BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – It’s about once a week or more that we relay news from the Space Coast of yet more Starlink satellites hitching a ride to low-Earth orbit on a SpaceX rocket, but what are they, how many are there and will the launches ever end?
After development began in 2015, post-prototype Starlink deployments started in May 2019, at a time when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he could expect as many as 2,000 of the satellites to be deployed each year. The small satellites communicate directly with ground transceivers to achieve Musk’s stated goal of providing broadband internet worldwide, everywhere from packed suburban neighborhoods to remote dead zones.
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The official Starlink website now advertises unlimited home service at $120 per month in most locations after a $599 hardware purchase. An interactive map on the Starlink website suggests most people in the continental U.S. are in range and eligible; here in Florida, there’s a lone nodule north of Dunnellon where Starlink said service is set to expand to this year.
More than 2.6 million customers now use Starlink, according to a study shared by the Starlink team on March 8 that otherwise updated recent efforts to bring down latency — or the time it takes for data to travel from source to destination — to below 20 ms. The smaller the latency, the better, with Starlink claiming it’s reduced median latency within the last month from 48.5 ms to 33 ms during peak usage hours in the U.S., also reporting a drop in “worst-cast peak hour latency” from 150 ms to fewer than 65 ms in that coverage area. Outside of the U.S., median latency was reduced by up to 25% and worse-case latency by up to 35%, the study states.
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According to “Johnathan’s Space Report,” a website operated by Starlink-tracking astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, Ph.D, there were 5,988 Starlink satellites in orbit at the time of this writing, 5,529 of which were considered working.
So, is having nearly 6,000 Starlink satellites in orbit enough for SpaceX and its internet customers to be satisfied?
For SpaceX’s part, not really. We’re only about halfway to the number of satellites that the company has been approved to launch, with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 2018 giving SpaceX clearance for a 12,000-unit satellite constellation.
Once SpaceX’s 12,000th Starlink satellite is deployed however, Musk is on record expressing his desire for an additional 30,000 satellites, submitting paperwork requesting as much from the International Telecommunication Union back in October 2019.
Even then, though the Starlink satellites are designed to communicate with and autonomously avoid collisions with one another, their design also accounts for end of life, what calls for them to eventually be actively deorbited and to mostly burn up on atmospheric reentry, according to NASA. It could be expected then that SpaceX would have to launch replenishment missions, at least if current Starlink launches aren’t already seen as such.
As it stands, don’t hold your breath if you hope the launches end soon. The potential for a staggering 42,000-strong Starlink internet satellite constellation is a far cry from the 5,529 units currently up and working, and more could be launched regardless to replenish retired satellites.
Don’t forget, there’s also Amazon’s “Project Kuiper” internet satellites to contend with, with a goal of having 3,200 in low-Earth orbit — also launched from Florida’s Space Coast, no less — to directly compete with Starlink.
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