SpaceX, the aerospace company of Elon Musk, has many open fronts. Among them, one of the best known is Starlink: your project to offer satellite internet and thus connect the most remote places via broadband. High speed connection from anywhere on the planet.
At the end of October, after a private beta for employees – which they say showed “good results in both latency and download speeds” -, Starlink started its services publicly. A beta version to which “only a privileged few” had access, mainly in the north of the United States and in Canada.
Now, the company is expanding this public test internationally. and offering early access to the service in UK. The next step may be to bring it to Spain, since public records show that SpaceX has registered Starlink subsidiaries in our country – as well as many others: Austria, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, France, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Greece , Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines and South Africa.
“Earlier this month we expanded our ‘Better than Nothing Beta’ program to include customers from across the pond in the UK,” said the lead manufacturing engineer for SpaceX, Jessie Anderson, last Wednesday during the launch of a new package of 60 satellites -with which it adds a total of 17 shipments-.
And he added: “In the United States and Canada, and now in the United Kingdom, we are focused on rural and remote areas where there is no easy access to fiber or cable”.
Anderson noted that, in addition to people in rural areas of northern USA, SpaceX has already included the city of Marysville, Ohio, and the Wise County Public School District of Virginia in Starlink service.
In the province of Ontario, in Canada, the rural indigenous community of Pikangikum First Nation became the first in the country to receive satellite internet service from SpaceX.
The company has also requested access to the Japan and Musk has spoken about the arrival of Starlink to India and the Caribe.
How much?
The beta of the service in the US and Canada has an initial cost of $ 499, which includes the ‘Starlink kit’ with a user terminal – the parabolic antenna, which is automatically oriented towards the satellites – and a router WiFi to connect to these. Afterwards, the price of this satellite internet is $ 99 per month. In the UK it is worth 89 pounds a month and the cost of the kit is 439 pounds.
The Starlink network is an ambitious endeavor, and SpaceX has said that it will cost to build 10 billion dollars or more, although they estimate that it could generate up to $ 30 billion a year.
How does Starlink work?
Let’s remember that SpaceX started this project in May 2019, when he launched his first satellites to space. Currently, with its last trip last Wednesday, the company has already more than 1,000 satellites in orbitAlthough the company’s goal is to deploy 12,000 – that is for now, since Musk has requested approval for another 30,000 more.
They are at a lower latitude than other satellites -550 kilometers versus 1,000 kilometers or more-, they have a compact design and weigh about 260kg. They have four very powerful antennas that give them “high throughput” and can be quickly redirected.
Starlink satellites deorbit themselves at the end of their useful life and burn in the atmosphere of the earth in a period of one to five years.
They are made up of solar panels and ion propulsion systems powered by krypton, which is what allows them to move around and dispose of at the end of their useful life. Further, have star tracker, which gives them the ability to position themselves exactly to ensure “the best possible operation of the broadband“, and have a sensor that detects debris to avoid colliding with them.
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