{"id":301753,"date":"2025-11-22T16:16:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T16:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/301753\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T16:16:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T16:16:13","slug":"elon-musks-starlink-is-rewiring-the-world-but-at-what-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/301753\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink is rewiring the world \u2014 but at what cost?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Alex Leiserach and his wife moved from Lancing in West Sussex to a farmhouse in the Lincolnshire countryside, they knew it would be a big life change. What they did not expect was to travel back in time to when web connections were so slow that pages would appear to download pixel by pixel, like a slow-motion waterfall. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like the good old days of dial-up internet,\u201d said the 42-year-old. \u201cIf my wife and I both wanted to send an email, one of us would have to wait.\u201d<\/p>\n

He looked at an alternative to the old copper telephone line that ran to the property, but the promised fibre connection under Project Gigabit \u2014 the government\u2019s \u00a35 billion plan, launched in April 2021<\/a>, to connect 99 per cent of British households to broadband internet \u2014 was years away.<\/p>\n

\"Alex<\/p>\n

Broadband internet at Alex and Louise Leiserach\u2019s glamping site is powered by Starlink<\/p>\n

THELAYBYLINCS.CO.UK<\/p>\n

\"Interior<\/p>\n

So instead he joined the customer ranks of Starlink, the space-based internet business of Elon Musk\u2019s $350 billion (\u00a3270 billion) rocket company SpaceX. For \u00a375 per month (and \u00a3299 for the dish), Leiserach gets enough bandwidth beamed from satellites orbiting 340 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface to run The Layby Lincs, the glamping business he and his wife have set up on their property. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere could potentially be our five units in the garden, plus us, streaming video at the same time \u2014 and we\u2019ve never noticed anything buffer,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t be able to function as a business without [Starlink]. We had to build a website. We have to run social media channels. It\u2019s really important.\u201d<\/p>\n

From medieval castles to deep-sea fishing <\/p>\n

Stories like this illuminate one of the most extraordinary business stories unfolding in the world today. With Starlink, Musk is rapidly building a new layer of global infrastructure that offers an alternative to the messy traditional approach: digging up roads and laying thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Satellites, seen in a long-exposure photograph, now fill the night sky, with SpaceX adding about 12 per rocket launch<\/p>\n

ALAN DYER\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Instead, through SpaceX he has launched nearly 9,000 internet-beaming satellites into orbit, and these have opened up the prospect of bringing online the 2 billion-plus people globally who, the World Economic Forum estimates, are still without internet access.<\/p>\n

Starlink this month hit 8 million paying customers, up nearly fourfold from the 2.3 million it had at the start of 2024. Sales last year leapt to an estimated $7.7 billion, surpassing the fees it collects from governments and companies that pay for a ride on SpaceX rockets.<\/p>\n

As its launch cadence grows \u2014 SpaceX now fires a rocket into orbit roughly every other day \u2014 so too does Starlink\u2019s constellation. SpaceX adds about 12 satellites per launch, filling out a network that provides internet access almost anywhere \u2014 from the turrets of medieval castles in England to deep-sea fishing vessels in the North Pacific to, as of next year, the entire fleet of British Airways passenger jets. <\/p>\n

Jonathan McDonnell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, said: \u201cStarlink is starting to deliver on [Musk\u2019s] promise of ubiquitous broadband internet for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steve Durkin, founder of Rutland Broadband, specialises in installing Starlink systems for farmers and other customers who have been waiting years for the rural broadband initiatives promised by successive governments. Ofcom, the UK industry regulator, estimates that 2 per cent of Britons over the age of 16 \u2014 1.3 million people \u2014 do not have internet access. <\/p>\n

Durkin said: \u201cThe rural community absolutely needs internet connectivity. Farmers all have smart farms. Pretty much every piece of farm equipment these days is a connected device, and they run sophisticated agronomy systems, field analysis and all the science behind optimising crops. There\u2019s no good alternative \u2026 Starlink has been a game-changer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea for Starlink began with a crazy idea hatched in Musk\u2019s mind. Famously obsessed with making humans \u201cinterplanetary\u201d by colonising Mars, he recycled $100 million that he made from the sale of PayPal \u2014 the online payment company he co-founded and offloaded to eBay in 2002 \u2014 to design, from scratch, a reusable rocket that could theoretically be orders of magnitude cheaper than, say, the Space Shuttle or other rocket systems in use at the time.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Why Elon Musk\u2019s plan to put a million people on Mars is doomed to fail<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Elon<\/p>\n

Starlink began with what seemed a crazy idea hatched by Elon Musk<\/p>\n

MICHAEL GONZALEZ\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

It was, on the face of it, an insane idea. Governments, not private companies, built rockets \u2014 and certainly not companies run by someone with zero experience in spaceflight. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe started off with just a few people who really didn\u2019t know how to make rockets,\u201d Musk once said of the early days of SpaceX. \u201cThe reason I ended up being the chief engineer or chief designer was not because I wanted to; it was because I couldn\u2019t hire anyone. Nobody good would join. So I ended up being that by default.\u201d<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s first three rockets failed, pushing the company to the edge of bankruptcy. \u201cFortunately, the fourth launch \u2014 which was the last money we had for Falcon 1 \u2014 worked. Or that would have been it for SpaceX.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, the Falcon 9 \u2014 the ninth iteration of that first rocket \u2014 is the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet. Every two and a half days, one of them blasts into the sky from either Florida or California, ferrying all manner of hardware to space, from satellites and GPS kit to supplies for Nasa\u2019s International Space Station.<\/p>\n

\u2022 SpaceX success as Polaris Dawn becomes highest orbit ever flown<\/a><\/p>\n

The key breakthrough was making the booster reusable. Before SpaceX, rockets were almost artisanal. Each booster was made to deliver a single payload to orbit. It would then detach, crash into the ocean and never be seen again. The ability to not just control a descent, but direct the rocket to land with pinpoint accuracy, was deemed simply too hard. <\/p>\n

SpaceX, after many misfires, has mastered the technology.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A SpaceX rocket nails a precision landing in August<\/p>\n

The upshot is that it has brought down launch costs by a factor of ten, allowing it to grab most of the market, while also spawning a generation of start-ups whose business models are enabled by the suddenly cheap cost of getting their equipment into orbit. <\/p>\n

The other reason for satellite internet\u2019s boom is the level of orbit. Traditionally, providers of the technology operated from much further away \u2014 22,000 miles above the Earth \u2014 resulting in a lag time that limited its utility. Signals from Starlink, operating from \u201clow Earth orbit\u201d of about 340 miles, have far shorter distances to travel, resulting in speeds akin to terrestrial internet.<\/p>\n

The satellite boom<\/p>\n

A decade ago, about 1,200 working satellites orbited the Earth; today there are 12,000, most of which are Musk\u2019s. If the 54-year-old billionaire and his rivals, including Amazon Leo, the online retailer\u2019s nascent satellite internet service, deliver on their plans, there could be more than 100,000 satellites circling the globe by 2035.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Jeff Bezos v Elon Musk: who is winning the space race?<\/a><\/p>\n

The implications could be profound. Not only would it mean potentially lighting up the last dark internet corners of the planet, it would also concentrate even more power in the hands of the world\u2019s richest man. A software fault in September briefly cut service across the network \u2014 from the front line of the Russia-Ukraine war, where Kyiv\u2019s military rely on Starlink to conduct operations, to Leiserach\u2019s Lincolnshire business \u2014 highlighting what a critical lever it has become on the world stage.<\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

Ukrainians in Kherson connect to wi-fi with a Starlink station in November 2022<\/p>\n

AFP<\/p>\n

The sheer amount of kit being put into orbit also increases the risk of catastrophe. Satellites circle the globe at 17,000 miles per hour. A collision could set off a chain reaction that sends shrapnel hurtling through space, destroying other satellites and rendering swathes of orbit unusable. <\/p>\n

This could affect everything from basic internet services to bank transactions to climate-change monitoring. McDonnell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said: \u201cThe Earth economy is now strongly entangled with the space economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

SpaceX and its rivals regularly \u201cde-orbit\u201d satellites, lowering them at the end of their useful life so they are incinerated by the atmosphere. \u201cWe could see ten to 20 satellites re-entering each day, and each of these satellites is like half a tonne,\u201d McDonnell said. \u201cSo you\u2019re adding many tonnes of metal a day, in multiple forms, to the upper atmosphere. We know that will have an effect on atmospheric chemistry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

A computer-generated image of space junk in orbit around Earth<\/p>\n

For most, however, the ability to tap into high-speed internet far outweighs concerns about space junk hurtling 340 miles over their heads. When Simon Burton, 66, a retired tech worker, found a home he loved in the West Country village of Kingsdown, the first thing he did was test the speed of the existing service. It was bad: 21 megabits per second (Mbps), about a 20th of what he had become accustomed to when living in Devon.<\/p>\n

He asked BT Openreach when it planned to lay fibre to the village, but there were, apparently, no plans for the next 12 months. This was particularly galling because he was so close to Bath, a tourist destination and university town wired with high-speed internet. <\/p>\n

\"Simon<\/p>\n

Simon Burton turned to Starlink when high-speed internet proved elusive in his village near Bath<\/p>\n

COLLECT<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can see Bath out the window, but there is no fibre in the village,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve been a BT customer all my life, so I have massive loyalty. But I didn\u2019t want to go from 950 Mbps to 21. The obvious answer was Starlink.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet even Starlink\u2019s most loyal customers are wary of being so reliant on a company controlled by Musk, whose behaviour has become increasingly erratic in recent years. <\/p>\n

Leiserach said: \u201cHe seems to be very flighty. He can change his mind on things very quickly. You don\u2019t want it to be the only option because really, you\u2019re at Starlink\u2019s mercy. No one likes a monopoly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Right now, however, it is the only option he\u2019s got.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Alex Leiserach and his wife moved from Lancing in West Sussex to a farmhouse in the Lincolnshire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-301753","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}