How Starlink Actually Works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-aL_MiUz4
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TRANSCRIPT
I want to take you back to one of the
most important events in the history of
space exploration.
May 23rd, 2019. That's the day that
these odd lights started appearing in
the night sky. A string of 60 little
dots all flying in a perfect row. When
people first saw this, a lot of them
thought it was the beginning of an alien
invasion. But what they were actually
seeing was the arrival of a new way to
connect the world. Fast forward to today
and those 60 little dots have already
grown into a massive constellation of
11,000 Starlink satellites. That's more
than every other non-S Starlink
satellite combined. And just look at the
impact [music] this technology has
already had. Starlink has played a
critical role on the battlefields of
Ukraine. It has enabled disaster relief
across the US and around the world. It's
been a communication lifeline to
pro-democracy activists inside the
authoritarian fortress of Iran. This
initial success of Starlink has
propelled SpaceX from a simple rocket
maker with dreams of landing on Mars to
one of the most valuable publicly traded
companies in American history. And
here's the reason why. It's because
Starlink is more than just a new way to
access the internet. This is the
beginning of a new internet that exists
entirely in outer space. So, the first
thing that we should do is take a look
at how Starlink can actually get
high-speed internet from space all the
way down to you out here in the middle
of nowhere. There are three main pieces
in the chain of communication. One is
your receiver, two is a satellite, and
three is a gateway. You might notice
that only one of the three is actually
in space for now at least. Starting with
the receiver, which SpaceX has
affectionately named Dishy, short for
Dishy McFlatace. But this is not
actually a satellite dish in the way
that you've known them before. Maybe
you're like me and still have one of
these satellite television receivers
attached to the side of your house. It
hasn't been used in a very long time,
but I really like the early 2000s
aesthetic, so I leave it up there as a
decoration. Anyway, these classic dishes
were not flatfaced, and that's because
the U-shape or parabola, to be
scientific, is necessary to concentrate
radio waves onto the antenna, which is
this thing that sticks out. Yes, TV from
space travels on radio, and so does
internet from space, but we'll get
there. Now, you might remember the time
when home satellite TV dishes were the
size of a gazebo, and they would have to
physically move around to change
channels by pointing at different
satellites to pick up the signal. These
second generation dishes don't need to
move because newer satellites broadcast
multiple channels. So, your mini dish
only needs to be pointed at one of them.
And that satellite is parked in an orbit
that we call geocynchronous, which means
that relative to the surface, the
satellite is always in the same place
overhead. But for this to work, the
satellite needs to be orbiting at an
altitude of over 35,000
km, which even for space is very high.
Keep that in mind. Now, to understand
what makes Starling different, we need
to appreciate why Dishy is so flatfaced.
And the best way to do that would be to
crack Dishy open and start pulling out
his guts to see what they look like. The
first thing that we're going to find
underneath the face is the antenna
layer. It's basically a whole bunch of
little circles made from very fine
wires. Each one of the circles is a mini
antenna. There are over 1,200 of them on
here. And this is the reason why your
Starlink receiver can talk to multiple
different satellites without ever having
to physically move around. To see how
that works, we go down one more layer
and find the motherboard. This is the
reason why a Starlink receiver costs so
much. It is the brain that turns your
sheet of a thousand circles into
something called a phased array. In very
simple terms, Dishy is shooting an
invisible beam of information into space
using radio waves. The phased array
allows the beams to be pointed in any
direction, so it can actually move in
real time to track a Starling satellite
as it flies overhead. And that distance
to the Starlink is just about 500 km,
which is a whole lot less than 35,000.
So inside the beam is what we call a
data packet. That's your request to the
internet. And it just got launched into
space where one of those 11,000
satellites is waiting to receive it. On
board each Starlink, there are five
phased arrays just like Dishy that are
dedicated to receiving data packets from
users. That's what your beam is firing
at. And then the satellite is going to
take your request and transfer it over
to another three-phased arrays that are
dedicated to gateway down links. This is
the third piece of the puzzle that most
people are probably less familiar with.
So the gateway is actually here on the
ground. There are over a hundred of them
spread out across the USA and another 50
or so around the world. But just like
the satellites, this number keeps going
up. Each gateway looks like a collection
of nine balls, but these are just round
covers that keep rain and snow off of
the instruments. Inside the cover is a
satellite dish, not a flat one, an
actual parabolic dish. And these do
physically move around to capture data
packets from the satellites. They don't
have to move very much or even very
fast. That's why there are nine with
each one pointing in a different
direction. So, our request from Dishy
has gone up to space, bounced off a
satellite, and come back down to our
closest gateway location. And many of
these gateways happen to be conveniently
located next to a Google data center.
This is not a coincidence. Google was
actually an early backer of SpaceX and
contributed $900 million way back in
2015 to fund the development of the
Starlink network in the first place. So
they have this agreement where SpaceX
can rent out space inside Google's
computer clusters and use them to
connect with the local internet. Now
let's say that you are outside of the
United States in some remote location or
maybe in an airplane over the middle of
the Pacific Ocean. Because Starling
satellites are relatively low to the
ground, they're not going to be able to
see one of these gateways and your
antenna at the same [music] time because
the curvature of the Earth is going to
obscure the view. So in this case, the
satellite that receives your data packet
is going to fire up a laser and blast
the information through space to another
satellite, which will then relay the
signal via laser to another satellite.
And then the chain continues until
eventually it finds a clear view of a
gateway and the packet is finally
delivered to the internet, at which
point your request is processed. And
then the web page is returned back
through the same chain to your dishy and
onto your computer screen, which sounds
like way too much stuff to be happening
in a split second, but it starts to make
sense once you wrap your head around how
fast all of this stuff moves through
space. You may have noticed that there
are two methods used by Starlink to
transfer data. The first is radio.
That's how individual satellites talk to
the ground. And the second is laser.
That's how satellites within the
constellation [music] talk to each
other. The reason that we use laser
communication in space is not because it
travels faster. Radio [music] is
actually light. It's just invisible to
the human eye. So, it travels at the
same speed. [music] But laser light is
able to carry more data on one signal,
between 10 and 100 times more
information per beam thanks to its
higher frequency range. So while each
satellite can receive multiple beams at
once from multiple dishes, it has to
compress that down into one single beam
that travels to the next satellite. So
why don't we use laser light to connect
from space to the ground? Well, the
downside to a laser beam is that the
higher frequencies can be easily
scattered by small interruptions such as
clouds, rain, or even just fog.
basically any kind of water vapor which
the Earth's atmosphere is full of has a
tendency to scatter some light waves
which is why the sun looks yellow in the
sky. It's not actually the real sun is
white. It just turns yellow when the
light passes through [music] our sky.
Radio waves carry lower frequencies that
are able to pass right through water
molecules. So that's what we need for
data to reach the ground from space
intact. [music]
Which might raise another important
question. How do we turn the internet
into waves that shoot back and forth
through space? And the answer can be
easier than you think as long as we keep
this all relatively simple. So
everything that you see and hear from
your computer starts out as binary code,
ones and zeros. Now if we look at a
wave, there are two ways to show binary
information. One is amplitude. That's
the height of the wave on a vertical
scale. So we could say that a tall wave
is one and a short wave is zero. [music]
The second method is frequency. That's
the length of the wave on a horizontal
scale. So likewise, a long wave can be
one and a short wave can be zero. This
is the basic idea. And within that
method, there are a million different
ways that data can be encoded. But
that's [music] essentially how we move
information around the world. Now,
here's the reason why Starlink works so
well compared to any other global
transmission network. Back in the day, a
satellite communication from the middle
of the ocean would have to go all the
way up to 35,000 km geocynchronous
orbit, then bounce all the way back down
to a ground station thousands of
kilometers away on the mainland. [music]
And even though the signal moves at the
speed of light, it's still traveling
over a long distance and moving through
some generally outdated and inefficient
computer processing along the way. So
this means there will always be some
inherent lag or latency in the signal
enough that even holding a live
conversation becomes challenging. You
know those clips on television news when
a reporter is trying to call in from a
war zone to a live broadcast and [music]
there's always that really awkward delay
with the host and people end up just
sitting there staring blankly into the
camera. That is satellite communication
lag and you can't have a serviceable
modern internet connection with that
kind of nonsense going on. Gamers would
revolt. This is why Starling satellites
are positioned so low. At 500 km, they
are about 70 times closer than
traditional satellite communications.
This even has an advantage over
traditional groundbased fiber optic
internet. So like 99% of all
communications that cross the Atlantic
Ocean flow through underwater cables.
Inside these fire hosed sized tubes are
bundles of fiber optic cable, basically
glass lines that we fire laser beams
through and carry information from point
A to point B. Laser light can travel
easily through glass as long as it's
high quality and clear, but it still
gets slowed down just a little bit
compared to light moving through the
vacuum of space. So, a laser signal
traveling between Starling satellites
from New York to London will move about
30% faster than even the highest quality
fiber optic line. Now, it's not like we
needed Elon Musk to figure out that
lower satellites equal lower latency,
but we did need SpaceX and particularly
the reusable Falcon 9 rocket to make a
lowaltitude communication constellation
economically viable. Because Starlink is
not hovering in place like a
geocynchronous satellite, they are
flying around the Earth at a rate of
about one orbit every 90 minutes. This
means that from your position on the
ground, it would take one satellite
about five minutes to cross from the
western horizon to the eastern horizon.
And in order to make sure there are
enough satellites that you always have
at least one visible from any given
location on Earth, you need to have
thousands of them in service all at
once. Meanwhile, from 35,000 km, you
only need three satellites to cover the
entire habitable Earth, which is
excluding the North and South Poles. So,
from a business standpoint, do you want
to launch three satellites or 3,000?
[music] Any reasonable capitalist is
going to choose the lower number. Elon
Musk chose the high road. But Elon also
knew that he'd never get to 3,000
satellites or even 300 satellites
without first totally reinventing the
rocket as we know it. So, the first
phase of SpaceX was figuring out how to
make an orbital rocket booster reusable.
This proved to be a really difficult
task. It took them many years and a lot
of exploded rockets. But by the
mid2010s, SpaceX was finally starting to
figure it out. And that's why they
waited until 2019 after the Falcon 9
booster had finally become fully
reliably reusable to start ramping up
Starlink launches. With Starlink V1,
each Falcon 9 launch was able to carry
around 60 into orbit at one time. That
has gone down over time as SpaceX has
upgraded to the bigger and more powerful
V2 satellite with them now being limited
to just 20 per launch, but they've
compensated by flying their rockets at a
much higher frequency. [music] So in
2019, SpaceX conducted a total of 13
orbital launches. In 2023, when they
upgraded to Starlink V2, the company
launched 96 times that year. By 2025,
Falcon launches were up to 165. But
there comes a time when you reach a
limit for how many rockets you can
launch at any given time, even with
reusable boosters, which is why SpaceX
is developing their next rocket
platform, the Starship. This is not just
a little bigger than Falcon 9. Starship
dwarfs every other rocket ever made. And
compared to Falcon 9, it increases
payload capacity to low Earth orbit from
20 tons to 200 tons. That is going to
allow SpaceX to make even bigger and
more powerful Starlink V3 satellites and
return to launching 60 of them at a
time. And because Starship makes the
entire rocket fully reusable, not just
the booster, they will be able to launch
even more frequently at an even lower
cost than the existing Falcon 9. But why
do Starling satellites need to keep
getting bigger anyways? Well, bigger is
better, of course, but one of the main
reasons is that Starlink has already
begun moving to a service where you
don't even need a dishy in order to
access the network. This involves direct
to cell phone communication. Makes
sense, right? Of course, we all want a
highquality mobile network everywhere we
go. But unfortunately, this is very hard
to achieve even for Starlink. So the V2
satellites are about twice as wide to
accommodate the extra phased array
antennas made specifically for direct to
cell. These actually need to be bigger
and more powerful than the standard
Starlink antennas because the beam
strength coming up from a cell phone is
so weak compared to the signal from a
dishy. So you need more power just to
hear it. And then on the return back
down, the beam has to be concentrated
enough to hit a moving cell phone and
cut through any surrounding radio noise,
which also requires extra power. What's
crazy is that even with the V2 upgrade,
the best that Starling can do for direct
to cell service right now is voice and
text, no streaming internet. So, there's
a key reason why V3 is necessary. It's
going to have a much bigger and more
powerful mobile antenna. It's also going
to have an even bigger and more powerful
space laser connection system, which is
also very much needed. [music]
Remember before I said that moving data
with a laser through space is much
faster than moving data across the ocean
through fiber optics. That is true for
latency, but as it stands, the Trans
Ocean cable network can still move 100
times more data per second than
Starlink. So, it's not actually a better
solution for all people. And that's the
big hurdle that SpaceX needs to
overcome. If every one of us right now
decided to switch our internet
connection over to Starlink, the amount
of traffic would completely overload the
network and it wouldn't work for
anybody. So, as of right now, Starlink
is a great option when you have no other
good options, like when you're located
in the middle of nowhere. But anywhere
else, there's really no point. Not yet,
at least. Of course, SpaceX has a plan,
and that involves a lot more than just
replacing the existing constellation
with V3 satellites. It means growing the
network to 10 times its current size.
Over 100,000
active Starlinks in Earth orbit, which
sounds crazy, and it is, but that's not
even the end game. Elon Musk wrote in
May 2026, "If growth continues, Starlink
will one day carry the majority of
internet traffic." At that point, it is
the internet and everything else just
connects to Starlink. That means no more
gateways or ground stations or fiber
optic cable. Your request goes up and
the answer comes straight back down. The
internet as we know it today would exist
entirely in space. Which is the reason
why SpaceX is already considered to be
one of the world's most valuable
companies because owning the internet
has a potential value that is almost
beyond comprehension. And that's just
for Starlink alone. But this all really
plays into Musk's other long-term goal
for SpaceX, which is to launch a second
mega constellation of AI data center
satellites called Star Mind. These would
sit much higher above Starlink where
they can capture more light from the sun
for solar power. And that is where all
of the AI models of the future would
live. So in this future, your personal
device will radio a request to Starlink.
Starlink will laser that further up to
Star Mind where a super intelligent AI
will process the answer. Star mind will
laser it back and Starlink will radio it
directly to you. Musk says that to
accomplish this, SpaceX needs to launch
1 million satellites into Earth orbit
between both Starlink and Star Mind. And
if you want to see how SpaceX will build
their Star Mind AI satellites on the
moon and then launch them into space
with a giant electromagnetic rail gun,
we've got that video for you on screen
right now. Check it out. It's actually a
really good one. I think you'll enjoy
it.
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