Elon Musk’s Starlink
3rd October 2022
My kid brother John runs a small television, antenna, cable, and dish installation business in New Mexico. He’s been doing it for many years and he’s really good at it. He sends me pictures sometimes of huge flatscreen televisions he’s mounted on tile walls above fireplaces in extraordinarily expensive Santa Fe homes, stuff like that. He does nice work.
Lately, he’s been busy — really busy — doing Starlink installations. Starlink, as everyone probably knows, is Elon Musk’s space-based internet service provider. New Mexico is a huge, wide-open, mostly empty state with lots of mountains and pockets of wealth. It’s a booming market for Musk’s high-speed, low-latency, low-Earth-orbit service.
Starlink interests me. Not because I want it: I have inexpensive cable internet that does a great job for me. It interests me because it’s innovative, beautifully engineered, and one of the drivers of SpaceX (Starlink’s parent company) and Musk’s rocket business.