More satellites, more internet, but also a more crowded sky.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Satellite internet has been around for decades, but in just the past six years, the number of satellites orbiting Earth has grown dramatically.

Many of those belong to Starlink, whose satellites are in low Earth orbit, and it's expected to get even busier up there, with thousands of new satellites launching for Amazon's Project Kuiper.

Joe Supan with CNET wrote about this in his story, Inside the Rise of 7,000 Starlink satellites,

and their inevitable downfall. He started by talking about what having more options for satellite

internet has meant. It's really a game changer for people in very rural areas where they haven't built out

fiber or cable lines.

And in those situations, they're pretty much stuck choosing between those slower satellite

options or sometimes fixed wireless or DSL, all of which are prohibitively expensive

and slow. So Starlink is also expensive. It's $120 a month and you have to pay $350 for

equipment. So that's like double what most people pay for internet in this country. But when I talk to people who use Starlink

in rural areas, they all pretty much unprompted said it's much cheaper than what I was paying for

before. So it might seem like a lot to us, but it's in rural areas. It's actually pretty competitive.

I kind of forgotten how young Starlink was. I feel like it's been in like the vocab for a while,

but it really is just in like the past five years it's gotten going.

Tell me about what that's meant for the number of satellites up in the skies.

Yeah.

When Starlink first launched in 2019, there were only 2,000 satellites.

And Starlink has 7,000 alone right now. They have suggested that they want as many as 42,000.

So they have the vast majority of satellites in the sky currently. But there's also projections that

there will be 100,000 total by the end of the decade. So they really kind of like kicked off this race to

...