SpaceX CEO Elon Musk raises his arms in celebration beneath a prototype Starship rocket under construction in Boca Chica, Texas.
Steve Jurvetson on Flickr
Elon Musk said in a series of tweets on Monday that his aerospace company SpaceX has shipped 100,000 Starlink terminals to date and is now serving 14 countries with license applications pending in others.
The tweets imply that Starlink added 10,000 subscribers in about 3 weeks. In late July, the company said it had around 90,000 users of its Internet service, CNBC reported.
Starlink is a SpaceX initiative to create a network of tens of thousands of satellites, known in the aerospace industry as the Constellation, to deliver high-speed Internet to customers around the world.
SpaceX launched its Starlink beta internet service in late 2020 with a program that allowed some customers to try it out for $ 99 a month, without the upfront costs for shipping, taxes, installation, and equipment like roof mounts to hold the terminals in place.
A Starlink kit contains a satellite antenna, stand, power adapter, and wireless router.
More recently, SpaceX announced plans to extend the service to the Internet on board or on moving ships and trucks.
Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX, announced in February 2020 that the company is likely to spin off its Starlink satellite business and go public for the unit in the coming years.
The initiative was already capital intensive for SpaceX. In 2018, Shotwell predicted it would cost SpaceX about $ 10 billion or more to build the Starlink network.
Last week, state records revealed that SpaceX intended to use its Starship rocket as the primary vehicle to launch its Starlink Gen2 satellites into orbit. SpaceX has already launched 1,740 satellites under Starlink and aims to add around 30,000 Internet satellites to its Gen2 Starlink system.
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