In addition to sending rockets to Mars and beyond, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company also produces a satellite internet connection called Starlink. This service is now providing free emergency calls from wilderness areas to help improve search and rescue efforts that can save lives. Starlink is famous for giving Ukrainians the ability to communicate during wartime, and for providing free internet access to areas that have lost contact to the outside world due to a natural disaster. This latest initiative allows people who are stuck deep in the wilderness to call for help. In remote areas that don’t have phone coverage, the Starlink satellites provide emergency connections for a person or group that is in trouble. Starlink creates coverage in these “mobile dead zones” by reaching into space to connect with its satellites, which then bounce the call to emergency services. 

 

Here’s how it works. SpaceX has already launched over 7,000 of these Starlink satellites that follow each other in low orbit around the earth. The Starlink user kit includes a small satellite dish, 25 metres of cable, and a router. You mount the dish somewhere with a clear view of the northern sky, and then run the cable to the router which is plugged into a power source (battery). The dish transmits your phone’s signals to the satellites that are rapidly passing overhead. Every few minutes your dish automatically hands over your connection to the next Starlink satellite as it passes your location. The satellites send your message to a ground station that forwards it to the place you are trying to contact. The answer is returned to your phone by wifi. Low earth orbit satellites do this much faster than normal internet satellites, for the obvious reason that they are much closer to earth. “Starlink will provide emergency services access for mobile phones to people in distress for free,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter). “This applies worldwide, subject to approval by each country’s government. It is free because we can’t have a situation where someone dies in the wilderness because they were unable to call for help.”