Ilon Musk showed a rocket, which will immediately display 60 satellites in one launch

In 2015, the head of the company SpaceX Ilon Muskspoke about the Starlink project, in which 12,000 satellites will be launched into Earth orbit to distribute the Internet. The first half will be sent in the next six years, and the company is already engaged in the launch of test samples. So, in 2018, she launched the TinTin A and TinTin B satellites into orbit, and now she intends to carry out a larger mission to simultaneously launch 60 satellites at once. Ilon Mask himself shared a photo of the loaded Falcon 9 rocket - judging by them, thousands of satellites of rather large size will be scattered in near-earth orbit.

According to Ilona Mask, during the launch on May 15unforeseen problems may arise - the company must be ready for anything. The President of SpaceX Gwynn Shotwell noted that satellites preparing to launch are able to communicate with the Earth and freely maneuver in space, but they cannot communicate with each other. In essence, these are test options needed to test the effectiveness of the launch system.

Satellites will be loaded into the fairing.Falcon 9 launch vehicle - what it looks like, you can see in the photo published by Ilon Mask himself. The entrepreneur also published a photo with a Tesla car inside the fairing - judging by them, Starlink satellites are of impressive size. Even if 60 devices have such an impressive size, it’s scary to imagine how much space all 12,000 satellites will occupy.

At the moment, SpaceX can only runlimited number of satellites at a time, so there will be quite a lot of missions to put them into orbit. For example, in 2019, the company plans to conduct from 2 to 6 Starlink missions - their number will directly depend on the success of the upcoming launch.

All this costs money, but with the advent of spaceStarship with an estimated capacity of 150 tons, the company will be able to launch more satellites at a time - this will significantly reduce costs and speed up the deployment of the world-wide Internet. It is expected that the new details about the starship will be announced in mid-June.

If you do not understand what will beTo present the Starlink project in the end, we recommend that you read our material that reveals this question. It tells how a professor at University College London used a three-dimensional game engine to create a Starlink model.

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