According to reports, Google is considering injecting money in to Elon Musk’s astronautics company SpaceX, to take advantage of its plan to launch hundreds of satellites into a low orbit to provide internet to remote and rural areas.
Musk said on Friday that the satellite internet project will be based out of SpaceX’s new Seattle office. “The speed of light is 40 percent faster in the vacuum of space than it is for fiber,” Musk said. “The long-term potential is to be the primary means of long-distance Internet traffic and to serve people in sparsely populated areas.”
This would not be the first time that Google invested in another company’s plan to launch internet satellites. Google pumped over $1 billion into O3b last year, but when founder Greg Wyler left O3b to set up OneWeb, he took the patent rights to the radio frequency satellite tech with him. Musk, however, insists that SpaceX’s satellite technology is more sophisticated than OneWeb’s variant.
Source: Ars Technica
