Elon Musk’s Revolutionary Internet Service Continues to Grow

Thanks to its unrelenting launch schedule, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched 3,009 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit since 2018, making the eccentric billionaire’s dream of providing satellite internet access to everyone on Earth tantalizingly close.

SpaceX officially crossed the 3,000 satellite mark on Tuesday when a Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered a payload of 52 satellites to their preordained orbits 340 miles above the Earth.

Gizmodo’s Passant Rabie reports:

Falcon 9 is the hardest working rocket in the game, with the latest launch marking the 35th Falcon 9 mission in the current year alone. The majority of these missions have been to deploy more Starlink satellites to orbit, as SpaceX continues to build out its satellite megaconstellation. Together, the impressively large fleet of interconnected satellites provide internet connectivity across the world. SpaceX’s Elon Musk is hoping to launch a whopping total of 42,000 satellites to Earth orbit, providing connectivity to users across land, air, and sea. So far, the Federal Communications Commission has approved 12,000 Starlinks for launch, with the remaining 30,000 pending approval.

Before you start worrying about space junk making spaceflight even risker (think “Gravity”), SpaceX says the Starlink satellites’ operational altitude is low enough to give in to Earth’s atmospheric drag after a few years.

The intense heat from the friction caused by falling through the air at thousands of miles per hour will cause the satellites to disintegrate in the upper atmosphere.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be any problems, as Rabie notes:

SpaceX is miles ahead of the competition when it comes to flying its internet satellites to space, an accomplishment largely due to the fact that SpaceX is both a rocket company and a satellite company. OneWeb, a SpaceX competitor in this realm, has even turned to SpaceX to help it launch its satellites to orbit to form a much smaller internet constellation consisting of 648 satellites. Amazon is also planning to launch a fleet of 3,236 satellites for Project Kuiper. The company recently booked 83 trips to launch its satellites on board rockets from Arianespace, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance, while omitting SpaceX from the mix.

As these companies rush to build out their artificial constellations across the skies, astronomers are getting increasingly worried that the new internet satellites will continue to pose a threat to observations of the cosmos. SpaceX has made efforts in the past to dim the brightness of its satellites, but with bigger and brighter satellites planned ahead, it’s not looking good for future views of the night sky.

One thing’s for certain — we’ve come a long way from the days of Sputnik.

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