CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk recently shocked Twitter by saying he will be going off-grid for some time. Some netizens jokingly suggested that the entrepreneur will be departing for Mars, trips to which his SpaceX hopes to organise one day, and thus will be left without Wi-Fi to send new Tweets. It seems though that his company just came one step closer to eliminating that problem.
In an apparent come-back to the social media platform, Musk posted a Tweet, which he says was sent via Starlink – a SpaceX project comprising a satellite constellation that aims to one day deliver internet access to people globally, even to the farthest reaches of the globe. Sixty of the envisioned thousands of satellites were deployed in May this year, with the majority of them passing their first tests successfully.
Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite 🛰
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2019
While the project's goal is to become accessible to the broader public by the mid-2020s, it appears that it is already working just fine even though Musk expressed surprise at that fact.
Whoa, it worked!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2019
The Starlink project will not be limited to Earth alone, as SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell shared in a speech at the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 when she stated that the company expects the technology to be deployed on Mars one day in the future.
"If you send a million people to Mars, you better provide some way for them to communicate. I don't think the people who go to Mars are going to be satisfied with some terrible, old-fashioned radios. They'll want their iPhones or Androids on Mars", she said.
