Musk says that the Starlink satellite internet service gets half a million pre-orders

On Tuesday, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, said that it received more than half a million pre-orders for Starlink satellite internet service and anticipated no technical problems meeting the demand.

Musk tweeted that the only limitation is the high density of users in urban areas. It was a response to a post from a CNBC reporter that said the $99 deposits that SpaceX took for the service were fully refundable and did not guarantee assistance.

Musk said that it is more of a challenge when they get into the several million user ranges.
SpaceX did not release a date for Starlink’s service launch yet. However, in 2020 they did not offer the commercial service as it had previously planned.

The company has said the Starlink constellation would cost it $10 billion, and it plans to deploy around 12,000 satellites.

Building and sending rockets to space is a capital-intensive business. However, the two of the world’s richest men, the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos and the chief of automaker Tesla Inc Musk have invested more than billions of dollars during some years to make inroads in the market.
Bezos and Musk have sparred publicly on the competing satellite plans.

Plans regarding Starlink satellites

Last month, Federal Communications Commission decided to approve SpaceX’s plan to deploy some of the Starlink satellites at a lower earth orbit than planned. Still, it included several conditions to ensure the plan’s safety.

SpaceX accepted the idea that their satellites might encounter interference from satellites deployed in the frame of Amazon’s Kuiper Systems satellite project.

Since the beginning of March, the company delivered 422 Starlink satellites that the SpaceX CEO may not be aware of because he would’ve tweeted about it.

The spaceship took off at 3:01 PM from Cape Canaveral in Florida, and they used a previously used Falcon 9 booster that has flown eight times before. This booster also landed on SpaceX’s floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. It was tying the record for SpaceX’s reused flight program to fly resumed boosters, which set in March.

SpaceX also shared updated figures, transmitting and receiving signals from the constellation for broadband service. The company received more than half a million reservations for the service that includes hardware deposits.

This strong demand explains why there is such a significant backlog in the process of fulfilling Starlink orders.