Elon Musk’s SpaceX is having a banner year, and apparently things just keep getting better: On Tuesday, the company announced that it has received upwards of 500,000 orders for its satellite internet service, Starlink.
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“To date, over half a million people have placed an order or put down a deposit for Starlink,” SpaceX operations engineer Siva Bharadvaj said during a launch event broadcasting its 26th Starlink mission.
Starlink is SpaceX’s planned interconnected internet network, which already features thousands of active satellites — an array known in the space industry as a constellation — that are designed to work together in order to deliver high-speed internet to consumers anywhere on the planet.
Back in December 2020, Starlink won a massive government contract — to the tune of $885 million — to provide high-speed internet to underserved, rural areas of the U.S. The contract came just two months after SpaceX had begun a public beta program for Starlink, pricing internet service at $99 a month on top of a $499 upfront cost that includes a user terminal and Wi-Fi router to connect to the satellites.
In its current form, Starlink is already the world’s largest satellite constellation, with more than 1,500 Starlink satellites currently in orbit.
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Despite the announcement of over half a million orders already in play, those numbers are subject to change; as of now, all of those orders are still “completely refundable.” In a Tuesday tweet, Musk himself acknowledged that the preliminary sales numbers were also limited by “high density of users in urban areas.”
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“Most likely, all of the initial 500k will receive service,” he wrote. “More of a challenge when we get into the several million user range.”