Oddly enough, almost half of the world population is still offline in 2020. This is completely unacceptable for the modern era we’re all living in, and SpaceX started an ambitious plan on May 23, 2019, for solving the situation once and for all.
Elon Musk’s company launched 60 Starlink satellites into orbit at that time with the purpose of providing internet access to remote regions across the planet. The act is just a tiny part of a much bigger plan, one that aims to send 12,000 Starlink satellites into orbit. And at almost a year since the first flight, results are finally on their way.
Download speeds of 25Mbps
Millions of Americans have DSL connections that assure them speeds of only several kilobytes per second. SpaceX is preparing to assure download speeds of at least 25Mbps to millions of homes. Elon Musk’s company showed within a presentation internet performance tests that were featuring download speeds between 102Mbps and 103Mbps, upload speeds of about 40.5Mbps, and a latency of 18 to 19 milliseconds.
SpaceX itself declared that it’s building Starlink satellites at an out-of-this-world pace: 120 units every month. SpaceX also declared for the Federal Communications Commission that it has invested the amount of over $70 million for developing thousands of consumer user terminals each month.
Sadly enough, only 4.57 billion people around the world are using an internet connection in our days. The most offline countries are India with 685 million people and China with 582 million people. If everything will go according to SpaceX’s plan, the space agency will launch about 12,000 satellites into orbit for the upcoming years. Not to mention that there’s even a possible extension to 42,000 satellites.
Another ambitious plan of SpaceX besides the Starlink satellites is represented by the colonization of Mars for the far future. The first steps in that direction will be taken pretty soon by NASA if all goes well with the Artemis program.
