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Neil Newman
Neil Newman

Abacus | Elon Musk’s Starlink: game-changer for China’s Great Firewall and hedge funds

  • The billionaire has sold regulators on his satellite network by saying it will provide internet coverage to the poorest of nations
  • But it will also transform the worlds of high-frequency trading and internet censorship on Earth before SpaceX ventures deeper into space

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Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX. Photo: AP
Neil Newman
With everything that’s happened in 2020 already it would be easy to suffer from news fatigue. But I came across something last week in the world of orbital telecommunications that left me speechless – a disruptive game-changer for arbitrage traders, censorship and internet delivery that is about to go live.
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I’m talking, of course, about Elon Musk’s Starlink project, which aims to provide internet coverage anywhere on the planet through a network of 12,000 small and inexpensive satellites, approximately 60 of which are to be launched on Wednesday.

As most stargazers will be aware, Mr Musk has form when it comes to space. His live-streamed launching of a red sports car and its crash-test dummy into space in February 2018 attracted 2.3 million views on YouTube, the second-largest audience for a live event. More importantly, it showed that launching things into space was no longer the preserve of governments and national space agencies; it is now firmly in the private sector.

The aerospace company Musk founded, SpaceX, is just one of several companies pursuing the business of regularly flying stuff into space. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic are two others hoping to make a dime by transporting people or objects into orbit on the commission of governments, businesses or individuals.

As of yet, there are precious few holiday destinations in space – an eight-day stay at the International Space Station cost Dennis Tito a cool US$20 million in 2001. So the most lucrative business currently is putting satellites, not sports cars or entrepreneurs, into orbit and, in the future, going deeper into space.

02:15

Astronauts arrive at International Space Station on historic mission using private SpaceX rocket

Astronauts arrive at International Space Station on historic mission using private SpaceX rocket

NEW SPACE RACE

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