Google is reportedly considering a billion-dollar investment in SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, in order to boost its deployment of cut-price satellite internet.
The investment, the exact size of which is unknown, puts a value on SpaceX of more than $10bn.
News of Google’s plans was reported by Jessica Lessin at The Information.
If the investment is finalised, it would advance Google’s efforts to explore alternative methods by which internet access can be spread to the developing world. The company has already explored using weather balloons to hoist wireless internet into the sky, in a plan called “Project Loon”.
“By partnering with Telecommunications companies to share cellular spectrum we’ve enabled people to connect to the balloon network directly from their phones and other LTE-enabled devices,” the company explains. “The signal is then passed across the balloon network and back down to the global Internet on Earth.”
At Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, the plan is to use low-flying, solar powered drones to boost connectivity instead. The company has also launched Internet.org, a non-profit aimed at achieving the same goal with more low-tech interventions.
Both companies are pushing to increase access to the web, in part due to humanitarian aims, and in part hard-headed business decisions. Facebook’s userbase is close to 50% of the entire internet-connected population of the world, and it may be easier to increase that latter number than get the holdout half to use the service.
SpaceX has become the first private company to win a contract to restock the International Space Station, and Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, is expected to announce plans for a mission to Mars in 2015.
