SpaceX Deploys 52 More Starlink Satellites, 3598

Good afternoon, I’m still reporting on Starlink from my YouTube 2-week suspension.
Most of us didn’t know what the heck Elon Musk was up to when he first started launching not one satellite at a time, but 54 at a time, then, on top of that, sending the Falcon 9 launch vehicle back to earth to land on a huge barge in the middle of the pitching Atlantic ocean – almost always successfully.
What Starlink is up to is to fill a dire need for high-speed internet services to the entire world and – hopefully – for a fraction of the current price. Right now, only a small percentage of the planet has high-speed internet – just the wealthy and well-populated areas.
What is high-speed internet speed? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defines high-speed internet as 25 megabits per second down and 3 Mbps up.
SpaceX promises that download speeds will hit 210 and presumably the same for upload speeds. That’s faster than 95% of existing internet connections in the U.S. right now.
As of today, SpaceX has deployed 1,729 of these satellites into orbit, and says that 12,000 more will be launched in the next decade, and eventually as many as 42,000 will be deployed into low-earth orbit, between 210 miles and 690 miles high.
Why low-earth orbit? Because the lower the orbits, the closer the satellites will be to ground stations and their connection to the wired internet, and therefore the less time it takes a signal to make the round trip up and back to earth.
The Star Link system just opened up its beta test last week, started starting with services to some of the most underserved areas. Prices are expected to run around $100 per month for the service, with initial set up fees of about $200 for a small dish and a router.
More info at www.starlink.com.
The following is the final 11 minutes of the countdown, through the return of the first stage for a successful landing on the drone barge. The host, a SpaceX systems engineer, provides a lot of interesting detail on the system and the launch.
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I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of world freedom. Good day.