Space X's "Starlink Program"
In May 2019, SpaceX's first 60 Starlink satellites were launched into space, and in the next few decades, Musk plans to send 42,000 satellites into space, which is 15 times the number of satellites operating in orbit today.
Nearly half of the world's population does not have access to the Internet because, in most areas, access to the Internet requires a large number of expensive underground cables, leaving many rural and remote areas isolated, and satellite Internet can easily access these areas. As a result, SpaceX hopes to bring low-latency, near-instantaneous, high-speed internet to the world through the Starlink satellite program, promising that there will be no buffering in every corner of the world.
The traditional satellite internet is provided by a bus-sized spacecraft that is 22,236 miles high in Earth orbit, a distance that means the satellite can reach places that the cable cannot reach and serve more people, yet its data capabilities are very limited, limiting the connection speed, and the signal must travel a long distance to be received, causing a serious lag.
This is exactly the problem that StarLink is trying to solve, it is a global network of internet networks that will give you rapid access to satellites no matter where you are.
Musk's goal in achieving this plan is very simple, just to get a piece of the $1 trillion a year in the global telecom industry. If Spacex can achieve this goal, it could net $3 billion to $50 billion a year, enough to support its starship spacecraft and colony of Mars research and development programs.
So far, SpaceX has launched a total of 1,890 Starlink satellites, and plans to launch a total of 12,000 in the next five years, with a total of 42,000 satellites orbiting the Earth by the end of 2024. All of these satellites will operate in low-Earth orbit, reducing connection delays.
Traditional internet satellites are constantly moving once they are in orbit, so there must be many satellites in orbit to compensate for the inability to stay in one place to send signals continuously, as several satellites are needed at any one time to reach more users.
Each satellite will be connected to other satellites by a laser beam, creating a network backbone, and you'll need a pizza-sized receiving antenna that can aim its beam at any satellite above, keeping the Internet signal flowing.
But some experts have questioned the scheme.
Each star-chain moon is bright, and they reflect sunlight and shine it back on Earth, causing them to look like moving stars.
The most pronounced periods of brightness for these moons are after dawn and dusk, which is when astronomers look for near-Earth objects or asteroids that may hit Earth, and as more and more satellites lift off, they can interfere with astronomers' line of sight and affect celestial observations.
SpaceX is also trying to solve this problem, planning to paint all the glowing parts of the satellites with dark material and mitigate the impact on the ground by adding sun visors, however, unless they can hide the starlink satellites like the spacecraft in Star Trek, these problems will not really be solved.
There is also a bigger problem, and that is the concern about space debris. When so many satellites are flying in the closest, densest orbit around Earth, they are more likely to collide with each other, and once these satellites hit, they will create a cloud of debris that can orbit the Earth for years or even hundreds of years and pose a threat to other satellites, which will eventually cause Earth's near-Earth space to face loss of control.
While SpaceX experts say the probability of this happening is very low and say its satellites can move away automatically to avoid collisions, dozens of Starlink satellites have already had program errors, which will become a hidden danger in space.