Elon Musk has confirmed that Starlink, the network of satellites launched by SpaceX to provide the Internet from low Earth orbit, is going to be updated. Starlink 2.0 is already in development, according to the tycoon in an interview/guided tour posted on Youtube channel Everyday Astronaut.
What do we know about the plans for Starlink 2.0?
Musk has not released many details, but it seems that a prototype of the new generation of satellites already exists. They will have greater capacity but also larger, reaching 7 meters and 1.25 tons. This means that the new satellites will not be launched from Falcon rockets like their predecessors, but will require the company’s future super-heavy rocket, Starship.
Starlink 2.0 will surpass its predecessor’s capabilities by “nearly an order of magnitude” in terms of useful bits of information that the new system would be able to deal with, in the tycoon’s words. He has also clarified that the terminals will be able to operate with both Starlink 1.0 and the new version.
We’ll need a bigger ship.
The Falcon rockets, which today carry Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, could not keep up by sending out the new generation, four times as heavy. Musk explains that maximizing “mass flow to orbit” is imperative. The idea of sending the second generation of Starlink from Starship rockets is not new, rather it goes with delays. “We turn the impossible into the late,” Musk jokes in the interview.
An interview from the Orbital Launch Tower.
The interview that Musk has given to the promoter Tim Dodd of the channel Everyday Astronaut It was recorded from the company’s facilities in Texas, from where the Starship rockets are planned to be launched. In it Musk and Dodd talk about other topics such as the importance of humanity expanding to other planets, but perhaps the most impressive thing is the setting. The launch tower rises 143 meters above the ground and dwarfs the already built stages of the US company’s super-heavy rocket.
An uncertain context.
The announcement comes after a few months in which the tidal wave of the purchase of Twitter and its effect on Tesla have left Musk’s megaproject in the background. Just a few months ago Starlink 2.0 promised to be the salvation of the company, but there is still no clear timetable for its implementation. Starlink is already operational in Spain, but its implementation is not excessively wide. Perhaps the increase in capacity implies a reduction in the price of the service that improves this perspective.
Image | NASA
