Elon Musk said in a tweet on Thursday he was in talks with airlines about installing Starlink, a satellite-based broadband service owned by his rocket company SpaceX.
Musk, who is known for his Twitter banter, announcements and lively interactions with followers, did not provide any details about the talks in his tweet. It was not immediately clear which airlines were approached or when installation would occur.
Yes, we are talking to airlines about installing Starlink. Please let them know if you want it on your airliner.
Low latency ~half gigabit connectivity in the air!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2021
Shares of in-flight Internet provider Gogo fell to an intraday low of 5.7 percent before recouping some of the losses in afternoon trading.
Starlink, the satellite Internet unit of SpaceX, plans to deploy 12,000 satellites. SpaceX has said the Starlink constellation will cost it roughly $10 billion (roughly Rs. 74,980 crores).
It is one of a growing number of companies making small satellites that also includes Amazon’s Kuiper, Britain’s OneWeb, venture capital-backed Planet, and Raytheon’s Blue Canyon Technologies.
Musk currently helms companies including electric-car maker Tesla, rocket startup SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
