Tesla Inc. and SpaceX Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has shared pictures highlighting Starlink satellites that are due to be launched on Wednesday.

Starlink is an ambitious plan by SpaceX to deploy thousands of low earth orbit satellites to provide internet access to everyone on the globe.

Announced by Musk at an event in January 2015, the initial plan was to launch 4,425 satellites of altitudes ranging from 715 to 823 miles above the earth. Then someone at SpaceX came to the conclusion that 4,425 wasn’t enough satellites, so the company applied to launch an additional 7,518 satellites in November.

The Starlink satellites swap footprint for speed. Existing satellites that provide internet services do so at up to an altitude of 22,000 miles, giving them a large footprint but also, because of their distance, higher lag.

Musk’s Starlink satellites, by comparison, have a much smaller individual footprint, but because they’re not nearly as high, the lag is greatly reduced. An apt comparison might be driving 10 miles or 100 miles: It’s always quicker to drive 10 miles and the same is true for the distance required to transfer data.

The numbers are impressive as well. The service is claimed to provide bandwidth of up to 1 gigabits per second per user, making it competitive with existing fiber optic connections and even 5G technology.

The first experimental Starlink satellites were launched in February 2018, but the new launch, involving 60 satellites, will be the first commercial launch of many to come.

First 60 @SpaceX Starlink satellites loaded into Falcon fairing. Tight fit. pic.twitter.com/gZq8gHg9uK

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2019

“These are production design, unlike our earlier TinTin demo sats,” Musk said on Twitter, adding that it’s a “tight fit” to get all 60 on top of a single SpaceX rocket.

The full time frame for Starlink’s deployment of its full 11,943 satellites has not been revealed, but given that the SpaceX Falcon rocket can only deploy 60 at a time, 200 launches would be required to fully deploy the system. SpaceX has launched 77 times, including five failed launches.

Given that SpaceX is not solely dedicated to launching Starlink satellites, having various other contracts for commercial launches, it would be fair to estimate that Starlink is still years, possibly as long as 10 years or more, away from being fully deployed.

Photo: SpaceX/Flickr