SpaceX’s Starlink factory in Bastrop, Texas, is now the company’s largest hardware manufacturing unit, and is in business and expanding further. Local comments suggest the factory, which opened in July 2023 and is adjacent to Elon Musk’s Boring Company, is approximately double in size.

The Texas factory is capable of producing 90,000 Starlink broadband terminals per week, or 4.68 million annually. This is additional to SpaceX’s existing manufacturing facility in California although there is some confusion as to whether other factories including a R&D facility at Redmond, Washington State or El Segundo, California, will continue producing terminals. Musk has stated that he intends exiting California.

Starlink, in data published on May 20th, was connecting more than 3 million customers and up from 2.3 million customers as at December 2023. Those subscriber/customer numbers, showing growth of about 150,000 clients per month, have not been updated since May.

Meanwhile, the FCC regulator has asked SpaceX for more information on Starlink’s application for a waiver which would allow satellite transmissions on its Direct-to-Cellular (D2C) ambitions. The FCC asked: “Please explain at what point in SpaceX’s planned deployment of its Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) network it will be unable to comply with section 25.202(k)(1) without suffering negative impacts. Please provide this information both in terms of number of SCS-equipped satellites in orbit and the approximate month/year in which SpaceX would expect to reach deployment of this number of SCS-equipped satellites.”

SpaceX is already authorised to place into orbit 7,500 D2C satellites. The FCC wants a response by September 16th.

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Tags: elon musk, FCC, starlink, texas