SpaceX wasn’t able to land Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship, but that hasn’t deterred the US private rocket launch service from pursuing other goals. The company is planning to launch a myriad of satellites in a bid to offer high-speed global internet coverage as revealed by regulatory filings.
SpaceX plans to launch as many as 4,452 satellites in orbit for creating a network according to FCC (Federal Communications Commission) filing.
To get an idea of how big the project is, let us tell you that currently there are 1,419 satellites and the number by SpaceX is three times more. As far as the budget is concerned, Elon Musk, the owner of the company had previously said that it could cost least $10 billion.
There were no other technical details in the document as reported by Reuters.
How they plan to achieve this?
This is the default question with not so easy answer. At first, SpaceX plans to about 800 satellites for expansion of internet in the US. As of now, cable and fiber-optics are the answer to internet needs, but SpaceX plans to modify it with Internet-via-satellite networks.
SpaceX said in the FCC filing, “The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, government and professional users worldwide,”.
Once the company is able to achieve the setup, it promises to provide a bandwidth of 1 gigabytes per second for global users. That’s 180 times faster than the current speed average of 5.6 megabytes per second, the report noted.
The project was announced in January 2015, and now it seems the company is ready for the next step.