Early on February 16th, SpaceX lifted another batch of 60 Starlink satellites from Launch pad 40 at Kennedy Space Center, but did not successfully land the booster rocket. The booster landed in the Atlantic close to its target barge some 400 miles northeast of Cape Canaveral. This was the first time since March 2020 that […]
Elon Musk, in one of his regular Tweets, stated that an Initial Public Offering for the Starlink broadband-by-satellite system was on the cards “once we can predict cash flow reasonably well”. His rationale was that building 120 satellites a month, plus their launches, plus their ground segment and operational costs represented a “deep chasm of […]
SpaceX’s Starlink broadband-by-satellite system is inviting potential subscribers to sign up for its service almost anywhere on the planet, provided the country of residence has granted permission for Starlink to operate. Starlink stresses that it will treat those users signing up that they will be treated on a “first come, first served basis” and that […]
SpaceX’s Starlink broadband-by-satellite service is now supplying capacity to more than 10,000 beta-users. The news emerged in a filing to the FCC. Moreover, SpaceX says that it has registered “hundreds of thousands” of interested users without a dollar being spent in advertising. SpaceX says that demand for its service is “strong and widespread”. The FCC […]
Elon Musk will no doubt breathe a sigh of relief at the end of this weekend when, if all goes to plan, his second Falcon 9 rocket orbits the second batch of 60 Starlink satellites. The first consignment was another flawless flight, landing in the early hours of February 4th (01.19 Florida time) after lifting […]
SpaceX did not have the best of experimental launches on February 2nd when one of its prototype Starship giant rockets again exploded on landing. It had a perfect launch and a superb in-orbit manoeuvre as preparation for landing on its exact take-off spot. It reached some 6 miles in height, but the landing resulted in […]
Egypt’s latest commercial geostationary satellite, Nilesat 301, will be launched by SpaceX next year. Nilesat 301 is being built by Thales Alenia Space and follows on from a long relationship with Arab satellite operators. The very first Arabsat (Arabsat-1A) was built by Alcatel Alenia in 1985 which was eventually absorbed by Thales Alenia. Nilesat 301 […]
The planet’s two richest individuals, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are involved in a bitter slanging match over their satellite mega-constellations. Their rival businesses, SpaceX and Project Kuiper, have lodged tit-for-tat almost daily filings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with SpaceX saying that Amazon’s Kuiper is guilty of “stifling competition”. SpaceX is already asking […]
SpaceX launched 143 satellites on one rocket on January 24th including 10 of its own Starlink craft. The previous record was held by an Indian launch of 104 satellites in 2017. The impressive cargo formed SpaceX’s ‘Transporter-1’ mission, and while around 133 of the satellites were small, so-called cube-sats and ‘micro-sats’ it was nevertheless an […]
SpaceX launched another 60 of its Starlink satellites into orbit on January 20th at 08.02am Florida time (13.02 GMT). It was the 17th mission for the Starlink team and went flawlessly. It is also the first launch for Starlink this year, but it is expected that another launch of 10 satellites will follow over the […]