Elon Musk has a deadline of 2027 to surround Earth with Starlink high-speed Internet satellites – but the service would work much sooner than that.

Mark Handley / University College London / Reuters / Mike Blake / Business Insider

• SpaceX Plans is about to launch its first Internet Starlink satellites.

• Starlink could bring fast, cheap l & # 39; Internet remote areas as well as moving vehicles such as airplanes, ships and cars. It would also allow international teleconferencing and online gaming to proceed almost without delay.

• The plan plans to launch nearly 12,000 satellites into orbit, but Elon Musk said that a fraction of it would be needed to start selling the service.
• According to Musk, the initial service should be operational in about a year, with a global service a few months later, and a profitable service – about 1,000 satellites – a few months later.

• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

Starlink – the planned network of thousands of interconnected SpaceX satellites – could become a functioning global Internet service provider sooner than expected.

The ultimate goal of the project is to launch nearly 12,000 satellites in orbit around the Earth, to link them with laser beams and to give customers access to the Internet through flat antennas the size of the Earth. a pizza, called by SpaceX end-user terminals.

If this is the case, such a floating mesh network could allow access to the Internet at very high speed and low offset in almost every corner of the world.

This week, SpaceX was to launch the first 60 Starlink satellites in orbit. But the launch has been delayed twice, and now Musk says it will take place in about a week. The delay, says SpaceX, will leave time for a software update and give engineers a chance to "check all at once".

Elon Musk / SpaceX via TwitterPrior to the planned launch, SpaceX founder Elon Musk revealed new details regarding Starlink's long-term plan. Musk inherited the idea that it was necessary to launch nearly 12,000 satellites to set up a fully functional Internet service that would bring money back to his company.

"For the system to be economically viable, it actually takes about 1,000 satellites," Musk said in a phone conversation with reporters. "Which is obviously a lot of satellites, but it's a lot less than 10,000 or 12,000".

At present, about 2,000 operational satellites are in orbit around the Earth (although several thousand dead satellites are in cemetery orbits). SpaceX plans to launch about 60 satellites at a time with its Falcon 9 rocket and wants to launch at least one Starlink mission per month over the next two years, based on figures provided by Musk.

"I think that a year and a half or two years from now, if all goes well, SpaceX will probably have more satellites in orbit than all the other satellites combined," he said. "Basically, the majority of satellites in orbit will belong to SpaceX."

But Starlink could be functional even sooner than that. If there are no major problems with the satellites, significant launch delays or end-user terminal manufacturing problems, the first customers can have access in the next 12 months .

An "initial" service in the US – a service that Musk said SpaceX could sell – should be possible with 400 satellites in orbit, according to Musk. At the same time, a global and "significant" service should be provided with about 800 satellites, he said.

"We will start by selling our service around the 400 satellites," said Musk. "We will probably start making connectivity sales in advance, if things are going well, probably later this year or early next year."

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the types of frequencies that companies like SpaceX can use for telecommunication devices, has set the company deadlines for the launch of its Starlink satellites.

SpaceX has until April 2024 to deploy half of its 4,400 satellites in low Earth orbit and the remainder in April 2027. For the remaining 7,500 other satellites "very" in low Earth orbit, SpaceX has up to November 2024 to launch half, and November 2027 to send the rest. If SpaceX does not meet these contractual deadlines with the US government, the FCC may choose to freeze the maximum number of satellites regardless of where it is operating in orbit.

Musk said Starlink's request would determine how many satellites SpaceX will launch. Indeed, each satellite will have about 1 terabit of functional bandwidth, or enough to stream 4K video streaming to about 1,100 people at a time.

If the 1,000 Starlink satellites in orbit needed to keep the project in the shadows fail to meet the demand, and the company must launch more, according to Musk, it would be "a very good thing".

"This means that there is a lot of demand for the system," he said.

However, Musk has repeatedly insisted that his chronological estimates depend on many things that would go well and very little that went wrong, especially with the first 60 satellites.

"It's possible that some of these satellites are not working," he said. "So we do not want to count anything until it hatches."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The biggest challenge of Elon Musk will not be Tesla or SpaceX – here's why

See also:

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk has revealed new details on Starlink, a plan to surround the Earth with 12,000 high-speed Internet satellites. Here is how it could work.

DO NOT MISS: SpaceX has confirmed that its Crew Dragon spacecraft for NASA has been "destroyed" by a recent test. Here is what we learned about explosive failure.