The 1 Thing You Need to Know About China's 25,000-Satellite Space Project
Everyone knows by now that SpaceX is building a 12,000-satellite orbital broadband internet constellation, called Starlink. Many people probably also know that SpaceX is about one-third of the way toward completing this constellation, with more than 4,600 operational Starlink satellites up in orbit already, and more going up every few days.
One thing you may not have noticed, however, is that the pace of Starlink's expansion has slowed of late. In fact, over the past several months, SpaceX has increasingly been sending up batches of 21 or 22 Starlink satellites at a time -- rather than the 50- and 60-satellite missions that were most common up through the end of last year.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing for SpaceX, though, as the Starlinks that have been going up this year have been what SpaceX calls "Gen2" Starlinks -- bigger, heavier, and capable of carrying 10 times the bandwidth of earlier Gen1 Starlinks. Because the new Starlinks are more robust than the old ones, in fact, you could say that SpaceX has accelerated the rate at which it's deploying Starlink capability around the world.
Source Fool.com
