Comment by gregw2
16 hours ago
Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer:
"The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory.
Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink kits and ship them right out to the customer zones."
https://www.teslaoracle.com/2025/03/06/spacex-bastrop-factor...
So they form the plastic (already processed) using machines they've imported, and then put pre-populated PCBs with components made in China inside them? Hardly soup to nuts manufacturing.
I've worked in a niche assembly line in North America where we populated some of the board components in-house, but they were etched in batches off-site.
The components aren't made in China
This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant, it's a typical Musk exaggeration.
The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping costs because the dishes do take up volume.
But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're making and assembling the PCB in house, but the components originate from a lot of suppliers and there are a lot of components on it [1]. Personally, I'd guess the latter, given that the PCB contains a lot of pretty novel tech [2] of which I'm certain that SpaceX wants to be able to iterate on as fast as they can, without having to wait for even a day or two for a new plane full of PCBs from China.
[1] https://wccftech.com/starlink-user-terminal-apple-supplier-t...
[2] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/11/starlink-satellite-dish-x-ra...