SpaceX has 500,000 Starlink service requests |
Just five days after the final launch, SpaceX has launched more than 60 high-speed Internet satellites for the Starlink service.
SpaceX has sold 420 Starlink satellites since the beginning of March.
To date, the total number of broadcast satellites has reached 1,565 satellites, nearly nine times the number of satellites in another constellation.
SpaceX uses the oldest Falcon 9 amplifier in SpaceX's operational missile fleet.
This flight is the ninth flight of this reusable booster, which debuted in September 2018.
The new launch represents 100 successive flights of the Falcon 9 missile without canceling flights.
SpaceX also shared the latest data from Starlink terminals, which are used to transmit and receive broadband service signals in the constellation diagram.
Elon Musk said in a tweet: The company has booked more than 500,000 satellite internet services from Starlink and we are not expecting any technical problems to meet the demand, but the only caveat is the high density of urban users.
He added: The $ 99 deposit SpaceX paid for this service is fully refundable.
This high demand explains why Starlink is so late in fulfilling orders.
Customers who wish to use the service can sign up for SpaceX's Starlink website and pre-order kits that include Starlink receivers, routers, power supplies, and home installers.
So far, the service has been offered to test customers in 6 countries / regions, including Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Mexico, USA and Canada.
The company's goal is to continue expanding coverage by the end of 2021 to achieve near-global coverage in terms of service availability, and plans to launch more new products to the rest of the world.
SpaceX has not yet set a date for the launch of the Starlink service, but it is unlikely that the commercial service for 2020 will launch as previously planned.
The company plans to deploy a total of 12,000 satellites and has said that the Starlink constellation will cost about $ 10 billion.
Building a rocket and sending it into space is a huge sum of money, but the two richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, have invested billions of dollars over the years to achieve prosperity in this market.
Musk and Bezos are publicly arguing over competition plans for the satellites. Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved a plan to deploy some Starlink satellites to locations smaller than projected Earth orbit.
The commission has put in place certain conditions to ensure the safety of the program, and SpaceX has accepted the possibility of its satellites being disrupted by deployed satellites as part of the Amazon Kuiper Systems satellite project.