Spacex 100k Novemberalamalhodaeitechcrunch: This year has seen space-related projects take off. Not one or two, but many different ventures aimed at unlocking the mysteries of the solar system have been undertaken by private companies and government agencies.
The most eye-catching expeditions are those of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which recently announced having shipped 100,000 satellite terminals to date to provide broadband internet anywhere on Earth by 2020. High-profile figures have backed Musk’s vision, with Google and Fidelity Investments investing $1 billion in SpaceX so far.
Businessman Sean Parker has invested another $10 million. Among others, President Donald Trump and Musk himself have been involved in setting up a dedicated Federal regulatory agency to oversee commercial spaceflight.
The vision for this project, which started in the late 1990s, was to use the Earth and its resources as a massive broadband satellite network. This project manager wants to harness the position of the Sun and Earth in order to provide a global wireless internet service.
Largely funded by Elon Musk himself and his other companies, SpaceX is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California, United States. It is part of a corporate group known as Tesla Motors.
In June 2017, SpaceX became the first to successfully launch and return a refurbished Dragon cargo capsule. On February 22, 2018 the company launched Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two.
The company has developed its own version of an autonomous spaceport drone ship with a purpose-built deck to allow for rapid loading and unloading of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
SpaceX announced in 2011 that they were beginning a privately funded development program to design and build a manned autonomous spaceflight system. In 2015, the company unveiled the design for its next-generation, astronaut-carrying Dragon V2 spacecraft.
The company plans to enable access to space for small satellites and it is working on a super heavy-lift launch vehicle for interplanetary missions in order to build a space transport infrastructure that could potentially be used for human exploration.
The decagon-shaped satellite terminal is designed to provide internet access anywhere on Earth that has an unobstructed line of sight to the sky. The satellite has a single solar panel and three antennas.