WASHINGTON – SpaceX continued the launch of its Starlink broadband constellation with another launch of 60 satellites on April 7, delivering closer to continuous global service.
A Falcon 9 took off at 12:34 in the East from the Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The upper stage of the rocket put its payload of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit a little over an hour later.
The rocket’s first shift ended eight and a half minutes after the lift on a drone in the Atlantic Ocean. It was the seventh flight for this booster, launching the Demo-2 commercial crew mission for the first time in May and recently launching another set of Starlink satellites on March 11th.
It was the 10th Falcon 9 launch of the year for SpaceX, eight of which were dedicated to Starlink satellites. According to statistics maintained by Jonathan McDowell, there are now 1,378 satellites in orbit when they take into account those launched and subsequently uprooted.
This constellation is now approaching the size needed to provide at least basic service worldwide. “We have reached global reach, but we do not yet have the full connection worldwide,” Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said during a panel discussion on April 6 at the Satellite 2021 LEO Digital Forum.
“We hope to have ongoing coverage after about 28 launches around the world,” she added. This launch is the 23rd of v1.0 satellites, although some v0.9 satellites launched almost two years ago remain in orbit, along with 10 v1.0 satellites launched in a polar orbit in January . This indicates that the company will reach the continuous milestone after another four to five launches.
The launches will push SpaceX against the current FCC authorization, allowing the company to operate up to 1,584 satellites in orbits at about 550 kilometers. The current license from the Federal Communications Commission enables the company to operate 2,825 additional satellites at altitudes ranging from 1,100 to 1,300 kilometers. SpaceX has submitted a request to the FCC to amend the license and move the extra satellites to 550 kilometers.
The FCC has yet to decide on the change, but SpaceX’s current launch rate means the company will reach its current satellite limit of 550 kilometers within a few months. Shotwell mentioned during the panel that the company ‘is bringing our satellites down from their original height’ to address the issues of sustainability in space. However, she did not address the FCC license modification issue, except that the company will continue to launch satellites “as we are allowed.”
Shotwell said the company would continue to launch Starlink even after it reached the threshold of continuous global coverage. “The plan thereafter is to continue adding satellites to provide extra capacity,” she said. This includes the launch of additional satellites to the polar orbit from the summer from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. According to her, the polar satellites will probably include laser intersatellite links that the company experimented with on some Starlink satellites.
The element of the overall Starlink effort that has attracted the most attention is the series of launches that have created the world’s largest satellite constellation in less than two years. However, this was not necessarily the biggest challenge for SpaceX.
“The satellites and launch were pretty simple for us. “We thought we would struggle a little more on the satellites, but it seems that our Dragon, which is a very sophisticated satellite, helped us a lot to devise the satellite architecture for Starlink,” she said.
What was a challenge, she said, was dealing with a growing number of customers and building a reliable network, but ‘no one we can not solve.’
Starlink remains in beta testing in the United States and several other countries. Shotwell said there are no plans to end the beta test and move to full commercial service in the near future. “We still have a lot of work to do to make the network reliable,” she said. “We will move out of beta if we have an amazing product that we are very proud of.”
Another attempt was to use on-ground equipment used by Starlink subscribers, especially the electronically controllable antenna. Shotwell said the company is working to reduce the cost of the equipment needed to gain large-scale acceptance.
“We have made great strides in reducing the cost of our terminals,” she said. The equipment originally cost about $ 3,000. “We are less than half of that at the moment.”
Customers currently pay around $ 500 for the equipment, which means that SpaceX still subsidizes those terminals significantly. This may change, however, as the company makes continuous progress to reduce costs. “We do see that our terminal will come within a few hundred dollars within the next year or two.”
Shotwell appears on a panel of executives from several other satellite operators, many of whom have argued that hybrid systems using satellites in low and medium orbits as well as geostationary orbits, or GEO satellites alone, offer better solutions. “We see absolutely no way, no possibility, that the low-lane constellations can fulfill the latent demand of all the unattended population today,” said Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer.
While Belmer and other executives in the panel expressed their concerns about LEO constellations, Shotwell smiled. “In fact, I always smile when people make projections about what can and cannot be done with technology,” she said. “I do not think we have an idea how the technology can develop five years from now.”