Elon Musk doesn’t dream small. That much is pretty clear from the hovering space rockets and the vacuum-tube mass transit system. But his latest brainwave, which involves covering both the Earth and Mars in a blanket of sweet, sweet internet, is downright ballsy.
Rumours of Elon Musk using Businessweek report has the full details. Some are expected, some a little less so.
First, the stuff we already knew, or Businessweek report, Musk isn’t just hoping to connect the third world (a la Facebook and Google) with this project: the satellite system will rival existing fibre networks for speed.
Musk is thinking big in another way: Mars. He has made his ambition to establish a Martian colony pretty clear before, and, of course, you can’t have a human colony without video streaming. More usefully, any new colony would need some kind of communications network and the space entrepreneur thinks lots of satellites is the easiest way to do this.
Although there’s no immediate timeline for when Elon is going to save you from Comcast, ’50-60′ employees will apparently start working on the project from the company’s Seattle office, with that workforce growing dramatically over the next few years. [Businessweek]