A view of SpaceX’s first 60 Starlink satellites in orbit, still in stacked configuration, with the Earth as a brilliant blue backdrop on May 23, 2019.
But Starlink won’t be truly operational until several hundred more satellites go up.
SpaceX’s nascent internet-satellite constellation is already providing some boutique service, according to Elon Musk.
Late last night (Oct. 21), SpaceX’s billionaire founder and CEO said via Twitter that he was attempting to post something via Starlink, the orbiting network that the company began assembling this year. And 2 minutes later, he tweeted the result: “Whoa, it worked!!”
That’s quite something, considering that Starlink is just a shell of its envisioned future self. SpaceX has approval to launch about 12,000 Starlink satellites and recently applied for permission to loft up to 30,000 more. But the company has launched just 60 of the craft to date, all of which rode to orbit this past May aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
Continue reading… “‘Whoa, it worked’: Elon Musk tweets via SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites”