Google said to be investing major dollars in SpaceX project

According to a report from The Information, Google is considering a large investment in SpaceX. For those that don’t know, it’s a privately funded company led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk that’s set on making advancements in space travel. However instead of investing in the space travel portion of the SpaceX project, Google is apparently looking at helping to “support the development of SpaceX satellites that could beam low-cost Internet around the globel to billions who don’t have it.” As the report says:

Google is close to investing in rocket maker SpaceX, according to several people familiar with the talks, creating a formidable alliance in Silicon Valley’s accelerating Internet space race… The price and terms Google and SpaceX are discussing couldn’t be learned although one person familiar with them said Google has agreed to value SpaceX north of $10 billion and that the size of the total round, which includes other investors, is very large.

Musk hosted a SpaceX event in Seattle earlier in the week to announce the company’s goal to launch communication satellites into space to help increase Internet speed, creating access to over three billion people who don’t have reliable high-speed Internet access. This will be done by launching satellites much lower than traditional communication satellites. Apparently, according to Musk, the “speed of light is 40 percent faster in the vacuum of space than it is for fiber.”

The project would work two-fold as the Internet service could possibly serve as a global communications network for when the company eventually enables the colonization of Mars. It’s also possible that this new Internet network could be the eventual next step of Project Loon.

source: The Information
via: 9to5 Google

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