The Federal Communication Commission (FCC), the US government agency that regulates telecommunications, has granted the space company SpaceX the license to build and operate a huge network of small satellites to provide high-speed wireless Internet connections. Elon Musk's company plans to call the Starlink service and has been working on perfecting it for years. The project – which we had told more extensively here – plans to bring up to 12 thousand small satellites into orbit, an unprecedented amount and which will require a great deal of work by SpaceX and numerous launches of its rockets. The first phase will involve the transport and activation of approximately 4,400 satellites, and the FCC has requested that at least half of these be operational within the next six years. SpaceX has already launched a couple of its satellites to test its capabilities, while from next year it should start taking hundreds of them into orbit to start construction of the new satellite network.
