Ellie in Space
Starlink is planning it’s first launch in months for September 13th.
What is Starlink’s mission?
Simply put, many communities across our country and the world still lack access to reliable connectivity. Starlink aims to close the digital divide by providing innovative, cost-effective and spectrum efficient satellite system.
There are 8 antennas at the Starlink ground station in Utah, other close ones are in Evanston, Wyoming and Panaca, Nevada.
These gateway stations only communicate with satellites that are visible on the horizon above a minimum elevation angle, which could be as low as 25 degrees.
SpaceX has deployed a total of 1,740 satellites to low Earth orbit out of over 12,000 it plans to deploy.
In mid-August, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell spoke at the 36th Annual Space Symposium and explained why the company stopped Falcon 9 Starlink missions.
Shotwell says they’ve been rushing to complete manufacturing the first batches of next-generation satellites equipped with laser communication links.
Shotwell also said on August 24 that the next Starlink mission is “roughly three weeks” away, so this West Coast launch scheduled for September could be the first to deploy an entire fleet of next-generation satellites.
Also interesting, SpaceX has not launched a rocket from the West Coast since November 2020.
The next launch will be from Vandenberg Space Force Base. It will be the first Starlink mission launched from California.
The mission’s assigned name, ‘Starlink 2-1,’ is different than previous Starlink missions.
We don’t know much about the name change, but we can speculate that it has to do with it being SpaceX’s first West Coast Starlink mission that will deployed into different orbital parameters.
Maybe its hinting that SpaceX will launch the first entire fleet of the next-generation Starlink ‘Gen2 System’ satellites.
Elon Musk said via Twitter, ‘Data packets do not need to touch regular Internet – data can flow from user terminal to satellite/s to user terminal.’
The aviation and maritime sectors, both military and commercial, offer huge potential markets for Starlink that can only be tapped with laser linking. The cross-links are the key to getting truly lower latency than fiber-optic cable, especially over long distances.
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