This string of 60 satellites were placed into low earth orbit last Thursday. They are the first of a proposed group of 12,000 Starlink telecommunications satellites being lauched by SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company. The company's goal is to use the satellites to create a mesh-like network around the planet itself. Moving data with laser beams, the satellite grid will provide fast and affordable internet access to every remote corner of the earth. Internet traffic can now move at close to the speed of light in a vacuum — nearly instantaneously.

The astronomer, Marco Langbroek, wrote in a blog post that he had calculated the search orbit himself to find out when they would pass by, and "stood ready" with his camera. The train zoomed by within three minutes of his predicted time. "It started with two faint, flashing objects moving into the field of view. Then, a few tens of seconds later, my jaw dropped as the 'train' entered the field of view," Langbroek wrote.

Starlink promises to bring cheap, fast, internet services to the entire planet, including the remote areas of the planet that had no Internet. It will also bring Internet service to moving vehicles like airplanes, ships, trains, buses, and cars. Because of it's advanced speed, it would make international teleconferencing and online gaming nearly lag-free. SpaceX has a 2027 deadline to get all 12,000 of the Starlink Satellites launched. Elon Musk said that only a fraction of that number would be required for the service to function. He predicts that within 18 months, there will be enough Starlink satellites orbiting the planet to begin offering the service to Internet users.

Every corner of the world can access this floating mesh network for ultra-high-speed, low-lag internet communications. The thousands of satellites are linked with laser beams, and give customers access to the internet system via flat, pizza-size antennas that SpaceX calls end-user terminals.

SpaceX plans to launch roughly five dozen spacecraft at a time with its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets and is looking to launch at least one Starlink mission a month over the next two years, based on figures provided by Musk.

"I think within a year and a half, maybe 2 years — if things go well — SpaceX will probably have more satellites in orbit than all other satellites combined," he said. "Basically, a majority of the satellites in orbit will be SpaceX's."

In fact, the completed Starlink with its nearly 12,000 satellites — will consist of more than six times the number of all operational spacecraft currently in orbit. This is the plan of a visionary, and I suspect that there are implications and possible applications that go far beyond those being discussed today. Hopefully the People will find ways to access the mesh network that offers communications possibilities that allow them to break free of oppressive limitations and enforced propaganda imposed by their governments.

Many new technologies have gone into creating this system. Consider the rockets that lift the components into space each month: SpaceX plans to launch 60 close-to-production Starlink satellites at a time with its Falcon 9 rockets. Each satellite weighs about 500 pounds (227 kilograms) and is roughly the size of an office desk. Imagine 60 of those stuffed into the nosecone of a rocket. They'll rapidly deploy, one after another, into an orbit string about 273 miles (440 kilometers) up. That's some heavy lifting.

There are several problems and limitations in earthbound Internet communications. One in particular that Elon Musk was determined to overcome was the speed limitations of Internet data transmission across international distances on the surface of the planet.

As an aside, this physical speed limitation in current earth-based data transmission was the key to how we knew, almost immediately, that the Democratic Party and the Intelligence Community were pushing a Hoax about Russia hacking the DNC computers and stealing emails, which they gave to Julian Assange. The physical evidence on the released emails show high transfer speeds that can only be achieved by someone in the same room as the server using a portable thumb drive to copy those emails. We saw that the time of the data capture was just as the DNC offices were closing at 6PM. We continued to know, for two-and-a-half years, that everything that came from those sources — the DNC and the IC, along with their CrowdStrike cohort — was fruit of the poisoned tree — until the Hoax was finally exposed.

On the surface of the planet, there is an upper limit on how fast Internet data can travel over distances using fiber-optic cables. We can experience these slow speeds with long distance voice-over-Internet telephony. Calls over international distances have a long lag time, making conversations difficult. And, voice data beamed over geostationary satellites is some of the laggiest. That's because nearly all those spacecraft are orbiting at 22,236 miles up, where they can "float" above one location on Earth. That's enough distance to cause a more than half-second of lag. Conversely, Starlink satellites are placed in low orbit, 65 times closer to earth. Starlink moves data across distances in the mesh network using laser beams transmitting at the speed of light.

Because data sent over international distances have high latency, or lag, the most obvious commercial benefit of Starlink goes to the financial sector. Latency matters most to financial institutions. With markets that move billions of dollars in fractions of a second, any delay can lead to big losses compared to a competitor with a less laggy (and thus more up-to-date) connection to the web.

One has to wonder, with so many new satellites in orbit, what about the space junk that's already there causing collisions? Each Starlink satellite is fitted with an ion thruster that allows it to move around and adjust its orbit. The satellites will also be fed the latest NORAD tracking information for debris. The spacecraft will use artificial intelligence software and its thruster to avoid collisions with known hunks of space junk. If they should be damages or fail, they are programmed to drop out of low orbit so as not to add to the space junk. The satellites are vaporized as they fall to earth. The friction of low orbit limits the lifetime of individual satellites to about five years, so they must be periodically replenished.

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This is the video of the Starlink launch captured by Dutch astronomer, Marco Langbroek. It takes less than a minute for the train of satellites to cross the sky. As they continue to orbit their engines will position them about 500 miles apart in a line on the new grid being built over our heads. This low orbit grid, formed of thousands of satellites, will be visible to those on the ground, particularly at sunrise and sunset. It's the new normal in the sky.

On the YouTube page where it is posted, folks from all over the world shared the moment, noting from what country or state they saw it. Most had not known what they were seeing. What I saw was that people of this world were happy to talk to one another and share the event, without the paranoid, power-mad monsters who own their sovereignty coming between them:

• I live about 60 miles from Cape Canaveral, I watched it launch, it was so cool.

• Hi all! Saw this over Co.Tyrone Northern Ireland 12am 25-5-19. Wondered what on earth or out of earth it was!!!!

• Saw that in Czech Republic 5/26/2019. In Elon we trust.

• I saw it yesterday evening at 11:25 PM. Greetings from Hungary.

• Saw them over southern Ontario just now. I didn’t know what it was about freaked the hell out of me.

• Just saw this in Vermont! Slow and beautiful. Very mysterious; I had no idea what they were

• Hi I'm from Russia tonight over Siberia watched this beauty! I congratulate the Americans on this event!

• Seen it! Between 00:45 and 01:15 AM in Milan, Italy. Going from West to north-east.

• I count them about~60, and write you from North Korea.

• saw it last night at around 1:00 am in Miramichi NB Canada.

• I saw them over Berlin and wondered if it were alien spaceships, thanks for the explanation

• Dad thought they were UFOs. Seen from Poland, Poraj

• I was born before Sputnik. This is one of the most inspiring things I have ever seen!

• i saw this event saturday may 25 2019 at the beach of barangay baliangao province of misamis occidental, Philippines ... i want to see it again so i am gathering now some information how to spot the STARLINK.

• We saw them in Odessa, Ukraine at 00:22 and I thought, this is the beginning of world war 3

• I just saw this live tonight in Ohio and spent about an hour trying to figure out if I had just witnessed a glitch in the matrix.

• I saw that the same night in Belgium. Mindblowing sight!

• Just saw this in person in AZ. Seriously one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

• Saw that yesterday from Kenya. Was really shocked

• it in Russia Sakhalin island, I was shocked

• I saw it too, here in Denmark it was amazing to watch

• Seen around midnight on May 25-26, above the mouth of the Yellow Medicine river into the Minnesota river in South Western Minnesota, USA.