It’s been an exciting week for Elon Musk. First, a leaked email showed Tesla was on course to beat its Q4 2018 record in Q2 2019. On Friday, BBC News reported, his SpaceX company launched 60 internet satellites. It is the start of the firm’s rollout of its orbiting broadband program.
A Falcon-9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida late on Thursday, packed with 60 satellites capable of giving users on the ground high-speed connections to the internet. Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s firm aims eventually to loft nearly 12,000 spacecraft for its “Starlink” network. SpaceX is one of several commercial outfits with permission to fly an internet mega-constellation. Others include the UK-based start-up OneWeb, which began its roll-out in February with six operational spacecraft.
Check It Out: SpaceX Launches 60 Internet Satellites
And if one is concerned about space junk falling to earth- forget about it; 99.999% of junk will burn up before it hits the earth and the rest you will never see or be living around. It’s a numbers game; you have a better chance at winning the lotto or getting hit by lightning if you even SEE anything fall to earth let alone get hit by a piece that doesn’t burn up. Don’t forget these sats are only 500 lbs – little things that could never make it back to earth’s surface. ⏚
Another opportunity for Apple – their own network – but of course not. Not when you have no imagination above milking iOS toys. Low earth orbit sats like we’re talking about are no problem because the debris can fall back to earth as they decay or collide if that ever happens and of course it’s debris not the sats that is the problem that could cause more debris – see the Kessler syndrome – but either way no biggie as sooner or later those low energy low earth things will simply fall back to earth. When they graduate to higher less friction prone orbits any decay would take millennia to fall to earth. Still, there is too much space out there to worry about as of now and standards will dictate how a sat dies to mitigate debris. Kind of leaves a new opportunity to have space vehicles just go into synch orbit and pick up sats ready to be retired when it makes sense in any way shape or form in the future. 📺
Very mixed feelings on this.
On one hand the idea of a high speed connection anywhere is very enticing. Cut the cable company out. No more hunting for a WiFi spot I can leach off. No more asking myself if this video is really worth taking a bite out of my expensive Cellular Data.
On the other hand near earth space is getting very crowded. Thousands of pieces, from spent boosters, to dropped bolts, to dead satellites, to the ISS, to live GPS beacons, communications satellites, spy satellites, weather satellites, and on and on, are up there already. The last thing I think we want is 12,000 more satellites in LEO. Multiply this by four or five, the number of companies looking to built other similar networks, and it would make a bad situation massively worse. .