SpaceX Files Application To Blanket Earth's Orbit With Over Four Thousand Internet Beaming Satellites

When SpaceX wants to do something, you best believe it's going to be huge. Its latest task? Trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission to let it launch over 4,400 internet-beaming satellites into orbit. To put that into perspective, that's more satellites than the total number in use today.

As it stands today, there are 1,419 satellites in orbit hard at work, and some other 2,600 that are inactive and just hogging a piece of space. Even combined, all those satellites still fall short of the number SpaceX wants to deploy, so to call this ambitious is a huge understatement.

The goal here is to use these satellites to provide internet to all sorts of users - home and business alike. Each satellite will weigh about 850 lbs and will orbit a distance of 715 to 790 miles.

If the thought of satellite internet makes you cringe, note that this wouldn't be like any satellite system we've ever seen in place before. SpaceX claims that even with the first 800 satellites deployed, it'd be able to deliver internet to an enormous number of customers throughout the globe at up to 1Gbps per user. That sounds almost laughable because it's so outrageous, but if that's the promise, we'd love to see it happen.

The biggest issue with satellite internet isn't so much the lacking bandwidth, but rather the latencies. Online gaming isn't fun when you're dealing with ping times of 400ms or worse, but low latency is something else claimed to be a focal point here, with numbers of 25 to 35ms promised. That's not bad at all, considering the distance the data must travel.

Now we just need to deal with a waiting game to see if the FCC will grant this truly lofty request.