial to SpaceX's overall goals of making humanity multi-planetary.
- Starlink generated $1.4 billion in revenue for SpaceX in 2022.
- It is estimated that by the end of 2023, Starlink could represent upwards of 40% of SpaceX's overall business.
- Starlink now has over 2 million active customers in over 60 countries.
- It has been praised for connecting remote parts of the world and areas hit by natural disasters.
- Starlink's growing influence has garnered both praise and condemnation.
- The astronomical community has concerns about the interference caused by the large number of satellites.
- Starlink's rapid growth is attributed to its flexibility, user-friendly equipment, and independence.
- SpaceX plans to expand Starlink's service further and launch as many as 42,000 satellites into orbit.
- Competitors like Amazon's Project Kuiper are also entering the consumer satellite Internet market.

Continue reading the full newsletter for more details on Starlink's impact and challenges.


The Rapid Growth and Impact of SpaceX's Starlink

SpaceX's answer to providing global high-speed Internet coverage using a network of thousands of satellites

SpaceX's satellite constellation for astronomical observation

Connectivity in remote parts of the world

Support for communication links with aid organizations in Gaza

Ability to connect to unmodified smartphones

Interference with optical and radio observation

Competition from other satellite networks

Interference with astronomical observation

Potential risks to aviation and people on the ground

Risk of falling space junk causing harm to people on the ground and aviation

Demand saturation and reducing equipment costs

Competition from other satellite internet providers

Environmental concerns about satellite debris

- SpaceX's Starlink, a broadband mega constellation, is crucial to the company's overall goals of making humanity multi-planetary and exploring bodies like the moon and Mars.
- Starlink generated $1.4 billion in revenue for SpaceX in 2022 and is projected to represent upwards of 40% of SpaceX's overall business by the end of 2023.
- Starlink has over 2 million active customers and is available in over 60 countries, connecting remote areas and providing essential communication during natural disasters and conflicts.
- However, Starlink's growing influence has garnered condemnation for alleged geopolitical meddling and concerns from the scientific community regarding interference with astronomical observations.
- Starlink's rapid growth is attributed to its flexible and continuous satellite launches, allowing for more subscribers to be onboarded compared to traditional satellite service providers.
- Starlink has expanded its offerings to serve enterprise markets, including maritime, aviation, and cellular satellite connectivity.
- SpaceX's vertical integration allows for independence in operations and distribution channels, but initial production costs for consumer equipment were high before being reduced.
- Starlink's ease of use and deployment has made it a crucial tool for communication in the Russian-Ukraine war, although SpaceX has expressed reservations about its technology being used offensively.
- The influence of Starlink and Elon Musk's role in the war have prompted some countries to invest in their own satellite networks.

- Some countries are investing in their own satellite networks in response to the influence of Musk's Starlink.
- The European Union is contributing 2.4 billion euros to build its own satellite network.
- China and Taiwan are also building their own satellite networks to protect against potential threats.
- Concerns from astronomers include interference with observations and radio astronomy.
- The massive number of satellites could lead to a proliferation of debris and potential risks to people on Earth.
- SpaceX has made design changes to reduce brightness and is working on providing precise position information for observers.
- There are concerns about the environmental impact of satellite disposal.
- The pace of Starlink's growth may be difficult to sustain, and its success is tied to the development of SpaceX's Starship rocket.
- Competition in the consumer satellite internet market is increasing, with Amazon's Project Kuiper expected to be a major challenger.
- LEO broadband internet systems have the potential to provide connectivity to disadvantaged and rural populations.

Starlink is SpaceX’s answer to providing global, high-speed internet coverage using a network of thousands of satellites buzzing around the planet in a region known as low Earth orbit (LEO), about 342 miles above the Earth’s surface. SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites back in 2019, and since then, adoption of the service has ballooned. Starlink now has over 2 million active customers and is available on all 7 continents and in over 60 countries. Starlink has been praised for its ability to connect remote parts of the world that would otherwise not have access to reliable internet. The service has also become indispensable in areas hit by natural disasters, and, more recently, during times of war, particularly the Russia-Ukraine war. But Starlink’s growing influence is garnering condemnation from some who say that SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk is meddling in geopolitics, while the scientific community is raising alarms of the effect of thousands of satellites on radio and optical astronomy.

Chapters:
00:00 - 03:03 Intro
03:03 - 06:36 Behind Starlink’s growth
06:36 - 10:33 Starlink and geopolitics
10:33 - 15:35 Scientific concerns
15:35 - 18:38 Future

Produced and Edited by: Magdalena Petrova
Animation: Mallory Brangan
Supervising Producer: Jeniece Pettitt
Editorial Support: Michael Sheetz
Additional Footage: Getty Images

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#CNBC

How Elon Musk’s Starlink Is Bringing In Billions For SpaceX

Elon Musk's SpaceX is known for its frequent launches, which now dominate the space industry.

But what many of these rockets are launching is just as important for the company as the launches themselves.

And we saw this garland of little lights, 1 after another, absolutely perfectly sequenced.

Starlink is SpaceX's answer to providing global high-speed Internet coverage using a network of thousands of satellites buzzing around the planet in a region known as low-Earth orbit, about 342 miles above the Earth's surface.

While Starlink may be a business unit within the broader SpaceX company, it's seen as crucial to its overall goals of making humanity multi-planetary and exploring bodies like the moon and Mars because Starlink is seen as an economic engine for the company.

SpaceX reportedly generated $1.4 billion in revenue from Starlink in 2022.

In early November 2023, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that Starlink had achieved break-even cash flow.

Starlink's importance to SpaceX overall as a company is imperative.

Euroconsole estimates that optimistically by the end of 2023, this business of Starlink could represent upwards of 40% of SpaceX's overall business.

This total would be somewhere in excess of $3 billion generated from Starlink.

SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites back in 2019, and since then, adoption of the service has ballooned.

Starlink now has over 2 million active customers and is available on all 7 continents and in over 60 countries.

Starlink has been praised for its ability to connect remote parts of the world that would otherwise not have access to reliable internet.

The service has also become indispensable in areas hit by natural disasters and more recently during times of war, particularly the Russia-Ukraine war.

Elon Musk has also said, quote, SpaceX will support communication links with internationally recognized aid organizations in Gaza.

Although Musk said in late October that no Starlink terminal has attempted to connect from Gaza yet.

But Starlink's growing influence is garnering condemnation from some who say that Musk is meddling in geopolitics.

A Ukrainian official says that you have enabled Vladimir Putin as an aggressor.

Meanwhile, the scientific community has its own concerns.

The astronomical community got concerned because the projection of the full constellation of several tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit was immediately seen as an interference to both the optical observation and to radio observation.

But none of this has slowed down SpaceX's ambitions to expand Starlink's service even further.

CNBC explores what has led to Starlink's rapid adoption and growing influence.

With around 5,000 active satellites now in orbit, Starlink satellites account for the majority of all the world's active satellites.

This growth is uncharacteristic in the sense of its magnitude, whereas prior satellite service providers have ramped up to anywhere at most between 500,000 to a little bit over a million subscribers.

And this has taken, you know, a 10-year period.

Starlink's race to 2 million subscribers has taken only the better part of 2 years.

Experts estimate that the global market for consumer satellite services, including TV, radio and broadband internet, was worth over $92 billion in 2022.

And Starlink could be in a good position to capture a big piece of this market going forward.

By design, LEO satellite constellations like Starlink are more flexible than geostationary satellite networks like those operated by legacy satellite Internet service providers Viasat and HughesNet.

These satellite service providers have been constrained on capacity.

They launch large geostationary satellites that are the size of a minibus weighing multiple tons, and they last 15 years.

So what ends up happening is they have more boom-bust cycles than Starlink, who tends to introduce capacity so far at an unrelenting pace.

So they're able to onboard more and more subscribers by continually launching new satellites.

For the incumbent players, they're kind of stuck with what they have.

Although initially conceived for the consumer segment, Starlink's offerings have expanded to serve enterprise markets, including the maritime and aviation industries.

Starlink is absolutely witnessing explosive growth in the maritime segment, having captured commitments for over 4,000 vessels by our count as of the third quarter of 2023 and now have confirmed commitments on over 400 commercial aircraft and business aviation aircraft.

SpaceX has also announced plans to offer cellular satellite connectivity to unmodified smartphones in partnership with several global telecom partners, including T-Mobile in the U.S.

It's a feature Apple introduced in the iPhone 14 in partnership with U.S.

Your phone or mine, if they're compatible with the T-Mobile network, they will be compatible with Starlink's direct-to-cell service.

So when you exit coverage areas on rural highways, national parks, just areas of poor cellular coverage, you'll be able to automatically roam onto a space-based network extension of T-Mobile's network essentially.

Another factor that's helped Starlink's rapid growth is the independence with which SpaceX is able to operate.

It makes its own satellites, it launches them and it's crafted its own service.

So it's almost completely disintermediated in terms of suppliers and its distribution channels.

So when you think about how you connect to Starlink satellites, it's a small antenna or terminal, fairly inexpensive, and all you need to do is plug it into a power source.

But making its equipment user-friendly has not come cheap for SpaceX.

Early on, the company faced steep costs to manufacture its consumer antenna.

Production was initially estimated to be as high as $3,000 per unit.

At the time, SpaceX charged consumers $499 for its equipment, meaning the company was eating a lot of the cost.

Since, SpaceX has cut the manufacturing cost of its antenna to under $600 and charges residential customers $599 to buy them.

Starlink's ease of use and deployment has made it an indispensable tool in the Russian-Ukraine war.

The big benefit of Starlink and how it's being used in Ukraine today, it is communications.

It's providing a pathway for the military, for civilians to stay connected to the outside world.

It allows a pathway for the military to communicate with each other and to provide command and control direction to their forces.

SpaceX began offering its Starlink service to Ukraine at the request of Ukraine's digital minister, Mikhail Ofeterov, back in February 2022.

Here's Musk reflecting on Starlink's importance at the 2023 Viva Technology Conference in Paris.

Russia had actually taken out all of the satellite communications and all of the ground communications except for Starlink, who was the only 1 that was still operating.

And even today, it is still the only 1 that is effective at the front lines.

And Starlink today is the backbone of the Ukrainian military communications.

1 of the other benefits that we're seeing in Ukraine from the use of Starlink is its overall resilience.

With thousands of satellites on orbit at any given time, it makes it a lot harder to jam all of those satellites or to target them all.

The other benefit is just how agile and quickly they can move.

So as Russia has sought to jam Starlink, They've been able to make software updates on the fly to mitigate the effect of that jamming and to keep people connected.

But SpaceX has expressed reservations about how its technology is being used by Ukraine offensively, specifically to coordinate drone strikes.

In February 2023, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said that while the company had been quote, really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom, she emphasized that Starlink quote, was never intended to be weaponized.

Questions about Starlink's and Elon Musk's outsized influence on the war came to a head when it was revealed that in September 2022, The SpaceX CEO had refused a request by Ukrainian military officials to turn on Starlink service in Crimea, which would have allowed for a sneak drone attack on a Russian naval fleet.

According to the author of a recent biography about the tech billionaire, Musk refused to cooperate because he was worried that a Ukrainian attack on Russian vessels would have provoked the Kremlin into launching a nuclear war.

The magnitude of his influence is not lost on Musk.

At 1 point, the SpaceX CEO wrote, quote, between Tesla, Starlink and Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in 1 head than anyone ever.

I think what's important to remember about the use of Starlink in Ukraine is there was not a contract signed with the government or with our U.S.

So there weren't necessarily terms and conditions that Starlink had to meet for the government customer.

In June 2023, the Department of Defense did sign a contract with SpaceX for its use of Starlink in Ukraine.

SpaceX has also won a Department of Defense contract worth up to $70 million to make a military-specific version of Starlink called Starshield.

Seeing the influence Musk's Starlink may have on geopolitical matters has prompted some countries to invest in their own satellite networks.

The European Union has said that it will contribute 2.4 billion euros to help build out a constellation that's expected to reach full capacity by 2027.

China is building out its own low-Earth orbit satellite internet network after the country made it clear that it didn't want Starlink services being offered to its citizens.

Taiwan, wary of Musk's ties to China through his other venture, Tesla, too, has expressed interest in a proprietary satellite network to help shield the country from a potential assault from China.

SpaceX has said that it eventually wants to launch as many as 42,000 Starlink satellites into orbit.

Competitors including Amazon, UtahSat1Web, and Telesat want to launch thousands more satellites.

And that's not even counting the several nations planning their own mega constellations.

The concern of the astronomical community is mainly due to the fact that these satellites are very numerous.

We are moving from the 2,200 satellite of 2 or 3 years ago in orbit to something that would be 40,000 or even 100,000 satellites.

So for most of the time during the night, these satellites are illuminated by the sun and so they are visible in the sky and they interfere with the observation in particular with photographs that the astronomers take for their research.

This image taken from a telescope in Chile in November 2019 illustrates the concerns from astronomers.

The telescope meant to see images of distant stars and galaxies, instead captured the light trails of 19 Starlink satellites.

Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, long lauded as a vital research tool for astronomers, have also been affected.

Benvenuti says SpaceX has been responsive to concerns from the scientific community.

He points to several design changes SpaceX made to its satellites to reduce their brightness, but says more needs to be done.

The final solution is to know exactly for every satellite the precise position in the sky at any time from any observer.

And so we are working with the companies to have this information and create a service that can be used by any observer.

And they will know when the satellite is crossing their field of view and they can plan their observation in a way that this disturbance is avoided.

Satellites also pose a threat to radio astronomy.

The interference to the radio observation is a very serious 1 and a very difficult 1 because these satellites are there to transmit information to the ground in microwaves.

So the only solution is to switch off the transmission when the satellite is in view of 1 of the large radio observatory.

So what we are trying to do now is to negotiate with the company to have they switch off the transmission when they are over these facilities.

The massive number of anticipated satellites has also led to fears of a proliferation of debris, which some experts worry may eventually render large parts of Earth's orbit unusable.

And then there's the potential risks to people on Earth as satellites are deorbited.

In the past, SpaceX has said the lifetime of a Starlink satellite is about 5 years, which means satellites must be frequently replaced to maintain service.

A recent report by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for issuing launch licenses for satellites in the U.S.

A nonprofit research group, the Aerospace Corporation, predicted that by 2035, Starlink satellites would account for 85 percent of the risk to aviation and people on the ground from falling space junk.

The report went on to say that by 2035, if Starlink satellites did not fully burn up in the atmosphere before falling back to Earth as designed, the FAA expects 1 person on the planet to be killed or injured every 2 years as a result of Starlink satellite debris.

In a letter dated October 9th, 2023, SpaceX disputed the report, saying that the report relied on, quote, a deeply flawed analysis that falsely characterizes reentry disposal risks associated with Starlink.

The letter went on to say that a lack of knowledge, a flawed methodology, and an over-reliance on outdated data contributed to, quote, distorted analysis that makes preposterous, unjustified and inaccurate claims regarding Starlink disposal risk to people on the ground and to aviation and requested that the FAA, quote, correct its report to Congress.

SpaceX's response to the FAA analysis really centered on the data that was underlying the report and pointed to the fact that not only was the data from satellites that were not Starlink, but also that the company's own track record shows that Starlink satellites completely burn up when they enter the Earth's atmosphere.

The FAA declined CNBC's request for an interview, and SpaceX did not respond to our request for an interview.

Benvenuti says that while he doesn't believe that there is a risk of stray starlink debris injuring anyone, he does have some environmental concerns.

The chemical composition of these satellites that return it to Earth, they are burned into the higher atmosphere.

What would be the effect of that is not known and is not completely fully studied.

So the impact on the space environment should be fully studied before we continue to populate the lower Earth orbit with such a large number of satellites.

There's no question that Starlink has grown a tremendous amount in just a few short years.

But whether SpaceX can keep up this pace remains to be seen.

The pace of growth that Starlink has exhibited will be difficult for them to keep up going forward and for a couple of reasons.

On the first end, there's a certain degree of demand saturation that's happening where after the service was introduced and now it's been 2 years in many markets.

The lowest hanging fruit in terms of the subscribers who are most desperate for a better service have likely already moved over to Starlink.

We've also seen evidence that Starlink is having to spur demand in the market by reducing the cost of its user terminals.

It's run promotions where its baseline costs in the U.S.

Of about $600 for the equipment have been reduced to as low as $150 in Canada in rural areas.

And the same has been done in Australia and Japan, for example, in localized, targeted campaigns.

Starlink's success, many believe, is closely tied to SpaceX's other major undertaking, Starship.

SpaceX hopes to use the massive next-generation reusable rocket to launch cargo, people and a lot more satellites.

But development of the rocket has hit a number of delays.

In order for SpaceX to keep Starlink on that hockey stick-like growth that it's seen so far, the company needs Starship to begin flying.

Starship is a much larger and more powerful rocket than the current method that SpaceX uses to get its Starlink satellites into orbit, which are its Falcon 9 rockets.

To meet both the expansion of the network by launching more and more satellites into orbit, as well as replace aging satellites over time, SpaceX needs Starship flying regularly to be able to meet that overall growth trajectory.

Competition in the consumer satellite Internet market has also been heating up.

1 service that's expected to be a big challenger is Amazon's Project Kuiper, which launched the first of its satellite prototypes in October.

Amazon plans to begin beta testing its network with customers by the end of 2024.

Amazon is adopting a similar approach in terms of its vertical integration, manufacturing the satellites, to a certain extent launching them themselves through an affiliated company, Blue Origin.

And they'll be making their own user terminals and leveraging their e-commerce platform to deliver these pieces of equipment and services remotely to the same swath of users as Starlink.

In the future, you will see much more of these types of LEO broadband internet systems.

It provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and mobility, and that is tremendously powerful, not just for national security, but to connect disadvantaged populations, rural populations that don't have that kind of connectivity today.


Speaker 0: Elon Musk's SpaceX is known for its frequent launches, which now dominate the space industry. But what many of these rockets are launching is just as important for the company as the launches themselves. Broadband mega constellation Starlink.

Speaker 1: And we saw this garland of little lights, 1 after another, absolutely perfectly sequenced. And it was Starlink.

Speaker 0: Starlink is SpaceX's answer to providing global high-speed Internet coverage using a network of thousands of satellites buzzing around the planet in a region known as low-Earth orbit, about 342 miles above the Earth's surface.

Speaker 2: While Starlink may be a business unit within the broader SpaceX company, it's seen as crucial to its overall goals of making humanity multi-planetary and exploring bodies like the moon and Mars because Starlink is seen as an economic engine for the company.

Speaker 0: SpaceX reportedly generated $1.4 billion in revenue from Starlink in 2022. In early November 2023, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that Starlink had achieved break-even cash flow.

Speaker 3: Starlink's importance to SpaceX overall as a company is imperative. Euroconsole estimates that optimistically by the end of 2023, this business of Starlink could represent upwards of 40% of SpaceX's overall business. This total would be somewhere in excess of $3 billion generated from Starlink.

Speaker 0: SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites back in 2019, and since then, adoption of the service has ballooned. Starlink now has over 2 million active customers and is available on all 7 continents and in over 60 countries. Starlink has been praised for its ability to connect remote parts of the world that would otherwise not have access to reliable internet. The service has also become indispensable in areas hit by natural disasters and more recently during times of war, particularly the Russia-Ukraine war. Elon Musk has also said, quote, SpaceX will support communication links with internationally recognized aid organizations in Gaza.

Although Musk said in late October that no Starlink terminal has attempted to connect from Gaza yet. But Starlink's growing influence is garnering condemnation from some who say that Musk is meddling in geopolitics.

Speaker 1: A Ukrainian official says that you have enabled Vladimir Putin as an aggressor. What do you say to that?

Speaker 0: Meanwhile, the scientific community has its own concerns.

Speaker 4: The astronomical community got concerned because the projection of the full constellation of several tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit was immediately seen as an interference to both the optical observation and to radio observation.

Speaker 0: But none of this has slowed down SpaceX's ambitions to expand Starlink's service even further. CNBC explores what has led to Starlink's rapid adoption and growing influence. With around 5,000 active satellites now in orbit, Starlink satellites account for the majority of all the world's active satellites.

Speaker 3: This growth is uncharacteristic in the sense of its magnitude, whereas prior satellite service providers have ramped up to anywhere at most between 500,000 to a little bit over a million subscribers. And this has taken, you know, a 10-year period. Starlink's race to 2 million subscribers has taken only the better part of 2 years.

Speaker 0: Experts estimate that the global market for consumer satellite services, including TV, radio and broadband internet, was worth over $92 billion in 2022. And Starlink could be in a good position to capture a big piece of this market going forward. By design, LEO satellite constellations like Starlink are more flexible than geostationary satellite networks like those operated by legacy satellite Internet service providers Viasat and HughesNet.

Speaker 3: These satellite service providers have been constrained on capacity. They launch large geostationary satellites that are the size of a minibus weighing multiple tons, and they last 15 years. So what ends up happening is they have more boom-bust cycles than Starlink, who tends to introduce capacity so far at an unrelenting pace. So they're able to onboard more and more subscribers by continually launching new satellites. For the incumbent players, they're kind of stuck with what they have.

Speaker 0: Although initially conceived for the consumer segment, Starlink's offerings have expanded to serve enterprise markets, including the maritime and aviation industries.

Speaker 3: Starlink is absolutely witnessing explosive growth in the maritime segment, having captured commitments for over 4,000 vessels by our count as of the third quarter of 2023 and now have confirmed commitments on over 400 commercial aircraft and business aviation aircraft.

Speaker 0: SpaceX has also announced plans to offer cellular satellite connectivity to unmodified smartphones in partnership with several global telecom partners, including T-Mobile in the U.S. It's a feature Apple introduced in the iPhone 14 in partnership with U.S. Satellite operator GlobalStar.

Speaker 3: Your phone or mine, if they're compatible with the T-Mobile network, they will be compatible with Starlink's direct-to-cell service. So when you exit coverage areas on rural highways, national parks, just areas of poor cellular coverage, you'll be able to automatically roam onto a space-based network extension of T-Mobile's network essentially.

Speaker 0: Another factor that's helped Starlink's rapid growth is the independence with which SpaceX is able to operate.

Speaker 3: Starlink is vertically integrated. It makes its own satellites, it launches them and it's crafted its own service. So it's almost completely disintermediated in terms of suppliers and its distribution channels.

Speaker 5: It's a portable system. So when you think about how you connect to Starlink satellites, it's a small antenna or terminal, fairly inexpensive, and all you need to do is plug it into a power source.

Speaker 0: But making its equipment user-friendly has not come cheap for SpaceX. Early on, the company faced steep costs to manufacture its consumer antenna. Production was initially estimated to be as high as $3,000 per unit. At the time, SpaceX charged consumers $499 for its equipment, meaning the company was eating a lot of the cost. Since, SpaceX has cut the manufacturing cost of its antenna to under $600 and charges residential customers $599 to buy them.

Starlink's ease of use and deployment has made it an indispensable tool in the Russian-Ukraine war.

Speaker 5: The big benefit of Starlink and how it's being used in Ukraine today, it is communications. It's providing a pathway for the military, for civilians to stay connected to the outside world. It allows a pathway for the military to communicate with each other and to provide command and control direction to their forces.

Speaker 0: SpaceX began offering its Starlink service to Ukraine at the request of Ukraine's digital minister, Mikhail Ofeterov, back in February 2022. Here's Musk reflecting on Starlink's importance at the 2023 Viva Technology Conference in Paris.

Speaker 1: Russia had actually taken out all of the satellite communications and all of the ground communications except for Starlink, who was the only 1 that was still operating. And even today, it is still the only 1 that is effective at the front lines. And Starlink today is the backbone of the Ukrainian military communications.

Speaker 5: 1 of the other benefits that we're seeing in Ukraine from the use of Starlink is its overall resilience. With thousands of satellites on orbit at any given time, it makes it a lot harder to jam all of those satellites or to target them all. The other benefit is just how agile and quickly they can move. So as Russia has sought to jam Starlink, They've been able to make software updates on the fly to mitigate the effect of that jamming and to keep people connected.

Speaker 0: But SpaceX has expressed reservations about how its technology is being used by Ukraine offensively, specifically to coordinate drone strikes. During a conference in Washington, D.C. In February 2023, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said that while the company had been quote, really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom, she emphasized that Starlink quote, was never intended to be weaponized. Questions about Starlink's and Elon Musk's outsized influence on the war came to a head when it was revealed that in September 2022, The SpaceX CEO had refused a request by Ukrainian military officials to turn on Starlink service in Crimea, which would have allowed for a sneak drone attack on a Russian naval fleet. According to the author of a recent biography about the tech billionaire, Musk refused to cooperate because he was worried that a Ukrainian attack on Russian vessels would have provoked the Kremlin into launching a nuclear war.

The magnitude of his influence is not lost on Musk. At 1 point, the SpaceX CEO wrote, quote, between Tesla, Starlink and Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in 1 head than anyone ever.

Speaker 5: I think what's important to remember about the use of Starlink in Ukraine is there was not a contract signed with the government or with our U.S. Department of Defense. So there weren't necessarily terms and conditions that Starlink had to meet for the government customer.

Speaker 0: In June 2023, the Department of Defense did sign a contract with SpaceX for its use of Starlink in Ukraine. SpaceX has also won a Department of Defense contract worth up to $70 million to make a military-specific version of Starlink called Starshield. Seeing the influence Musk's Starlink may have on geopolitical matters has prompted some countries to invest in their own satellite networks. The European Union has said that it will contribute 2.4 billion euros to help build out a constellation that's expected to reach full capacity by 2027. China is building out its own low-Earth orbit satellite internet network after the country made it clear that it didn't want Starlink services being offered to its citizens.

Taiwan, wary of Musk's ties to China through his other venture, Tesla, too, has expressed interest in a proprietary satellite network to help shield the country from a potential assault from China. SpaceX has said that it eventually wants to launch as many as 42,000 Starlink satellites into orbit. Competitors including Amazon, UtahSat1Web, and Telesat want to launch thousands more satellites. And that's not even counting the several nations planning their own mega constellations.

Speaker 4: The concern of the astronomical community is mainly due to the fact that these satellites are very numerous. We are moving from the 2,200 satellite of 2 or 3 years ago in orbit to something that would be 40,000 or even 100,000 satellites. So for most of the time during the night, these satellites are illuminated by the sun and so they are visible in the sky and they interfere with the observation in particular with photographs that the astronomers take for their research.

Speaker 0: This image taken from a telescope in Chile in November 2019 illustrates the concerns from astronomers. The telescope meant to see images of distant stars and galaxies, instead captured the light trails of 19 Starlink satellites. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, long lauded as a vital research tool for astronomers, have also been affected. Benvenuti says SpaceX has been responsive to concerns from the scientific community. He points to several design changes SpaceX made to its satellites to reduce their brightness, but says more needs to be done.

Speaker 4: The final solution is to know exactly for every satellite the precise position in the sky at any time from any observer. And so we are working with the companies to have this information and create a service that can be used by any observer. And they will know when the satellite is crossing their field of view and they can plan their observation in a way that this disturbance is avoided.

Speaker 0: Satellites also pose a threat to radio astronomy.

Speaker 4: The interference to the radio observation is a very serious 1 and a very difficult 1 because these satellites are there to transmit information to the ground in microwaves. So the only solution is to switch off the transmission when the satellite is in view of 1 of the large radio observatory. So what we are trying to do now is to negotiate with the company to have they switch off the transmission when they are over these facilities.

Speaker 0: The massive number of anticipated satellites has also led to fears of a proliferation of debris, which some experts worry may eventually render large parts of Earth's orbit unusable. And then there's the potential risks to people on Earth as satellites are deorbited. In the past, SpaceX has said the lifetime of a Starlink satellite is about 5 years, which means satellites must be frequently replaced to maintain service. A recent report by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for issuing launch licenses for satellites in the U.S. A nonprofit research group, the Aerospace Corporation, predicted that by 2035, Starlink satellites would account for 85 percent of the risk to aviation and people on the ground from falling space junk.

The report went on to say that by 2035, if Starlink satellites did not fully burn up in the atmosphere before falling back to Earth as designed, the FAA expects 1 person on the planet to be killed or injured every 2 years as a result of Starlink satellite debris. In a letter dated October 9th, 2023, SpaceX disputed the report, saying that the report relied on, quote, a deeply flawed analysis that falsely characterizes reentry disposal risks associated with Starlink. The letter went on to say that a lack of knowledge, a flawed methodology, and an over-reliance on outdated data contributed to, quote, distorted analysis that makes preposterous, unjustified and inaccurate claims regarding Starlink disposal risk to people on the ground and to aviation and requested that the FAA, quote, correct its report to Congress.

Speaker 2: SpaceX's response to the FAA analysis really centered on the data that was underlying the report and pointed to the fact that not only was the data from satellites that were not Starlink, but also that the company's own track record shows that Starlink satellites completely burn up when they enter the Earth's atmosphere.

Speaker 0: The FAA declined CNBC's request for an interview, and SpaceX did not respond to our request for an interview. Benvenuti says that while he doesn't believe that there is a risk of stray starlink debris injuring anyone, he does have some environmental concerns.

Speaker 4: The chemical composition of these satellites that return it to Earth, they are burned into the higher atmosphere. What would be the effect of that is not known and is not completely fully studied. So the impact on the space environment should be fully studied before we continue to populate the lower Earth orbit with such a large number of satellites.

Speaker 0: There's no question that Starlink has grown a tremendous amount in just a few short years. But whether SpaceX can keep up this pace remains to be seen.

Speaker 3: The pace of growth that Starlink has exhibited will be difficult for them to keep up going forward and for a couple of reasons. On the first end, there's a certain degree of demand saturation that's happening where after the service was introduced and now it's been 2 years in many markets. The lowest hanging fruit in terms of the subscribers who are most desperate for a better service have likely already moved over to Starlink. We've also seen evidence that Starlink is having to spur demand in the market by reducing the cost of its user terminals. It's run promotions where its baseline costs in the U.S.

Of about $600 for the equipment have been reduced to as low as $150 in Canada in rural areas. And the same has been done in Australia and Japan, for example, in localized, targeted campaigns.

Speaker 0: Starlink's success, many believe, is closely tied to SpaceX's other major undertaking, Starship. SpaceX hopes to use the massive next-generation reusable rocket to launch cargo, people and a lot more satellites. But development of the rocket has hit a number of delays.

Speaker 2: In order for SpaceX to keep Starlink on that hockey stick-like growth that it's seen so far, the company needs Starship to begin flying. Starship is a much larger and more powerful rocket than the current method that SpaceX uses to get its Starlink satellites into orbit, which are its Falcon 9 rockets. To meet both the expansion of the network by launching more and more satellites into orbit, as well as replace aging satellites over time, SpaceX needs Starship flying regularly to be able to meet that overall growth trajectory.

Speaker 0: Competition in the consumer satellite Internet market has also been heating up. 1 service that's expected to be a big challenger is Amazon's Project Kuiper, which launched the first of its satellite prototypes in October. Amazon plans to begin beta testing its network with customers by the end of 2024.

Speaker 3: Amazon is adopting a similar approach in terms of its vertical integration, manufacturing the satellites, to a certain extent launching them themselves through an affiliated company, Blue Origin. And they'll be making their own user terminals and leveraging their e-commerce platform to deliver these pieces of equipment and services remotely to the same swath of users as Starlink.

Speaker 5: In the future, you will see much more of these types of LEO broadband internet systems. It provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and mobility, and that is tremendously powerful, not just for national security, but to connect disadvantaged populations, rural populations that don't have that kind of connectivity today.

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