Month: February 2021

Enlarge / Screenshot from the Starlink order page, with the street address blotted out. (credit: SpaceX Starlink)

SpaceX this week began accepting preorders for Starlink broadband, asking for $99 deposits for service that would be available in the second half of this year.

To start the process, you can go to Starlink's website and enter your email and service address. The overall cost is $499 for hardware, $50 for shipping and handling, and $99 for monthly service, plus tax. These are the same prices charged in the ongoing beta, which is limited to parts of the northern United States and southern Canada.

"Starlink is targeting coverage in your area in mid to late 2021," the preordering system says. "Availability is limited. Orders will be fulfilled on a first-come, first-served basis. You will receive a notification once your Starlink is ready to ship."

Enlarge / Peter Ben Embarek (R) talks with Liang Wannian (L) during a press conference following a visit by the international team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the city of Wuhan, in China's Hubei province on February 9, 2021. (credit: Getty | Hector Retamal)

After 12 days of field work in Wuhan, China, an international team of scientists assembled by the World Health Organization have wrapped up its investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that mushroomed out of the city in December of 2019.

The team’s findings support researchers’ previous leading hypothesis of how the pandemic began—that the virus used a still-elusive intermediate animal host as a bridge to infect humans from a distant reservoir host, such as horseshoe bats. But the team did fill in new, intriguing details of the pandemic’s first, crucial month—and ruled out sensational theories that the pandemic was born from a laboratory incident.

“Our initial findings suggest that the introduction [to humans] through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway,” Peter Ben Embarek, WHO International Team Lead, said in a 3-hour press conference on the team’s findings, livestreamed from Wuhan on February 9. Though researchers in China have already surveyed 11,000 animals around the country in search of that host, all have tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 so far, the team noted. Identifying the intermediary host “will require more studies and more specific, targeted research,” Embarek added.