Elon Musk SpaceX Starlink to 'Light Up' dark national parks in developing countries

Elon Musk’s Starlink – SpaceX’s internet-satellite constellation is coming online in the coming years to ‘light up’ dark national parks around the world with high-speed 5G service, enabling a great opportunity to deploy better park and wildlife protection systems including ranger communications, Cellular Trailcam surveillance and cloud-based protection systems.

Commercial operation could begin in 2020, but will not likely reach many countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia for years to come.  Global Conservation will begin testing the Starlink system next year with 5G Cellular Trailcams.

The ability to connect low-cost Cellular Trailcams and other sensors to a satellite based network opens incredible opportunities for park authorities to expand protection across large areas without investing in expensive cellular or digital radio towers and infrastructure.

SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk has approval to launch about 12,000 Starlink satellites and recently applied for permission to loft up to 30,000 more. But the company has launched just 60 of the craft to date, all of which rode to orbit this past May aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

A number of additional such launches will be required before Starlink can beam data for the rest of us, including many national parks in developing countries with no cellular service – ‘dark parks’

SpaceX needs about 400 Starlink craft to provide "minor" coverage and 800 for "moderate" coverage, Musk said earlier this year. SpaceX isn't the only company with internet-satellite plans. Amazon aims to launch more than 3,000 broadband craft of its own, and OneWeb launched the first six satellites of a 650-strong constellation earlier this year. The total cost of the decade-long project to design, build and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in May 2018 to be about US$10 billion.  

Product development began in 2015, with the first two prototype test-flight satellites launched in February 2018. A second set of test satellites and the first large deployment of a piece of the constellation occurred on 24 May 2019 (UTC) when the first 60 operational satellites were launched. The SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington, houses the Starlink research, development, manufacturing and on-orbit control operations.

SpaceX intends to provide broadband internet connectivity to underserved areas of the planet, as well as provide competitively-priced service to urban areas. The company has stated that the positive cashflow from selling satellite internet services would be necessary to fund their Mars plans.

Internal documents leaked in February 2017 indicated that SpaceX expected more than US$30 billion in revenue by 2025 from its satellite constellation, while revenues from its launch business were expected to reach US$5 billion in the same year.