One of the company's Falcon 9 rockets took off without incident from Cape Canaveral in Florida around 10.30pm last week. Billionaire Elon Musk's firm, which is leading the private space race when it comes to rocket launches, is now looking to seize a chunk of the future space Internet market. The launch will make it an early forerunner, along with rival OneWeb, a startup, but well ahead of Amazon's Project Kuiper, the brainchild of Musk's space rival Jeff Bezos. Each of the satellites weighs just 227kg and was built in-house in Redmond, near Seattle. Starlink will become operational once 800 satellites have been activated, which will require a dozen more launches.

Source: The Star May 27, 2019 10:52 UTC