All verified mentions of this organization in source documents.
SpaceX is currently authorized to deploy 4,408 satellites in low Earth orbit to build out Starlink’s global coverage.
A Falcon 9 launched the Starlink 4-6 mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida on 2022-01-18.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying 49 Starlink satellites on 2022-02-03.
The other half of the payload fairing assembly supported two earlier Starlink launches and Transporter-1, SpaceX’s first dedicated rideshare mission in January 2021.
About 90 minutes after liftoff, the 49 Starlink satellites deployed from the Falcon 9 upper stage to low Earth orbit.
SpaceX is seeking regulatory permission for a second-generation Starlink constellation of nearly 30,000 satellites to improve performance.
The Starlink 4-6 mission delivered 49 satellites into orbit.
Astrophysicist and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell’s statistics show SpaceX has launched 2,091 satellites for its low Earth orbit Starlink constellation, including two prototype spacecraft.
The 2022-01-31 Falcon 9 launch was the fourth Falcon 9 mission of 2022, following Starlink launches on 2022-01-06 and 2022-01-18 and the Transporter-3 rideshare mission on 2022-01-13.
Falcon 9’s first stage booster on the Transporter-3 mission had previously launched Crew Demo-2, ANASIS-II, CRS-21, Transporter-1, and five Starlink missions.
SpaceX raised a total of $5,000,000,000 from investors since the beginning of 2019 to fund development of Starlink and Starship.
Starlink had 140,000 subscribers and over 750,000 people had placed a $99 deposit as of November 2021.
Starlink won bids in the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction to serve more than 600,000 homes.
Achieving a 30,000-satellite Starlink version 2 constellation would require launching on the order of five or six thousand satellites per year to maintain the constellation.
Hughes and Viasat together lost almost as many U.S. subscribers in 2021 as Starlink gained during the same period.
Elon Musk judged Starlink version 1 to be financially weak and determined that a much larger version 2 system with as many as 30,000 satellites would be needed to produce a strong business plan.
SpaceX would need to launch many thousands of additional satellites and massively ramp terminal production before Starlink could produce a strong business plan.
SpaceX’s current Falcon rockets cannot launch sufficient mass or volume to support the potentially larger, higher-capacity Starlink version 2 satellites.
Elon Musk sought confirmation to provide Tonga with terminals to connect to SpaceX’s Starlink low Earth orbit broadband network, citing insufficient satellites with laser links and existing geostationary satellites serving the Tonga region.
The Chinese space station Tiangong performed two avoidance maneuvers in 2021 to avoid close approaches with SpaceX Starlink satellites.