The aim is to help connect people in developing countries, provide speedier online access to mainly rural users who depend on today’s slower and more expensive satellite Internet services, and cater to business customers that want real-time data from their equipment, like oil rigs and ocean buoys.
The biggest names in the race include Facebook, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and OneWeb, backed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group. They’re pitted against dozens of upstarts like Swarm Technologies, Astrocast, and Sky and Space Global that want to send cheap, toaster-size satellites called cubesats into orbit.
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