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Elon Musk’s Next Big Thing Is 40,000 Satellites Beaming Broadband

He hopes low-Earth orbits will help him succeed where so many others have failed.
Sixty Starlink satellites as seen in the night sky from Vladivostok, Russia, on April 27. The satellites were launched into orbit five days earlier, on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

Sixty Starlink satellites as seen in the night sky from Vladivostok, Russia, on April 27. The satellites were launched into orbit five days earlier, on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

Photographer: Yuri Smityuk/TASS/Getty Images/TASS

Every few years, someone comes along promising to disrupt the satellite industry. They burn through billions in cash before ambition crashes back down to Earth. Since the late 1990s, Globalstar, Iridium, Leosat, Skybridge, Teledesic, and other companies have attempted to rewrite space communications, only to collapse or shrink into a niche that poses little threat to the incumbents.

Now comes Elon Musk. After overturning the economics of the car and the rocket-launch industries, the billionaire is taking a hatchet to another fraying business model—space communications—by filling the skies with thousands of satellites that beam internet to isolated populations. His Space Exploration Technologies Corp. sent up the first Starlink satellites in May 2019, and as of early this month it had deployed almost 700, single-handedly increasing the number of active satellites in orbit by almost a third.