Elon Musk congratulated his staff and SpaceX technicians on May 20th for topping 3 million Starlink customers in 99 countries. But behind the scenes there could be serious problems ahead for Starlink, and in particular for its ‘direct-to-smartphone’ ambitions. The background focuses on recent transmissions carried out on a UK-registered satellite by SpaceX. The satellite […]

Analysts from Quilty Space say that Starlink’s progress is exceeding expectations and will generate a $6.6 billion (€6.1bn) in revenues in 2024. “Back in 2015, when SpaceX and OneWeb announced these mega-constellations, many industry veterans scoffed,” said Chris Quilty, founder of Quilty Space. “They remembered past satellite broadband ventures failing in the 1990s.” Quilty’s failing […]

Later today [May 2nd], a SpaceX rocket will launch another 23 Starlink satellites from a Florida launch pad. It follows on from a Falcon 9 launch on April 28th which placed another batch of 23 Starlink broadband satellites into their transfer orbits. That launch took the total Starlinks launched to 6,304, of which 5,896 are […]

SpaceX has received good news from India’s government with reports that its Starlink broadband service is to receive an “expedited” fast-track approval to operate in India ahead of Elon Musk’s visit to the country. Starlink was also authorised for use in Albania last week. However, there are doubts in some quarters over Starlink’s profitability. Bloomberg, […]

In the week that SpaceX has been given a market valuation of some $180 billion (€165.7bn) it is no great surprise that the overall space economy is forecast to triple in value to around $1.8 trillion and growing at twice the rate of global GDP, according to an Insight Report from the World Economic Forum, […]

SpaceX says it now has 2.7 million “customers – a rise of 100,000 in just three weeks. This is a growth rate of some 4,700 new users per day. If this rate is maintained, then another 1 million users by year-end is possible if not probable. A report from analysts at investment bank Morgan Stanley […]

During March the FCC approved some SpaceX applications and firmly denied others. But on March 28th it approved a request from SpaceX that was filed a few days earlier on March 25th. The application is for “experimental” (“Special Temporary Authority”) test transmissions direct-to-cellular devices from Starlink satellites. The approval kicks in on April 15th and […]

SpaceX engineers had a busy March 30th. They successfully launched Eutelsat’s latest satellite (36D) from Cape Kennedy and managed another launch a couple of hours later which carried their own first batch of Starlink broadband satellites for the weekend. But a planned third launch (from California) was scrubbed because of bad weather. The third launch […]

SpaceX has been asking the FCC for permission to share spectrum already allocated to Globalstar and Dish Network AWS-4 spectrum. The FCC has dismissed SpaceX’s application. The SpaceX application had included deployment of 7,500 Starlink ‘second-generation’ satellites with equipment operating in the 1610-1617.775 MHz (Earth to space), 2483.5-1500 MHz (space to Earth, and in the […]

SpaceX is asking the FCC for permission to operate some of its mega-constellation of satellites at much lower orbits of 340-360 kms altitude in order to better serve its ‘direct-to-phone’ service. SpaceX, in its FCC application, sayid: “Operating at lower altitudes will also shorten the physical link between the ground and the satellite, enabling lower-latency […]