SpaceX blast a blow to Facebook’s sub-Saharan plans
SPACEX is reeling after an early morning explosion took out its rocket on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. The incident is a major setback for chief executive Elon Musk. But odds are the bad news has also been a blow to another US tech billionaire.
The rocket destroyed on Thursday was bearing a satellite that Facebook intended to use to provide internet access to developing nations.
When the rocket went up in smoke, so did the cargo, SpaceX said.
“SpaceX can confirm that… there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload,” the company said. No one was injured. Last year, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said he was eager to use the AMOS-6 satellite to deliver broadband connectivity to hard- to-reach parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Facebook has about 84 million users in the region.
“To connect people living in remote regions, traditional connectivity infrastructure is often difficult and inefficient, so we need to invent new technologies,” he wrote in a Facebook post in October.
Zuckerberg has spoken proudly of the initiative to connect the world’s next billion people to the Web.
On Monday, he met Pope Francis and presented him with a model of the Aquila drone that Facebook expects will help beam the internet down to the Earth.
The drones are designed to work with Facebook’s satellite, essentially creating a single wireless network in the atmosphere.
The company has also developed terrestrial equipment that can serve as a standalone mobile data hot spot or as a hub for a data network.
It’s unclear what Facebook intends to do to compensate for the loss of the AMOS-6 satellite, whose 18 Gbps connections it planned to lease in partnership with Eutelsat for $95 million (R1.3 billion) over five years.
Zuckerberg’s company declined to comment on the explosion. – The Washington Post