The fact that you're able to read this article means you are one of the more than 3.77 billion people in the world that has access to the internet. While that's already a good number - more than half of the world's population, in fact - some 3 billion others don't have such access.
This is SpaceX’s plan to beam internet to the whole world
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Facebook is using massive, solar-powered drones to beam internet to the farthest corners of the world, AT&T wants to deliver wifi through existing power lines, and governments are getting in on the action, too, with New York and Canada planning initiatives to bring broadband to all citizens.
In total, SpaceX plans to launch nearly 12,000 of these satellites, which will park themselves in low-Earth orbit and beam internet coverage to the world below. There will be two Starlink flocks: one constellation of 4,409 satellites and a second constellation of 7,518 satellites, according to an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The second, larger constellation will fly at a slightly lower altitude, but together both will provide affordable coverage to every part of the globe, SpaceX representatives have said.
It could well be. Several companies are planning vast new groups of satellites, called mega constellations, that will beam internet down to Earth. These companies, which include SpaceX and Amazon, plan to launch thousands of satellites to achieve global satellite internet coverage. If successful, there could be an additional 50,000 satellites in orbit. This also means a lot more collision avoidance manoeuvres will need to be done.
Before Musk announced his plan to put 4,000 internet-providing satellites in space, Wyler had launched O3b, a company that has 12 internet satellites in orbit and is already the largest internet provider in the Pacific. OneWeb is his next venture, a project that, he says, will start with 648 low Earth orbit satellites that can beam internet to anywhere in the world.
Rather than balloons or satellites, Facebook plans to launch a fleet of solar-powered, unmanned drones, to beam Wi-Fi down to the internet-starved populous. Each one is expected to cover an area of 60 miles in diameter, while cruising at an altitude above 60,000 ft. (18.2 km). The first prototype, the Aquila, weights 1,000 lbs. (454 kg), and has a wingspan longer than a Boeing 747.
(CNN) -- Amazon is moving its business into the exosphere, with plans to deploy more than 3,000 satellites to beam internet connectivity all over the planet. On Tuesday, the company announced deals with three rocket companies that will launch those satellites.
It's not clear how far along Project Kuiper is in the development process. Such constellations involve sophisticated satellite technologies as well as complex ground terminals that can track the internet-beaming satellites as they whisk around the planet.
The company had also leased bandwidth on the AMOS-6 satellite to beam internet access to Africa, but that plan went up in smoke, literally, when the Spacex rocket carrying it exploded on the launch pad in 2016.
But what SpaceX and other companies want to do is launch them into lower orbits so that they can beam internet and you don't really observe any latency in signals so that the roundtrip flight time takes a less time to get to you. But, when you have satellites in a lower orbit, in order to provide that global coverage, you need a lot more satellites because they have to be able to see the entire planet.
We're currently testing rolling the satellite so the vector of the Sun is in-plane with the satellite body, i.e. so the satellite is knife-edge to the Sun. This would reduce the light reflected onto Earth by reducing the surface area that receives light. This is possible when orbit raising and parking in the precession orbit because we don't have to constrain the antennas to be nadir facing to provide coverage to internet users. However, there are a couple of nuanced reasons why this is tricky to implement. First, rolling the solar array away from the Sun reduces the amount of power available to the satellite. Second, because the antennas will sometimes be rolled away from the ground, contact time with the satellites will be reduced. Third, the star tracker cameras are located on the sides of the chassis (the only place they can go and have adequate field of view). Rolling knife edge to the Sun can point one star tracker directly at the Earth and the other one directly at the Sun, which would cause the satellite to have degraded attitude knowledge.
A new and lucrative standard in global connectivity is the impetus for these sprawling swarms of spacecraft. Blanketing our planet in satellites to beam high-speed Internet to any location on Earth around the clock could banish the days of struggling with spotty Wi-Fi and cellular connections, while also transporting the estimated three billion people who are currently offline into the digital age. If these companies are successful, the entire world could be suddenly interlinked as never before, with the Internet becoming truly omnipresent for essentially every human on the planet.
SpaceX launched its first Starlink satellite in 2019 with a vision of blanketing the globe in high-speed internet, and it has this week ticked off an important milestone in this grand plan. Researchers at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica are now tapping into the space-based internet service, where it's boosting the bandwidth for scientific research at the end of the Earth.
SpaceX currently has several thousand Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth, and has plans for many thousands more. The idea is to beam internet down to underserved regions to fill dead spots around the world, and the service does seem to be gaining momentum.
Starlink is a broadband satellite internet network developed by Musk's SpaceX company that aims to beam internet access to customers anywhere in the world (as long as they have a Starlink satellite dish to connect to the satellites). Since the first Starlink satellites were launched in 2019, SpaceX has put more than 2,300 of them into low-Earth orbit, and the company plans to send up to 42,000 satellites into space to form a gigantic megaconstellation.
SpaceX already beams Starlink satellite internet to over 140,000 customers across 20 countries. The company is primarily focused on serving rural and remote communities around the world where internet is unreliable or completely unavailable. SpaceX operates approximately 1,944 satellites in Low Earth Orbit that directly beam internet data to customer user terminals. Overall, the company plans to launch over 12,000 satellites to provide robust internet service globally.
SpaceX already had authorization for 4,425 Starlink satellites that would use Ku- and Ka-band radio spectrum to beam internet data, but last November, the company asked the FCC to sign off on a plan that would put more than a third of the satellites in 550-kilometer-high (340-mile-high) orbits rather than the previously approved 1,150-kilometer (715-mile) orbits.
Starlink is a new venture by SpaceX, which aims to surround Earth with satellites and beam affordable internet to remote locations all over the world. It is controversial because of its potential effect on the night sky. Just after launch, Starlink satellites easily can be seen with the unaided eye, swarming across stars and planets familiar to backyard astronomers. Scott Tucker of Tucson, Arizona, was photographing Venus on the evening of April 17th when this happened:
A group of astronomers has called for legal action to stop the launch of vast numbers of satellites designed to beam high-speed internet around the world until their impact on the night sky can be assessed.
The first of many: Other organizations, such as OneWeb, Amazon, Telesat, and LeoSat, are also planning to use vast numbers of lower-capacity LEO satellites to provide broadband internet connections to the globe. Each will use hundreds or thousands of the satellites, which will circle the Earth and beam internet to the surface. OneWeb launched the first of its hundreds of satellites earlier this year.
AlternativesApart from internet satellites, technology companies are also working on other options to beam radios. Google has made giant strides with its Project Loon under which the internet connectivity is provided through balloons. The company has already expanded the project to parts of Africa and also plans to roll out in India. 2ff7e9595c
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