Starlink Moves Toward Lunar Connectivity

SpaceX has now said publicly that Starlink is looking at communication services beyond Earth, turning a NASA-facing idea into an official company aim. Elon Musk’s February 2026 declaration of an “off-Earth expansion” followed a November 2024 pitch to NASA for a Marslink constellation that could deliver more than 4 Mbps of Earth-Mars bandwidth.

Starlink already has the hardware in orbit for such a move. It operates over 9,000 laser inter-satellite links, which are direct optical connections between satellites that do not use ground stations, and those links move more than 42 petabytes of data every day at better than 99% uptime, according to Basenor in early 2024.

The company is also testing the architecture. Laser signals travel through vacuum faster than light moves through fiber-optic cable, and that same technology can scale toward cislunar distances.

NASA’s Deep Space Network, a small number of large radio dishes run by JPL, was not built for the sustained, high-bandwidth demands of a permanent lunar presence. NASA’s Artemis program has already chosen Intuitive Machines to demonstrate the first commercial lunar relay, while Nokia Bell Labs has spent years working on a 4G/5G lunar surface network.

The Moon is about 384,000 km away, so a laser signal would take just over a second each way and more than two seconds round-trip. That would rule out real-time gaming, but it would still work for video calls, telemetry from rovers and bulk science data transfers.

Starlink generated an estimated $8.2 billion in revenue in 2024. Lunar bases and later Mars stations would be a future subscriber base, modest at first, but strategically significant as a margin driver rather than pure research spend.

Musk has said repeatedly that making humanity “multi-planetary” is SpaceX’s core purpose, and selling the connectivity infrastructure to do it is how the company funds that goal. No public timeline has been announced for a lunar relay constellation, and it is still unclear whether Starlink would build its own lunar network or work within NASA’s planned LunaNet framework.

What is clear is that the race to own off-Earth connectivity has moved from internal memos to public competition.