Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, said that his company's Starlink satellite internet service is now accessible in Ukraine, with more terminals on the way.
After being asked by a Ukrainian government official if SpaceX might supply more Starlink services to the country after Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine last week, Musk made the statement on Twitter over the weekend.
Due to Russian military actions and the following fighting, Internet services in Ukraine have witnessed "significant disruptions" in the capital city of Kyiv and across much of the nation, according to the monitoring group Netblocks
"@ElonMusk, while you try to colonize Mars - Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space - Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand," Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who is also the country's minister of digital transformation, asked Musk on Twitter Saturday.
According to Reuters, Musk and SpaceX recently dispatched 50 Starlink terminals to the Pacific Ocean island nation of Tonga to give free internet service and help reconnect rural towns after a devastating volcano eruption and tsunami in January. The Starlink terminals will aid in the restoration of communications with some of the worst-affected areas of the natural disaster.
Since 2019, SpaceX has launched approximately 2,000 satellites for the constellation, which is planned to have a total capacity of 14,000 in its first incarnation. SpaceX's most recent launch took place on Friday (Feb. 25), when it launched 50 new Starlink satellites into orbit from a pad at California's Vandenberg Space Force Base.
For this particular booster, it was the fourth launch and landing. According to SpaceX, the first stage also assisted in the launch of NASA and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites' Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich Earth-observation satellite in November 2020, as well as 60 Starlink satellites in May 2021 and NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft in November 2021.
Musk considers reuse to be a top priority. The CEO wants to help humanity populate Mars, and he believes that fully and quickly reusable rockets are the key to making that happen.
SpaceX's next Starlink mission is scheduled to launch on Thursday (March 3) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida's Pad 39A.
SpaceX's Starlink service provides high-speed internet connectivity via a huge constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites, with the goal of eventually providing coverage anywhere on Earth, with a concentration on distant or underserved places. Starlink users connect to the space-based internet service using a satellite dish installed on or near the site where service is needed.
