What makes Starlink so remarkable?

Using sattelites for internet communications is not a genuinely new idea. Number of companies provided such services before Starlink.

But the key difference between previous generation solutions is the latency.

The problem is, 600ms for a signal to travel almost 35700km to a sattelite and back is a lot. No gaming or realtime communication is feasible with such a delay.

The only way to decrease the lattency is to position sattelites at lower altitude. This is why Starlink sattelites fly between 340km and 1200km above the surface. Giving us incredible 30ms latency even in remotest regions of Earth.

Though, there are lots of challenges to overcome. To be able to cover same ground area, much more sattelites are needed. Also, the average lifespan of the sattelites drops to 5-7 years vs 15-20 years for “normal” sattelites because of much harder conditions. This means sattelite production and delivery to the orbit should be very good from the unit economics perspective.

This is where reusable rockets and Space X comes into play. As well as experience with cost effective mass-production on Tesla factories. 🏭

Also, transit and termination of the traffic requires state-of-art dynamic routing and effective inter-sattelite communications.

The project itself is a true miracle, providing humanity with unseen capabilities.