SpaceX's Elon Musk Reveals How 60 Starlink Satellites Launch into a Rocket – GeekWire

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We now know how many SpaceX Starlink broadband data satellites, developed in Redmond, Washington, can be crammed into the nose cone of a Falcon rocket.

The answer to the ultimate question is 60.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk showed how five dozen satellites were barely inserted into a Falcon fairing today in a tweet:

The Starlink project is set to cross the Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base next week. The demonstration mission will mark a new step in the deployment of thousands of satellites designed to provide low-cost global Internet access.

These first satellites are equipped with antennas and network equipment to communicate with ground stations in various locations, including three in Washington State. As Gwynne Shotwell, President of SpaceX, reported at this week's Satellite 2019 conference, they will not demonstrate satellite satellite links that unite the constellation. This will have to wait for future deployments.

For that, 60 satellites will not be a record for a single rocket launch, or even for a single launch of Falcon 9. Last December, the launch of SmallSat Express, organized by Seattle-based Spaceflight, placed 64 satellites on a Falcon 9.

In follow-up tweets, Musk added some more details about the launch, the satellites and their role in the Starlink constellation:

The Tintin prototype satellites were launched in February 2018 and continue to be tested in orbit. Since then, SpaceX's Starlink unit in Redmond has undergone a radical reorganization and overhaul. The production satellites are designed to operate in orbits up to 550 km (340 miles).

Critics on Twitter quickly pointed out that Musk's minimum for "minor coverage" was 420 satellites, a figure that appeared in the Tesla showdown last year and its misstep in marijuana:

The master plan provides for an initial constellation of more than 4,400 satellites, followed by a second series of 7,500 satellites. All of these satellites, as well as nearly a million ground terminals, are expected to serve as a base for an Internet access service that, according to Musk, will generate the revenues needed to build a city on Mars.

But Musk is not alone in its ambitions to build a satellite broadband constellation in low Earth orbit. Starlink could be competing in a variety of environments including OneWeb, Telesat, LeoSat Enterprises, Amazon's Project Kuiper, Boeing and Facebook. Other rivals – such as Viasat, SES O3b, HAPSMobile and Loon – are embarking on the broadband access market by routes other than the low Earth orbit.

Will SpaceX be one of the survivors? Given the fact that Musk spends hundreds of millions of dollars on this effort, it is unlikely that Starlink will collapse and crash. But at the same time, it is not clear how high he will fly.

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