Elon Musk’s Starlink Receives More Than 500 000 Pre-orders!
Elon Musk’s Starlink Receives More Than 500 000 Pre-orders! SpaceX has received more than 500 000 pre-orders for its Starlink satellite Internet service and anticipates no technical problems meeting the demand, founder Elon Musk said on Tuesday.
“Only limitation is high density of users in urban areas,” Musk tweeted, responding to a post from a CNBC reporter that said the US$99 deposits SpaceX took for the service were fully refundable and did not guarantee service. “More of a challenge when we get into the several million user range,” Musk said.
SpaceX has not set a date for Starlink’s service launch, but commercial service would not likely be offered soon as it had previously planned. The company plans eventually to deploy 12 000 satellites and has said the Starlink constellation will cost it roughly $10-billion.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last month approved SpaceX’s plan to deploy some Starlink satellites at a lower Earth orbit than planned but included a number of conditions to ensure the plan’s safety.
SpaceX is developing a low latency, broadband internet system to meet the needs of consumers across the globe. Enabled by a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites, Starlink will provide fast, reliable internet to populations with little or no connectivity, including those in rural communities and places where existing services are too expensive or unreliable.
SpaceX plans to sell some of the satellites for military, scientific, or exploratory purposes. The SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington houses the Starlink research, development, manufacturing, and orbit control. The cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in May 2018 to be at least US$10 billion.
Astronomers have raised concerns about the constellations’ effect on ground-based astronomy and how the satellites will add to an already jammed orbital environment. It ignited conversations about the ethics of a single company unilaterally changing the night sky’s appearance.
