Spacex closed a few days ago the greatest purchase of its history. It has nothing to do with rockets, or spacecraft, but it paves the way for Starlink not to leave any corner of the earth without coverage.
A little context. On September 8, Spacex announced an agreement which shake again the foundations of the satellite industry: the purchase of the entire spectrum of the band S of Echostar in the United States and its global satellite mobile service licenses. The operation, valued at 17,000 million dollars, is astronomical because it does not seek a short -term investment return, but the strategic domain of the market.
With this play, Spacex acquires the necessary lane for its Direct To Cell Cell Call Service, but also eliminates its main power competitor from a strokewhich was the echostar. Charlie Ergen’s company had been accumulating this valuable spectrum for decades without displaying its own network, and now becomes the fuel of Elon Musk’s plans.
A giant jump. The current constellation Starlink Direct to Cell satellites has more than 600 satellites in orbit that offer 4G coverage. The Spacex plan is to use its frequencies newly acquired to move to the next level.
The next generation of Direct To Cell satellites promises to multiply the current capacity by 100 thanks to the new spectrum and 5G protocols. In practice, this should translate into the total elimination of dead areas: provided you can see the sky you will have coverage, either from your land operator or Starlink.
Buy spectrum to eliminate competition. According to an analysis by the specialized consultant TMF Associates, the purchase is designed To corner other competitors such as Ast Spacemobile or the alliance between Apple and Globalstar, forcing them to join Spacex or be left behind.
In a characteristic turn of the character, Elon Musk responded to the analysis stating that “almost everything in this article is wrong”, which leaves a cloud of uncertainty about the finest details of the strategy, but not on its impact.
Starship, the piece that was missing in the puzzle. Having the best spectrum in the world does not serve to offer global coverage to millions of customers if you can’t launch many Satellites And this is where the second key piece comes in: Starship. After a series of failed test flights, the tenth launch of the world’s largest rocket managed to display a load for the first time.
August 26, Starship not only reached space and survived an infernal reentrybut he fulfilled a key mission for the future of Starlink: he successfully displayed a payload. Using a mechanism that Spacex compares with fish candy dispensers, the ship released eight Starlink satellite simulators, which shows that it is already ready to self -financing in the short term.
This milestone is crucial. Starship will be the vehicle in charge of launching the new generation Starlink V3 satellites, and the difference in capacity with the Falcon 9 is abysmal: while a Falcon 9 rocket can put into orbit about 22 satellites V2 mini, Starship is expected to deploy much larger batches.
Not only more satellites, but much better. The last key of the plan is the technological evolution of Starlink satellites themselves. Starship will not only allow more satellites, but much larger and more capable satellites. According to Spacex herself, a single starship launch with satellites V3 will add 60 tbps capacity to the networkmore than 20 times which achieves a Falcon 9 today.
The Starlink V3 also involve an engineering leap, especially because of their navigability. They incorporate new generation hall argon propellers such as the one seen in the header image. According to A SPACEX managerThey destroy the specifications of the already impressive current thrusters and allow more efficient orbital maneuvers.
A constellation to dominate them all. Spacex’s strategy is built on a practically unattainable basis by competition. The Starlink Broadband Network has More than 8,300 satellites in orbitmore than all other constellations together.
Broadband Internet service offers discharge speeds of 200 Mbps and latencies of 25 milliseconds in the United States, with a total capacity of almost 450 Tbps. And although third generation satellites (V3) will not reach until 2026the Spacex production machine does not stop.
The future of Spacex. But the vision of the future goes even further. Spacex recently revealed A new “25 Gbps” mini-raser that will be integrated into its satellites. This technology not only serves for Starlink to communicate with each other creating a mesh in space, but will allow other ships, satellites or space stations to connect directly to the Starlink network as if it were an orbital internet provider.
With the purchase of the ideal spectrum, a heavy launching vehicle and a satellite technology that advances at a dizzying pace, Starlink’s goal of eradicating dead the dead coverage areas on Earth has ceased to be a chimera to become an engineering plan in full execution. The world is about to become much smaller.
Image | Spacex
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