Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/February 22

Today in 2018 billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX launched the first two satellites for its mega-constellation Starlink. It is intended to close the last gaps in global Internet coverage. The plan is to launch several times as many satellites than all previous ones combined. But some countries and all of Musk’s major competitors each have a similar plan (OneWeb, Kuiper, Hongyan, ...). Tens or hundreds of thousands of new satellites mean potential problems for future access to space and astronomical observations.