Elon Musk’s SpaceX made it to Antarctica as the National Science Foundation (NSF) is in the midst of testing one of its Starlink terminals at one of the most extreme locations in the world. In a tweet, the NSF said that they are testing SpaceX’s Starlink terminal at McMurdo Station, based on an island right off the coast of Antarctica, as the company has shipped a Starlink dish to the US research facility.
The McMurdo Station is home to at least 1,000 people living and working there during the summer, where the satellite internet is not always reliable given the rough conditions. On Wednesday the tweet by NSF, while announcing SpaceX’s milestone, said that the scientists working in the U.S. Antarctic Programme were “over the moon”, with increasing bandwidth and connectivity. Further indicating that this will help scientists with their work on the remote continent.
Subsequently, SpaceX’s Twitter account announced that Starlink is now on all seven continents and how its availability and capability in such a remote location like Antarctica is enabled by the project’s space laser network. Reportedly, McMurdo is one of the most heavily populated stations in Antarctica and while the station already had satellite internet it was really slow and described as patchy. Furthermore, everyone at the base currently shares a 17 Mbps link but will Starlink internet service will be better and not patchy like it was earlier, said the USAP.
Along with SpaceX the other contender racing to cover the North Pole and other Artic areas with satellite internet was OneWeb. Reports also suggest that scientists at the McMurdo station were not allowed to use Netflix or take video calls except for Skype or FaceTime sessions once a week at a public kiosk or mission-critical communications. On the other hand, Starlink can offer a speed of up to 200 Mbps.
According to Musk, SpaceX is launching Starlink satellites approximately every five days or so and next year plans to launch at least 100 orbital missions. Notably, SpaceX completed its 40th mission so far this year which was marked by successfully launching 51 more Starlink satellites in space.
(With inputs from agencies)
