His company, SpaceX, operates Starlink, whose fleet of satellites beam high-speed internet from the sky to about two and a half million people in places like this. Rural communities.

Or out at sea. Or living the van life. Or on a battlefield.

It achieves this by maintaining a vast relay network in low-Earth orbit. That's the area higher than a jetliner, but below a GPS satellite.

Right now, Starlink has more than 5,600 satellites in orbit, and that number could probably be out of date while you're watching this video. At one point, SpaceX envisioned launching up to 42,000 satellites.

And it accomplished all this in less time than it took James Cameron to make a second

Avatar movie.

But this speed and relative success has raised eyebrows. Concerned ones in government. And excited ones in the boardrooms of potential rivals.

So with the commodification of low-Earth orbit officially underway, can Starlink survive increased scrutiny and keep its head start?

The story of Starlink is one of rapid innovation. It's essentially a company trying to disrupt a somewhat complacent marketplace with an entirely new idea and a new ambitious model for providing internet coverage.

It's also a story that necessarily starts with SpaceX, and hence Mr. Musk himself.

SpaceX has been going nearly 20 years now. Starlink as a concept was first mentioned by Elon in 2014, and in 2015 the plan really started to be developed in terms of building with satellites. Four years later, the first 60 were in the air, and now there are 5,000 globally.

That's fast. And speed's kind of Starlink's thing. Customers can get set up in minutes, and download speeds, although known to fluctuate, are on par with a basic fibre optic connection from your local ISP.

Having a Starlink as a consumer is effectively taking your bot, pushing it out, and you go out into a field, and you're ready to do business.

And this is what we get from Starlink. Instruction, three pictures, no words.

This side is Starlink, going up to space and back. This side is the fibre broadband. So

Starlink is more than twice as quick on the download, and on the upload, about the same.

At six years old, Starlink's a relative newcomer to the $138 billion satellite services industry, which for decades has relied on satellites in geostationary orbit.

The disadvantage with these kinds of constellations is that these geo-satellites are massive.

They're built to be the size of buses, and they take years to develop and build, and then years to launch and operate, and they can be quite expensive. Prior to Starlink, most of these geo-constellations would tap into modified sat phones. So you probably had seen them, big bulky phones that were specifically geared towards tapping into the satellites that were thousands of miles away.

Which means they're not really suitable to form the backbone of a high-speed internet service.

Starlink, in contrast, actually sits in low earth orbit. The reason you do that is you reduce the latency speed, and latency is the time it takes for the data to move between the satellite and the Starlink terminal on the ground.

It's similar to why your smartphone's 5G speeds tend to be faster the closer you are to a cell tower. Using satellites instead gives Starlink a first mover advantage. And of course being the child of a rocket company doesn't hurt.

They own their own rocket, and that is just kind of a straight shot to orbit to get their

Starlink satellites where they need to go. Starlink does have that advantage for potentially bringing in more revenue for a company like SpaceX that is limited when it comes to the kinds of customers it can advertise to for its Falcon 9 rocket launch.

The potential for facilitating telecommunications from space hasn't escaped other massive tech companies. Google tried it with stratospheric balloons, and Meta with drones, but neither hit the mark.

And there's at least one other billionaire thinking along the same lines and ready to nip at Starlink's heels. This guy. Who you may have bought a book from.

Project Kuiper is the most obvious direct competitor to SpaceX. They have plans to launch 3,000 satellites into low-earth orbit by 2029. They want half of those up by 2026. Amazon has a lot of the same benefits that SpaceX has. They have their own rocket company, in that Jeff Bezos' New Origin will be one of the rocket providers that sends their satellites up into space.

The ease of access to Starlink also means it's harder to know where and how it's being used.

Starlink has been used in Ukraine during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. There were threats of towing it off by Elon at one point over seemingly moral concerns. There have also been efforts by Russia to block the service.

Now that has come with some controversy because it was revealed that Elon Musk actually opted not to provide connectivity during a skirmish between Ukraine and Russia.

It's not the only conflict zone that Starlink is being used in. There's a wide-ranging set of conflicts and war zones where these things are finding themselves in the wrong hands.

It's been reported by Bloomberg that they're being used in Sudan, in Somalia.

Amazon could figure out the security issues before it launches, and that could give it a competitive edge.

Starlink is growing. SpaceX recently boasted 2.6 million customers of the system, and the company has also been making deals with businesses and the Defense Department. They recently made a deal with John Deere.

Starlink is currently the best service for a lot of these customers. If you can find a comparable service that's almost as cheap and provides roughly the same service, you're certainly going to be more tempted to move towards it.

SpaceX and other companies pursuing global satellite internet have espoused the potential marketplace. There are potentially billions of people that are unconnected by traditional internet right now that could tap into this system. The question really becomes, you know, can they afford it? And is that enough to sustain Starlink and make it a profitable business?