With Starlink, Elon Musk is once again showing how to make economies of scale work
Elon Musk made some interesting comments a month ago about Starlink, the satellite communications company launched via SpaceX, saying that his plan is to create antennas for use on trucks, ships and planes to provide internet to vehicles of a certain size, though not yet to cars, due to the size of the antennas.
Musk continues to disrupt the telecommunications industry: using the idle capacity in his rockets to launch waves of up to sixty satellites at a time has already allowed him to have 1,321 in orbit at a much lower cost than than is usually associated with these kinds of operations. Some 12,000 have already been approved, with a further 30,000 licenses also under scrutiny.
What’s more, these satellites are located in an orbit sixty times closer to the earth than conventional satellites, which changes all the usual approaches to satellite communications and allows it to offer internet access that is sufficiently fast and with the latency needed to play video games competitively. This means that, on the one hand, they are easier to see with the naked eye at night — although the company has worked hard to reduce their luminosity — while they could also be used for activities that until now were prohibitively expensive.
