![]() ![]() And so you need these things to be whizzing by you in New York or somebody else in Antarctica to be able to provide that sort of high speed, low latency internet. They are sending that signal down to Earth to something called a terminal, which is like a giant Wi-Fi hotspot to spread out that internet signal. And as one goes past you, it hands the signal off to another one that’s trailing not too far behind. And to make this work, you need lots of them. And the reason for that, it is incredibly expensive to launch a satellite into space. But other companies in the 1990s and in the 2000s had tried satellite internet. We don’t know exactly when he hatched this grand plan. When did the idea for Starlink come into focus? adam satariano And Musk has this general interest in space. OK, so Sweeting is developing these smaller satellites that can orbit the Earth at lower altitude. Which makes communication, whether it’s an internet signal now or some sort of observation work for environmental commercial businesses, it makes all that faster. And they can sit in this low-Earth orbit, which is closer to the planet. So instead of these big hulking satellites the size of a bus that get launched far into space, these were much smaller satellites, which are less expensive to develop. And what Sweeting and his company, Surrey Technology, was quite good at is developing these smaller satellites. adam satarianoĪnd of course, this ends up being Elon Musk. And he described getting a message from an acquaintance who said, I have somebody you should meet. And so I spoke to one British engineer named Martin Sweeting who got together with Musk in 2001. So that’s the initial source of his wealth.īut he is also fascinated by space, and ideas of being an interplanetary species, and colonizing Mars, all these far-fetched things. He was part of a group called the PayPal Mafia, who built up PayPal, the payments company, which eventually sold to eBay for a great deal of money. And we need to rewind a bit and remember that Elon Musk is not the person that we know now at this period of time. Where does that story start? adam satariano But before we do, let’s start at how he came to dominate so much of the sky around the planet. ![]() We want to get to the implications of Musk controlling chunks of the world’s internet. OK, so I definitely want to go there, Adam. adam satarianoĮxactly, and the more you learn about it, as you start to see the geopolitical consequences and other important ways in which this technology can be influencing the world. So one company, I mean, one man, in fact, is responsible for 50 percent of the satellites in space. And more than half of those, more than 4,500, are controlled by Elon Musk and his company. And what we found is that there are more than 8,000 active satellites spinning around the Earth right now. We found a database managed by a researcher in Hawaii. And so a group of colleagues and I wanted to understand the scale of this. But it was fascinating to see that, even more so, he is controlling this new, incredibly important area of communication in satellite internet. And his social media antics, and outbursts, and petty fights that he gets into online. We know Elon from Tesla, of course, and now from his ownership of Twitter. And then you add in the fact that it’s controlled by Elon Musk. It just seems like this kind of amazing technology, particularly when you think of all the parts of the Earth that don’t have internet connection. I learned about this technology, which is essentially satellites orbiting the Earth, which are beaming an internet connection down to just about anywhere on Earth. So Adam, tell us where this reporting that you’ve done on Starlink started for you. Today, my colleague, Adam Satariano on the story of Starlink’s rise, its revolutionary promise, and on the implications of one man controlling it all.Īdam, welcome to the show. Starlink, the satellite communication company owned by Elon Musk, has quietly and quickly encircled the Earth. sabrina taverniseįrom The New York Times, I’m Sabrina Tavernise. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email with any questions. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. This transcript was created using speech recognition software. Transcript Elon Musk’s Quest to Own the Stars Charting the rise and revolutionary promise of Starlink, the billionaire’s satellite internet company. ![]()
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