Starlink Group 10-14

Oh good, another Starlink launch. Because what better way to spend a Sunday morning than watching Elon Musk’s orbital vending machine fling another handful of internet routers into the sky. At 11:19 UTC, if you must know, a Falcon 9 will belch its way out of Cape Canaveral, launching yet another indistinguishable herd of Starlink satellites under the banner of “Group 10-14”, which sounds less like a marvel of aerospace engineering and more like a forgotten train schedule.

And of course, SpaceX will livestream it with the usual gravitas: dramatic synth music, a giddy commentator reading pre-approved bullet points, and obligatory slow-motion booster landing footage to remind us that this is about vision. A vision where every square meter of Earth is drenched in Ku-band goodness whether we asked for it or not.

What’s truly thrilling isn’t the launch itself, but the creeping realization that we’ve apparently agreed to let one company graffiti LEO with tens of thousands of aluminum bird droppings. Because when you think of global equity and accessible internet, obviously the answer is an ever-expanding constellation owned by a man whose idea of public discourse is posting memes at 3am.

Each new launch is about control. Every successful deployment is one more step in SpaceX’s bid to become the internet. All hail the benevolent space telecom oligarchy. Starlink might not yet own the sky, but it’s clearly leasing a suspiciously large portion of it with zero down and unlimited renewals.

So yes, tune in Sunday morning for the ritual. Pretend it’s exciting. Pretend it’s for the betterment of humanity. And while you’re at it, maybe pretend we haven’t ceded orbital real estate to the world’s most meme-addled billionaire.