SpaceX has reached a new milestone with its Starlink business, producing 10 million dishes for the satellite internet service.
“It took almost 4 years to build our first 5 million kits, and we doubled that in about 11 months,” Sujay Soman, a senior facilities manager at SpaceX, wrote in a LinkedIn post that appears to have since been deleted or made private. It comes as SpaceX announced this week that its subscriber numbers had crossed 6 million.
(Credit: LinkedIn)
The company initially began manufacturing Starlink terminals from SpaceX’s offices in Hawthorne, California. But in late 2023, it opened a new factory in Bastrop, Texas, dedicated to producing satellite internet dishes.
In March, SpaceX reported the Bastrop facility had the capacity to churn out 15,000 Starlink dishes per day, or nearly 5.5 million per year. So it won’t be long before the company doubles the assembled Starlink dish output to 20 million. (It’s a huge contrast from 2021 when SpaceX was producing only 5,000 dishes per week.)
In addition, the Bastrop site is poised to expand by over 1 million square feet this year to 1.7 million square feet. Last year, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell also said she expected the Bastrop facility to become the “largest printed circuit board manufacturing facility in the entire United States.”
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The growing manufacturing output appears to be benefiting consumers by reducing the cost of the hardware. Since April, SpaceX has offered free standard Starlink dishes, which normally cost $349, in certain parts of the US if customers commit to one year of service. The residential Starlink service costs $120 per month in the US, but a “residential lite” plan drops the fee to $80 per month in exchange for slower speeds.
Elsewhere, the manufacturing output promises to help SpaceX expand Starlink in other markets, including India, where it’s close to launching commercial operations.
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About Michael Kan
Senior Reporter
