Elon Musks shows off SpaceX’s 60 internet-beaming satellites packed together for launch
On Saturday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed the 60 satellites his company will be launching this week — the first batch of thousands of satellites that SpaceX hopes to deploy in the years ahead to provide global internet coverage from space. Musk tweeted a picture of the satellites packed tight together inside the nosecone of the Falcon 9 rocket that will take the spacecraft to orbit.
The satellites are the first operational units of SpaceX’s Starlink initiative, a planned mega-constellation of nearly 12,000 spacecraft that will sit in a low orbit above Earth and beam internet connectivity to the surface below. The Federal Communications Commission has granted SpaceX permission to launch two groups of satellites for the Starlink project: o...