SpaceX just got a massive FCC green light for Starlink Mobile

X ^ | X Freeze

[SmokingJoe]

SpaceX just got a massive FCC green light for Starlink Mobile

The FCC has approved SpaceX to launch and operate up to 15,000 next-generation satellites built for direct-to-phone connectivity

The new system is designed to:

• Target peak speeds of up to 150 Mbps per user
• Connect ordinary cell phones directly from space

• Operate in very low orbit at roughly 326–335 km

• Use T-Mobile spectrum alongside spectrum SpaceX is acquiring from EchoStar • Deliver orders of magnitude more capacity than the first-generation Starlink Mobile constellation

SpaceX currently has roughly 650 dedicated mobile satellites in orbit

The FCC also granted a waiver giving SpaceX a path to provide satellite wireless service without requiring a spectrum-leasing agreement with a terrestrial mobile operator

Starlink Mobile is moving far beyond basic dead-zone connectivity

SpaceX is building toward a full 5G cellular network in space

---

TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: fcc; musk; spacex

[SmokingJoe]

Is Musk even human? Yes. Just about. But he never stops.

[gibsonguy]

That IPO is looking like a bargain about now.

[Fungi]

As of August 2026, there are about 18,300 satellites in Earth orbit, including roughly 16,300–18,500 active ones depending on the source.
15,000 more and space becomes a war zone.

[stevio]

Kicking myself for not buying at $104, I was waiting for under $100. Did buy it at ~$148.

[Deaf Smith]

Where does Musk build his StarLink satellite?

[No.6]

IMO people generally on the side of not-being-enslaved have come to certain conclusions (also IMO not too hard to suss out) about what the globalists intend and their timeframe (which the published! See, this isn’t tricky) and need to have a countervailing force and momentum in place not subject to being destroyed the minute Trump leaves office.

(More parenthetical- anyone have faith even the best of our 2028 people have Trump’s ability to work for us outside uniparty control?)

Among the things we need are comms which some bureaucracy can’t quash, both means and platform as well as anonymity.

[thinden]

bttt

168

[SmokingJoe]

SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites primarily in Redmond, Washington.
According to SpaceX’s official sites page, the Starlink satellite manufacturing facility in Redmond.

[6ppc]

$113 here. Should have bought more at $104.

[Deaf Smith]

Thanks.

[cva66snipe]

I wouldn't have a Tesla if he gave it to me. But his company has done humanity a huge favor with STARLINK. AT&T is fixing to end Landline Service. Not one company except STARLINK has stepped in to fill that void. Rural areas need communication services. The cable companies will charge 10"s or thousands of dollars to run service. The cell phone companies focus on towns, cities, and interstate routes. I lost AT&T landline service over 6 years ago. The cable fell down and they left it laying on the ground where it got wet and phones were out. But in 2017 I went with VIASAT. Much better than dial up but trees blocked my signal this spring. I live on a ridge in East Tennessee.

So I looked into STARLINK because my neighbors had it and loved it. No usage Cap, Streams multiple TVs, computers and WIFI Cell capabilities. I was loosing Viasat for an hour at a time. Starlink has gone out due to weather one time Since June for a few minutes. The greatest part is this. I the power fails I hook up my 12VDC to 120VAC power supply and I have my service back immediately.

Starlink has built what AT&T ceased providing which is a true national grid telecommunications system for home and personal use. Also to his credit he sent his receiver systems into remote areas hit by hurricane Helena. I really like Starlink. I pay $130 a month no contract and get great service. Itmay not be what Gamers need but its great otherwise. Average download 100-250 MBPS and I've seen mine go up to 400MBPS. Easy to self install.

[Bobbyvotes]

Musk is the best F1-B visa immigrant ever !!!

[stevio]

Good job.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

That's a very low orbit! At 326–335 km a satellite is still flying through air. Not much air, but enough to matter. Drag steals speed on every orbit, the orbit sinks, and the sink speeds up as the air gets thicker. Left alone, a typical object near 300 km lasts on the order of weeks to a few months. Near 400 km the same object might last about a year. The Sun makes it worse: when solar activity swells the upper atmosphere, drag can rise several-fold. So a dead satellite in this band is not a long-term resident. It is on a short clock.

SpaceX’s answer is continuous station-keeping (i.e., thrust). Drag is always slowing the satellite, so the thruster has to keep restoring the lost speed instead of firing only now and then. Each satellite carries an electric thruster fed by argon, a cheap industrial gas, and powered by the solar wings. It does not burn fuel the way a rocket does. It throws a thin stream of argon backward with a push about as strong as the weight of a few sheets of paper. Run for much of the satellite’s life, that small continuous thrust cancels drag and holds the altitude. SpaceX has not published an expected service life for these low-orbit satellites, nor the size of the argon tank. The working guess is about five years, the design life already used on the higher Starlink fleet, and only if the tank is filled for the heavier drag down here. The gas load for that is likely tens to a couple of hundred kilograms. When the tank is empty, drag wins and the satellite comes down within months.

That short life means the constellation is a replacement machine, not a one-time build. Holding 15,000 satellites in place for a five-year life implies on the order of 3,000 end-of-life replacements a year, before counting launch failures and early retirements. Those are heavy next-generation satellites, so the cadence depends on Starship flying often and the factory keeping up. Pause the launches and the shell thins by itself.

The fall back to earth is aimed, not left to chance. A short thrust starts the descent. After that the satellite holds a steady attitude down to about 125 km and tilts its solar wings to add or subtract drag. Wings face-on to the direction of flight slow it faster. Wings edge-on let it coast farther. Power and drag are different jobs, so the wings can still be turned toward the Sun while their angle to the airflow is changed. Operators have used that trick for years. Here it is used to place the debris path over open ocean.

The aim is rough, about ten minutes of error, enough to miss cities, not enough to hit a chosen field.

The satellite is not meant to land whole. SpaceX says most of it burns up, and that about 5 percent of the mass may survive as small, low-energy bits, mostly solar-cell silicon, which falls to the ground rather than staying aloft. One 2.5 kg metal piece from an off-nominal reentry did reach a farm in Canada in 2024, so those predictions are not perfect. What does stay in the air is the vaporized metal. Aluminum structure becomes aluminum-oxide nanoparticles. Sampling flights have found spacecraft metals in stratospheric droplets above what meteors supply, and a typical 250 kg satellite is estimated to leave about 30 kg of alumina. That dust does not eat ozone directly, but it can help leftover chlorine become reactive. At a few thousand reentries a year, the solid crumbs come down; the vapor is the part that lingers.

[reg45]

The most prolific inventor since Edison.

[reg45]

Starling is the only international internet server. Satellites overfly everywhere.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

The thrusters are a fascinating bit of the puzzle. They've been widely used for decades in space. Starlink’s thrusters are Hall thrusters. They accelerate argon with an electric field, after knocking an electron off each atom so the argon is positively charged and the field can grab it.

Argon is stored as a cold gas and fed into a ring-shaped channel. A hollow cathode at the exit shoots out electrons. A magnetic field across the channel traps those electrons so they circle instead of falling straight to the positively charged anode upstream. That circling cloud is the Hall current the thruster is named for. The trapped electrons hit neutral argon atoms and strip an electron off, making Ar⁺ ions. Those ions are heavy and barely feel the magnetic field, so the electric field — anode positive, exit negative — pulls them out the open end. Exit speed is on the order of 20–25 km/s for the published V2 Mini rating of about 2,500 seconds specific impulse. Thrust is just that stream’s mass times its speed: a few milligrams per second at about 170 millinewtons, roughly the weight of a few sheets of paper.

Electrons from the cathode also spill out and mix with the ion beam, so the exhaust leaves neutral and the satellite does not build up a charge. Power comes from the solar wings, about 4.2 kW on the V2 Mini thruster. The argon is only the reaction mass. The energy is electricity.

This is not a new kind of engine. Hall thrusters and their cousins, gridded ion thrusters, have been flying for decades. The Soviet Union flew Hall thrusters on Meteor satellites in the 1970s. Since then they have been routine station-keeping engines on communications satellites in geostationary orbit, usually with xenon. SMART-1 used a Hall thruster to spiral out to the Moon. Dawn used gridded ion thrusters to orbit Vesta and Ceres. Starlink itself already does this job: krypton on the first satellites, argon on the V2 Minis, for orbit raising, station-keeping, collision avoidance, and deorbit. What changes at 326–335 km is how often it has to fire. Drag is stronger, so the thruster has to restore speed for much more of the satellite’s life.

Same physics as the common "Hall Effect," but different job. The Hall Effect is what happens when moving charges cross a magnetic field and get shoved sideways. Edwin Hall measured it in 1879 as a voltage across a current-carrying strip in a magnet. A speed sensor uses that as a switch. A magnet on a wheel or shaft passes a small semiconductor. Each pass shoves the charges in the chip sideways, the chip puts out a pulse, and the count of pulses is the speed. The chip is not pushing anything. It is only reporting that a magnet went by.

A Hall thruster uses the sideways shove on purpose. Electrons trying to fall from the exit toward the anode are crossing a magnetic field, so they are deflected into a circling current instead of going straight. That circling current is the Hall current. It is what keeps the electrons around long enough to ionize the argon. The argon ions are then flung out by the electric field. Nothing in the thruster is measuring the satellite’s speed. So the car sensor and the thruster are both the Lorentz force on charges in a magnetic field. One turns it into a pulse. The other turns it into a trapped electron cloud that lets the engine run.

So, next time you get in your car, look at the dashboard, see your car speed or engine rotation speed on the tach, and think "Hall Effect -- its cousin is keeping StarLink satellites flying!"

[ridesthemiles]

MEANWHILE, JUST ABOUT 23 MILES FROM TESLA OPERATIONS HERE IN N NEVADA—— CREWS ARE PITTING UP’OPTIC FIBER LINES’ ON MY STREET.

[fhayek]

I don't know if I would go so far as to say bargain. Its up 10% from the IPO, which is not nothing, but it is trading at 67 times sales right now. 67 times earnings would be a bit pricey, but times sales, its a little speculative. The Starlink part of the company makes money, but the rockets and the AI parts are burning through a lot of capital expenditures. SpaceX will probably need a ton of additional financing through stock sales, borrowing, and (probably) government subsidies. I am not saying bet against Elon Musk, but, we are probably a little bit from the company showing returns that justify the current price.

[gibsonguy]

Sounds like good expert analysis. Don’t bet against Elon but it is true he takes BIG risks at high costs. If you were heavy with his stock you might not get much sleep.