Prices are going up at SpaceX, with the company citing inflationary pressures as the reason.
The Elon Musk -led space company’s Starlink unit, which uses satellites to provide broadband internet connections, recently said the price of its user kit for clients with deposits already in is increasing to $549 from $499, while new customers will pay $599, according to a message viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The monthly charge for the service will increase to $110 from $99, the message said.
“The sole purpose of these adjustments is to keep pace with rising inflation,” Starlink said. The message didn’t specify what input costs drove the change, but said that Starlink has quickly added new infrastructure since October 2020, including tripling the number of satellites in orbit, and made improvements to its network.
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, Mr. Musk said in a tweet that SpaceX, as well as Tesla Inc., the electric-vehicle manufacturer he leads, are “seeing significant recent inflation pressure in raw materials & logistics.”
Users tap into Starlink via a terminal that SpaceX ships to them. The company has been adding ground infrastructure for the service and now has 250,000 subscribers, an executive for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, said at a recent industry conference.
Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX also raised prices it charges to get customers’ assets to orbit. SpaceX’s ride-share program, in which satellite operators reserve space on a rocket with unrelated operators, now lists costs as low as $1.1 million for certain launches on its website, up from a previous price of $1 million. SpaceX said on its website it made the change in March “to account for excessive levels of inflation.”
Meanwhile, a document on the company’s website now lists the standard price to reserve the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for certain launches at $67 million, compared with an older guide that showed that cost at $62 million.
SpaceX also boosted prices for Falcon Heavy, a bigger rocket than the Falcon 9, to $97 million from $90 million, the documents show.
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