If you look at it through the eyes of just Starlink though it makes a lot of sense. The new v3 sats do solve a lot of the problems with Starlink in more (suburban) areas with much more capacity per sat.
In a happy path if Starship works and v3 works, each Starship launch would launch ~60Tbit/sec of downstream capacity and ~10Tbit/sec of upstream (ideal world figures yada yada).
With falcon 9 and v2 mini, each launch provides ~2Tbit/sec of downstream and ~0.2Tbit/sec of upstream.
So roughly 30x the downstream and 50x the upstream.
The upstream is probably the critical part to improve as well for congestion (usually upstream gets saturated before downstream in most retail ISP configs, on asymmetrical technologies like DOCSIS and causes terrible user experience).
So Spaceship could be ~40x the cost per launch of Falcon 9 and it would still make sense financially. I assume it won't be anywhere near that. And this doesn't take into account how much further Starlink will be on all the other competitors that are trying to spring up.
I think if you ignore everything else and just focus on Starlink (which has the potential to be a $100bn/yr business easily) it is worth them rolling the dice. Whether it actually works or not is interesting to discuss - but figures like $500m/launch is really pocket change for the scale/potential scale that Starlink operates in.
In a happy path if Starship works and v3 works, each Starship launch would launch ~60Tbit/sec of downstream capacity and ~10Tbit/sec of upstream (ideal world figures yada yada).
With falcon 9 and v2 mini, each launch provides ~2Tbit/sec of downstream and ~0.2Tbit/sec of upstream.
So roughly 30x the downstream and 50x the upstream.
The upstream is probably the critical part to improve as well for congestion (usually upstream gets saturated before downstream in most retail ISP configs, on asymmetrical technologies like DOCSIS and causes terrible user experience).
So Spaceship could be ~40x the cost per launch of Falcon 9 and it would still make sense financially. I assume it won't be anywhere near that. And this doesn't take into account how much further Starlink will be on all the other competitors that are trying to spring up.
I think if you ignore everything else and just focus on Starlink (which has the potential to be a $100bn/yr business easily) it is worth them rolling the dice. Whether it actually works or not is interesting to discuss - but figures like $500m/launch is really pocket change for the scale/potential scale that Starlink operates in.