SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, is starting to launch an internet revolution.
On Thursday between 10:30 p.m. and midnight ET (weather permitting), SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Crammed inside the rocket’s nosecone will be 60 tabletop-size satellites designed to test a floating internet backbone called Starlink.
Starlink, scheduled to be completed in 2027, would consist of nearly 12,000 satellites — more than six times the number of all operational spacecraft now in orbit. The goal is to blanket the Earth with high-speed, low-latency, and affordable internet access.
Even partial deployment of Starlink would benefit the financial sector and bring pervasive broadband internet to rural and remote areas. Though completing the project may cost $10 billion or more, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, Musk said during a call with reporters on Wednesday night that it could net the company perhaps $30 to $50 billion per year.
It’s not going to be easy to pull off, though, as Musk didn’t shy away from saying.
“There is a lot of new technology here. So it’s possible that some of these satellites may not work,” Musk said. In fact, he added there’s a “small possibility that all of the satellites will not work.”
Musk provided new information about Starlink during Wednesday’s call, and more specific details about the plan occasionally emerge in public Federal Communications Commission filings. While the documents can be difficult to parse, they’ve enabled industry experts to make educated guesses about Starlink’s workings and scope.
“This is the most exciting new network we’ve seen in a long time,” Mark Handley, a computer-networking researcher at University College London who’s studied and modeled Starlink, told Business Insider. He added that the project could affect the lives of “potentially everybody.”
Here’s how Starlink might work and maybe even change the internet as we know it.
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