Why SpaceX Starlink is such a big deal

As Tesla's stock is soaring to new heights after the release of the company's fourth-quarter earnings, another Elon Musk venture is also doing quite exciting things. Yesterday, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 rocket with another 60 small Starlink satellites. This brings the number of Starlink satellites in orbit up to 242 and many more will be launched in the coming months and years.

In a new post, security researcher Jeffrey Paul explains why this is such a big deal. A couple of years from now, high-speed, low-latency, uncensored, reliable Internet connectivity will finally be available in almost all parts of the world:

Connectivity will be the great equalizer in the future. With high-quality, uncensored, reliable access to the global network, intelligent and resourceful people located virtually anywhere can operate on substantially similar footing to anyone else so equipped. Billions of people, blocked from accessing the Internet due to lack of infrastructure or local greed or fraud related to same, are presently kept from participating in the global knowledge economy. Starlink will remedy this, to some extent. Save for the wide deployment of the Internet itself, Starlink and its spiritual siblings launched by others may be one of the crowning technological achievements of our generation.