“Our goal is not to go bankrupt,” Musk said at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, acknowledging that all previous attempts to build a satellite-based internet network in low-Earth orbit has ended in failure, bankruptcy or a pivot away from a direct-to-consumer business model. SpaceX began launching satellites for the Starlink network in 2019, and has built up to a rapid pace of deployment, launching more than 780 in the past six months alone.

The Starlink program is separate from SpaceX’s Dragon program, which aims to ferry people and goods to the International Space Station, and the Starship program, which is intended to one day bring humans to the moon or Mars, or haul massive satellites into orbit. Starlink, on the other hand, is SpaceX’s first foray into the satellite market.

It’s a take on an idea first proposed decades ago but never fully executed: Use thousands of satellites working in tandem from low-Earth orbit — which is the area below 1,000 km (620…