Is the Internet part of the path to Mars?
Elon Musk has long dreamed of getting to Mars. Now he's unveiled an ambitious plan to finance it. Over the weekend he told a crowd of hand-picked attendees at a SpaceX launch that he intended to build a massive
WiFi network in space:
As guests drank beer and wine and sipped Champagne from glasses etched with the SpaceX logo, Musk outlined an audacious plan to build a constellation of some 4,000 geosynchronous satellites, a network in space that could deliver high-speed Internet access anywhere on Earth.
Those satellites are to be designed by software and aerospace engineers in SpaceX’s new engineering office in Redmond.
The plan would be a
boon for rural areas:
In Musk’s vision, Internet data packets going from, say, Los Angeles to Johannesburg would no longer have to go through dozens of routers and terrestrial networks. Instead, the packets would go to space, bouncing from satellite to satellite until they reach the one nearest their destination, then return to an antenna on earth. “The speed of light is 40 percent faster in the vacuum of space than it is for fiber,” Musk says. “The long-term potential is to be the primary means of long-distance Internet traffic and to serve people in sparsely populated areas.”
While providing high-speed Internet worldwide sounds ambitious enough, for Elon Musk, it is merely a
means to an end:
The person present said Musk told the crowd that the satellite endeavor is “all for the purpose of generating revenue to pay for a city on Mars.”
Most of the invite-only guests were software engineers and aerospace engineers who Elon Musk is trying to court for his new venture.