BOCA CHICA, Texas—SpaceX and T-Mobile announced an ambitious plan on Thursday evening to connect anyone with a mobile phone from space, anywhere.
The project would link SpaceX’s Starlink satellite technology to the second largest wireless carrier in the United States, T-Mobile US, and its mid-band spectrum, cellular network and large customer base.
To provide space-to-ground internet to mobile phones, SpaceX must complete development of its second-generation Starlink satellites. These will be significantly larger than the current ones, which have a mass of about 295 kg. SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk said the project could enter “beta service” before the end of 2023.
At a live event at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, where the company is building and testing its next-generation Starship rocket, Musk appeared with Mike Sievert, the US chief executive of T-Mobile. The event had something of a rocket concert flair, with a smoke machine, fireworks and lots of people mingling around the stage in black t-shirts. Only these shirts sported magenta T-Mobile and white SpaceX logos, and three Starship prototypes loomed in the background.
The companies are proposing to deliver a service they’ve dreamed of since the advent of cell phones: no dead zones. “Our vision is that if you have a clear view of the sky, you are connected,” Sievert said.
How this would work
Currently, a user of SpaceX’s Starlink service needs a saucer-shaped terminal that can remove broadband internet from one of the 2,800 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit. The existing satellites are simply not powerful enough to connect to many smaller cell phones because the signal is too weak.
The solution to this problem is to use a much more powerful phased array antenna on the second version, or V2, of the Starlink satellites. Musk said the body of these satellites would be about 7 meters long, and the antenna would expand to about 5 meters to one side, or “about 25 square meters.” As the satellite passes overhead, this antenna sends and receives data along a focused beam that travels across the planet’s surface.
Initially, the service would in any case not provide a broadband internet service. But in a typical service cell, it should deliver 2 to 4 megabits of data, enough for thousands of voice calls or millions of text messages. This would allow connectivity in off-grid areas, or during emergencies, such as when a hurricane disables service to a community.
A user’s cell phone would first search for a cell phone tower, but if it didn’t detect it, the phone would search the sky instead of a user with no service bars. It would then connect to the nearest available satellite, with software on the satellite communicating with the cell phone as if it were a virtual cell tower on the ground.
Sievert said T-Mobile planned to offer this service to its users for free on most of its existing plans, initially for the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, as well as much of the world’s oceans. He invited foreign mobile network operators to partner with T-Mobile and SpaceX, offering reciprocal roaming around the world.
The challenges
Beyond regulatory issues, SpaceX faces several major challenges in making all of this work. The most important of these is designing and building the big satellites that can talk to cell phones.
“These are the most advanced antennas in the world, we think,” Musk said. “They need to pick up a very quiet signal from your cell phone. Imagine that signal needs to travel 500 miles and then be picked up by a satellite traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. The satellite needs to capture the Doppler effect of moving so fast.”
Then they have to get the satellites into space. The V2 satellites are too large for the payload capacity of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, which is 5 meters wide. So the full Starlink V2 satellites will have to wait for the much larger Starship rocket to come online. SpaceX is working to do just that at its Starbase facility in South Texas, but operational launches are likely to take at least another year.
To that end, if Starship development doesn’t come as quickly as expected, Musk said SpaceX could develop a “V2 mini” Starlink satellite that could fit into the cockpit of the Falcon 9 rocket. But it seems clear that in order to get the kind of global connectivity that Musk and Sievert talked about, a fully operational Starship launch system is needed.
In his comments on Thursday night, Musk acknowledged that the company has a lot of technical work to do, but said the SpaceX teams have made great strides.
“So it’s really quite a difficult technical challenge,” he said. “But we’ve got it working in the lab and we’re confident this will work in the field. So it’s actually quite a lot of extra hardware on the satellites and it’s a lot of software as well. It’s a tough problem.”
The competition
SpaceX has already launched satellites for a competitor in this area, Lynk, and will launch the “BlueWalker 3” demonstration satellite for another company, AST Space Mobile, later this year. Both companies are trying to provide a direct-to-cell phone service.
Lynk says it has already successfully demonstrated that it can use regular, unmodified cell phones to connect to satellite Internet services. The company currently has one operational satellite in space, but plans to launch more to provide a wider coverage area.
“Elon said it’s hard, and it’s only been done in the lab, but Lynk has already done it in space,” Miller said in an interview Thursday night. “We are the only company in the world that has done that.”
Lynk has 14 commercial contracts with mobile network operators in 35 countries, Miller said. The company expects to obtain a license from the US Federal Communications Commission to start selling commercial services in those countries before the end of this year.
While Lynk has an edge and AST Space Mobile a satellite ready for demonstration testing, the arrival of SpaceX and T-Mobile, two of the world’s leaders in spaceflight and connectivity, has created a whole new level of competition. It’s plausible that they could pull this off, given SpaceX has already deployed the world’s largest satellite constellation and the company has a history of delivering its new rockets.
Musk and Sievert seemed to be having a good time onstage and talked about other ways the two companies could work together. For example, Starlink can provide “backhaul” capacity to remote cell towers on Earth. This means that the satellites would connect those towers to the Internet without T-Mobile having to run cables to the towers.
And maybe T-Mobile will become the first cellular service provider on Mars someday. “We would love to have T-Mobile on Mars,” Musk joked during the event.
