Elon Musk has successfully used Starlink satellites to send some twitter messages.
SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said Oct. 22. that SpaceX will start offering broadband service in the United States via its Starlink constellation in mid-2020. SpaceX will have to launch six to eight Starlink satellite launches.
SpaceX needs 24 launches to get global coverage.
Starlink is being tested by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory under a program called Global Lightning. SpaceX in December 2018 received a $28 million contract to test over the next three years different ways in which the military might use Starlink broadband services. SpaceX has already demonstrated data throughout of 610 megabits per second in flight to the cockpit of a U.S. military C-12 twin-engine turboprop aircraft.
SpaceX will target consumer service in rural areas that currently have no connectivity and then they will target users who currently have poor and expensive service.
Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite 🛰
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2019
SOURCES- Twitter, Spacenews
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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No need for 5g at all if this can be used mobile. Competition fosters better prices and service, so let the games begin!
It would never have crossed my mind that tens-of-thousands of networked nodes in orbit could not provide potential use as a military asset. Real-time interferometry for observation, and the communications options are obvious possibilities.
Can you take down that network? Yes, but not before all the literal fireworks are set free in event of such a decapitation move. Can you be sure you have taken out all your adversaries’ system, leaving no hidden reserve with which to conduct secondary, tertiary, and so forth responses? That uncertainty fosters fear, uncertainty, and doubt; thus, restraining the sword hand from action.
Of particular note here is the aircraft application here. That is a mobile terminal, so Starlink needs to be smart enough to actively do the correct beam steering/spot selection to make that work. If it was limited to purely fixed ground assets that simplifies the spot beam problem.
Take that, 5G!