We all know that Elon Musk is a mad genius, who's out to disrupt a variety of industries. And in terms of cheap global Internet access, he wants to do more than what Jio did for India -- launch a bunch of satellites in space and offer broadband connectivity to every corner of the planet.
It's an ambitious plan, still in its early stages, but the third SpaceX launch of the Starlink mission successfully happened, placing 60 satellites in earth's orbit earlier this week.
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The latest delivery of 60 satellites of Elon Musk's Starlink project were hauled up in space by the space company's Falcon 9 rocket, placing them somewhere over Antarctica and Australia above the earth.
The whole thing was a resounding success, bringing the total number of Starlink satellites hovering in low-earth-orbits to about 180. It's still a far cry from where Elon Musk needs to get in terms of total number of satellites to be able to deliver on his promise of providing cheap, accessible, ever present Internet connectivity covering the entire expanse of the planet.
In October last year, Musk claimed it would require between 30,000 to over 40,000 satellites in space to cover the entire planet with his Starlink internet coverage -- a figure that has given astronomers and space enthusiasts a lot to worry, as that's a lot of objects circling the earth all the time.
The satellites, however, are only there to beam down the Internet. If you want to connect to the signal, you will need some sort of special hardware, like a Starlink Terminal, which Elon Musk dropped a big hint about.
The Starlink Internet's ground-based device ¡°looks like a thin, flat, round UFO on a stick,¡± according to Elon Musk. So imagine a circular-shaped disc on top of an antenna that latches onto the Starlink Internet Network.
There's no doubt that Elon Musk and SpaceX's goal is to move fast and control the high space ground in terms of global Internet services, an area that's not without competition, including London-based startup OneWeb and Amazon's Project Kuiper.