While preparing his fields for springtime seeding earlier this year, Barry Sawchuk came across a giant slab of space debris. It had come from a spacecraft belonging to Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX. News of the Spielberg-esque incident piqued the interest of one of his neighbours, Dr Sam Lawler, an Associate Professor of Astronomy at Campion College at the University of Regina. She began to look more closely into the company’s flagship project, Starlink, and what she has evinced is, some might say, alarming.
Starlink is, as of 2020, the world’s largest-ever satellite constellation, with 6,000 satellites in low Earth orbit designed to build a global mobile broadband. It is already proving popular with Britain’s centrist dads: Sir Keir Starmer and, the Standard can reveal, one Goalhanger podcast host have had it installed in their homes, wooed by its superior speed and quality. Starlink was publicly announced in 2015 with the opening of the SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington, and named after a reference in John Green’s novel, The Fault in Our Stars. It is currently facing sanctions in Brazil, where its accounts have been frozen following a fracas between Mr Musk and President Lula’s government over disinformation running rampant on Twitter/X. Otherwise, things are going swimmingly, with Starlink projected to earn $6.6bn in revenue by the end of the year. Parent company SpaceX (passport name: Space Explorations Technologies) is valued at $210bn.
