SpaceX plan to introduce fast broadband in the world begins now

Another Elon Musk project aimed at shaking an entire industry starts Wednesday night when a SpaceX Falcon 9 launches the first batch of satellites aimed at the company's Starlink broadband network.

SpaceX has launched a pair of prototype satellites for service last year, but these are the first small satellites of the "production" version of Starlink. They will be part of a constellation designed to possibly include thousands of flying data links broadcasting Internet access worldwide.

Earlier in the week, Musk tweeted an image of the 60 satellites all crammed into the fairing of a Falcon 9, which also passed a test shoot and is ready to be launched from 22:30. AND Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Air Force Air Base in Florida.

Musk also warned that the expectations for this first launch should be temperate, saying "a lot of things will probably go wrong". He added that six more launches of 60 satellites will be needed for the service to even start offering "minor" coverage.

SpaceX hopes to eventually build the mega constellation of 12,000 satellites. It is essentially a new approach to the provision of commercial satellite internet.

More other satellite internet services, like Viasat or HughesNet, are based on a handful of large satellites in geostationary orbit, more than 35,000 km from the Earth.

Signals and data come and go between these satellites and customers' satellite dishes, as well as larger ground stations on Earth, to bring the Internet to the homes of hundreds of thousands of customers, often in rural areas with few other options.

Traveling thousands of kilometers from a high orbit can cause high latency levels when using satellite internet, as anyone who has already skyped with such a connection will tell you. Real-time video calls and games can become difficult in case of late and late in the line, due to the fact that the data must travel in space again and again.

The idea behind Starlink is to use satellites in a much lower orbit to reduce this delay time. It sounds good, but there is a trap. Because the satellites will be much closer to the surface of the Earth, they will only be able to "see" much smaller areas, so it will take a much larger number to cover the entire planet.

In its application to the Federal Communications Commission, the company plans to deploy an army of more than 4,400 small satellites in low Earth orbit between 1,100 and 1,325 km above us. In April, the FCC also authorized the deployment of more than 1,500 of these satellites at a minimum distance of 550 km to reduce unwanted waste in space. (Satellites will enter the atmosphere and burn out faster at the end of their useful life.) This will also put a little more distance between Starlink and planned service competitors like OneWeb, supported by Richard Branson.

Once the first 800 satellites in this constellation are operational, this will be enough "to provide initial coverage in the US and around the world for broadband services," says the company in its FCC application. "The deployment of the rest of this constellation will complement coverage and increase capacity worldwide."

But that's not all. Once its low-Earth-orbit constellation is operational, SpaceX hopes to launch an even larger number of satellites, 7,518 of them, in an orbit of about 340 km altitude.

According to SpaceX, this "VLEO constellation" would provide additional capacity where it is needed in the world, "enabling the provision of broadband, broadband and low latency broadband services, truly competitive with solutions spare parts ".

SpaceX is not the only company hoping to operate a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit. Globalstar and Iridium have been operating dozens of satellites for voice services at this altitude for many years, and OneWeb has already approved a constellation of several hundred broadband satellites. But Musk's plan is undoubtedly more ambitious by an order of magnitude.

For this bold plan to work, SpaceX is integrating more emerging technologies into each satellite, in the form of lasers that allow them to communicate and coordinate with each other.

The launch of Starlink satellites "fires the first cannon on the use of laser communications in the space to provide connectivity even to the most remote places on the planet," said Markus Knapek, engineer and engineer. member of the board of directors of the Mynaric laser communications company.

You will have to wait a while before you can connect to the new SpaceX network. Musk says the full service will probably not be operational until the middle of the next decade, just in time to help him finance his other daring projects, like sending us to Mars to give Man of stars a high space five.

Originally published on February 20, 2018.
Update of February 21, 2018: Modifies the launch date and adds confirmation of the Musk test satellites.
Update of May 14, 2019: Adds information on the first launch of 60 production satellites and updates of the orbits of some satellites.