Facebook's Internet.org initiative to bring internet access to less developed areas is set back when the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explosion destroyed the satellite designed to push the social media company's venture.
Both Facebook and France-based satellite operator Eutelsat Communications SA worked together on the project, and the satellite was meant to get people in Africa to go online.
According to the president of the telecom consulting firm TMF Associates Tim Farrar, the satellite cost roughly $200 million, and it requires quite a lot of time to finish.
"It's a big, complicated satellite. It takes hundreds of people at least two years to build," he says, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Of course, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was disappointed about the turn of events, saying that in light of the incident, it's now going to take even longer to connect people.
"I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent," Zuckerberg says, noting that Facebook is still committed to the project and reminding everyone that Aquila is still under development to bring internet access to remote areas.
For those who don't know, Aquila is a solar-powered drone that can soar up to 60,000 feet, and tests to get it off the ground started back in July. However, it's still under development, but with that said, the Facebook executive expects it to get a total of 5 billion users on Facebook by 2030.
Regarding the explosion itself, it happened while the engineers were fueling the Falcon 9 rocket up with kerosene propellant and liquid oxygen to get it ready for a test fire, but it should be pointed out that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that it wasn't an explosion but a fast fire.
@scrappydog yes. This seems instant from a human perspective, but it really a fast fire, not an explosion. Dragon would have been fine.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2016
To sum up the events, Facebook won't be pushing its plans of bringing internet access to secluded areas via satellite just yet, but it does have a backup plan with Aquila. In other words, while the incident may have held up the initiative, Zuckerberg is far from abandoning the idea.
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