Sometimes the stars line up. For example, 12 hours before SpaceX launched a $62,000,000, 230-foot tall, 1,120,000 pound Falcon 9 Block Five rocket out of Vandenberg AFB to disgorge 52 STARLINK satellites into low earth orbit, a package arrived at the Malibu Road home of John Ortiz.
The box sat on an outside table. Mysterioso. What was in there? A lamp in the shape of a lady’s leg? A severed head of a loved one or a racehorse? John pulled a bit of Brad Pitt from 7even - “What’s in the booooxxxxxx???!!” and then he opened it. To find another box. A nice square of gray packaging lettered with STARLINK.
And within was a simple but sophisticated selection of the newest internet communications tech, which are part of a massive and sophisticated network that will bring high speed internet to the most inaccessible nooks and crannies of the planet.
From the Himalayas to Haleakala - rain or snow or sleet or Santa Ana winds or PG&E shutdowns. That’s it. That’s all you need to connect with the STARLINK constellation of high speed satellites beaming the Internet at the speed of light. Brave new world indeed. Photo: Ben Marcus.
STARLINK is Elon Musk’s hyper-expensive, insanely-ambitious side hustle for SpaceX - multi-billion dollars paying for hundreds of rocket launches piercing gravity at the speed of sound to place as many as 40,000 flat, door-sized, solar-powered satellites in low earth orbit to beam at the speed of light high-speed internet to every nook and cranny on earth: From sailboats in the middle of the ocean, to isolated desert surf spots in deepest Baja, to villages in Africa to monks on mountain tops and even beam the internet to those stately homes lost in the nooks and crannies of Malibu.
(April 26, 2022 Update: And now, since this story was first written, STARLINK brought volcano-proof communications to the island nation of Tonga. And when the people of Ukraine pleaded for STARLINK to communicate with the outside world and maybe geolocate and smoke some Russian tanks, Musk responded and delivered dozens of units to Ukraine in 10 hours - and the tank destroying began. And continues.)
The lack of cell service and WiFi service in Malibu is legendary - they made fun of it on Entourage - but it’s really not funny. For example, the GDP of Malibu Road - where John Ortiz lives - is probably in the billions of dollars - especially now that the Billionaire Twice Over Artist Formerly Known as Kanye West has moved into a cozy, 3600 square foot, $57 million beach cottage down the road.
Pink, Simon Cowell, Keanu Reeves, Suzanne Sommers, Jeremy Piven: Malibu Road is or has been home to some of the world’s greatest communicators - musicians, actors, directors, producers, politicians, entrepreneurs, industrialists, influencers - and yet cell service and internet access can be terrible. Third World terrible in one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest state of the wealthiest country. Inexcusable, and yet, there it is. Or isn’t.
What is true along Malibu Road is even truer in some of the remote hollers of Malibu - Encinal, Solstice, Corral, Malibu Canyon. Even here in the 21st Century, if you will excuse the alliteration, the cell service sucks. There is no internet. None.
Frustrating to citizens - and a frustration John Ortiz deals with personally and professionally every day as a citizen and serviceman to Malibu.
Verizon John, a comms bandido ready to make all your communications dreams come true. Photo: Kiki.
John Ortiz was an employee of Verizon for many years - some call him Verizon John - and he has been in, out and under some of the finest homes and cottages of Malibu. Everyone knows John, and he now owns his own business: JCO Technologies with a Facebook page claiming: “Exciting home entertainment and technology.”
John doesn't install microwave ovens or custom kitchens but he does deliver internet and security systems, super tech TV screens and audio and motion-activated lighting systems to the finer homes and estates and businesses around Malibu - high and low, for the famous and the anonymous: Anyone who wants to feel secure, and to secure their home and communications against threats natural and human and even animal: Intrusive coyote, Santa Ana winds, those few days of rain, home invaders, paparazzi, revenuers.
This STARLINK setup was not for John - who caters to some of Malibu’s more celebrated and elite clientele, and with whom he is discrete. This STARLINK is for CLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED who live far up CLASSIFIED Canyon - too deep to have any hope of getting Internet up there. Which is frustrating as these people are hyper-creative, prolific, world-famous communicators.
But John wants to help them, and he hopes STARLINK is the magic solution - bps from heaven.
On a cold and clear, Malibeautiful almost-winter evening, John placed the box on a big, heavy table - a gift from CLASSIFIED, another one of his celebrity clients. The box was gray and simple and unadorned with nothing more than the words STARLINK.
It’s alive!!!!!!!! Some dude reacts as the STARLINK dish moves and angles to find a link with a satellite hundreds of miles in the heavens above.
Kind of like that German dude in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark who stared into the ark of the covenant just before it ate his face, there was an unearthly glow over John’s face as he hovered over the box, and then opened that simple, but stylish STARLINK container to examine this 21st Century technology with his own expert eyes.
Billions and billions of dollars to manufacture thousands of door-sized, flat, solar-powered satellites and the rockets to launch them into space. As otherworldly, impossibly expensive and sophisticated as that artificial constellation of satellites is orbiting the earth, the $500 earth-station end of STARLINK is refreshingly, 21st Century, idiot-proof simple.
The STARLINK home version has four items: The communications dish itself comes in a round or a rectangle and is called Dishy McFlatface in MuskSpeak - measuring 19” x 12” standing 24” high and weighing 9.2 pounds. It’s made of plastic and almost seems flimsy. Nothing fancy, but light and hopefully durable - as in Malibu, these dishes will most likely be perched outside and up high and vulnerable to everything from Santa Ana winds to curious ravens to out of control paparazzi drones.
These STARLINK directions make even Ikea look wordy. So simple, a caveman or an alien could do it.
While the directions in the box are Rosetta Stone simple, the STARLINK website comes with several caveats:
“If any object such as a tree, chimney, pole, etc. interrupts the path of the beam, even briefly, your internet service will be interrupted. The best guidance we can give is to install your Starlink at the highest elevation possible where it is safe to do so, with a clear view of the sky. Users who live in areas with lots of tall trees, buildings, etc. may not be good candidates for early use of Starlink.”
The dish and the mounting pole and the tripod all click together and it is powered by a 100-foot power-over-Ethernet (PoE) cable which must be plugged into a wall socket under normal circumstances - or a generator or battery in case of emergency. (See: The Thanksgiving Day Massacree of 2021)
There is also a small, shiny WiFi router which also must be connected to a power source. All of it outwardly 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish basic and clean, but don’t let that fool you. These gizmos gots the power.
John was engrossed by this new, seemingly simple technology. As the sun flamed out in one of those epic winter light shows and the palm trees lit up with that golden hour magic and the displaced tropical parakeets chirped and a coyote yipped off in the distance, John followed the simple pictograph directions:
Like a mad scientist in a candy store, John Ortiz hooks it all up. Photo: Ben Marcus.
He plugged in the Dishy McFishFace deal, then leapt back a little in surprise and delight as the dish leapt to life and moved automatically, a funky little plastic dish somehow communicating across hundreds of miles of the great ocean of atmosphere to find the best one of those thousands of flat, door-sized satellites hovering somewhere in the cosmos.
Oh brave new world, that has such gizmos in it!
That was cool. That was Tesla-cool. Like your S or 3 adjusting the mirrors as you approach or unlocking the doors or somehow sensing you want to hear Tom Petty.
Indistinguishably from magic, the communications dish finds the closest available satellite and at the speed of light connects with that huge constellation of satellites to send and receive Internet at speeds up to 10+ Mbps now, and as much 1 Gbps in the near future. That signal is routed to the WiFi transmitter, which is also silver and plastic and has its own PoE cable.
How powerful is the range of this WiFi router you ask?: “The WiFi will broadcast like a standard router,” John said after extensive stress-testing. “I walked my smartphone to our gate which is about 200 feet and still picked it up on my phone.”
Both the communications dish and transmitter plug into an adapter that plugs into the wall, and you’re up and running.
Although not right away, at first. With the communications dish vibing with a cold and distant satellite, and delivering quality internet to the WiFi transmitter, John called the WiFi signal CLASSIFIED and typed in CLASSIFIED as a password, and then he tried to pick up the signal on his smartphone, while I tried to get it on my laptop.
And it didn’t work, at first. John mumbled something cryptic about how “The system is searching.”
I responded cryptically, “Aren’t we all?”
We all went inside to watch The French Dispatch (a movie that kind of inspired this article.) But after an hour or so, John erupted from the sofa, “We’re up!”
And we were. Connected to the cosmos.
Cool beans. Wifi from the heavens. Knowing there was a STARLINK launch coming in the next few hours, I used STARLINK Wifi to Google “Vandenberg SpaceX launch” and got conflicting results. Some pages said there would be a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg at 1:24 am Pacific Standard time, other sites said 4:24am PST.
I had seen two other launches from Malibu - one was a blast, one was a bust. The first was on December 23 2017 - Falcon 9 FT carrying 10 Iridium satellites into polar low earth orbit. It took me and a lot of people by surprise and was at Golden Hour, so the “twilight effect” created a giant glowing jellyfish in the sky with booster rockets pulsing off it and was one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen. Right up there with the northern lights in Norway, Golden Hour on Diamond Head, Rio de Janeiro, the Lamar River Valley in Yellowstone, the stars at night in desert Nevada and a giant, green and red meteor we saw while driving back to Waikiki from the North Shore in 2016.
I was hoping for a repeat of that glowing jellyfish on Tuesday, November 23. SpaceX was launching a NASA project called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test - an experiment designed to nudge an asteroid out of its path in case the real thing should threaten to kill the dinosaurs again. Don’t know what happened with the asteroid, but the launch was a bust: The sky was cloudy and there were just glimpses of the red flare of the rocket - like God had flicked a cigarette in a smoke-filled room.
There were brief glimpses of red flame up in the clouds that disappeared. And then way off in the distance, the bright flare of the rocket booster returning to earth to land in Elon Musk’s outstretched palm.
One a blast, one a bust, but on the night of December 18 and morning of the 19th, the sky was post-storm cold and clear and hopes were high.
I set the alarm on my phone and laptop using STARLINK wifi and then went to bed - listening to the most excellent KSCN 88.5. They played Bowie’s Starman as a matter of fact and that was a sign.
All the alarms went off at 1:30am - thanks to STARLINK Wifi - but there was an email from a gal on Malibu Road who was sure the launch was at 4:24am PST.
She was right, so I reset all the alarms - courtesy of STARLINK Wifi - and woke up at 4:30am. It was a cold morning but I got on the SONDORS Ebike and found a position on the driveway that looked in the general direction of Vandenberg. The 4:24 launch time passed, and then a couple minutes later, a big, red $62,000,000, 230-foot tall, 12-foot wide, nine Merlin engines producing 1.7 million pounds of thrust, two stage Falcon Nine Block Five carrying 34,400 pounds of satellite payload and weighing a total of 1,210,000 pounds at Mach 1 - the speed of sound = one mile every 4.7 seconds - appeared over the Santa Monica Mountains and directly underneath the moon, moving with unearthly speed straight south, and then directly overhead, spreading out a ghostly rooster tail as it sped into space.
Beautiful, ethereal, otherworldly, cool and deeply satisfying - I wondered what Elon Musk felt when he saw his million dollar babies soaring into the heavens. No “twilight effect” at this hour of the morning, just watching that fierce rocket soar into the loneliness of space until it was just a red dot.
A long-track glowing meteor that just kept going and going and going.
And then a little later, that flare on the horizon as the booster landed on the Autonomous Space Port Drone Ship also known as Of Course I Still Love You, which was ready and waiting. The ASPDS known as OCISLY is home-ported in Long Beach and I wondered where they located it to catch the booster.
Using STARLINK WiFi I Googled around and the consensus was the ASPDS/OCISLY is located about “600 – 675 km downrange.” Using that quality STARLINK WiFi I got onto Google Earth and measured straight south from Vandenberg, which put the drone ship halfway down Baja.
Really? Is that what I was seeing? From Malibu? Really?
One assumes the Rocket 9 successfully belched those 52 STARLINK satellites into the proper orbits and now it is 10 hours after the launch and I’m sitting in the winter sun along Malibu Road, writing this piece, using STARLINK Wifi.
It works down here on Malibu Road in a location that is not ideal within a location that is not ideal: a steep cliff behind, a huge tree to the west, palm trees to the east and the only clear line straight up or to the south. But it works and works well, and John is packing it all up right now to drive CLASSIFED from here on PCH and find out if it works for CLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED in their cabin way up CLASSIFIED Canyon.
STARLINK is a big deal when you think of all its applications - sailboats way out at sea having lightning fast internet could save a lot of lives.
(Jon Roseman, the owner of the recently solar-powered Tavarua Island surf resort in Fiji read this story and got excited. Offering infallible, celestial WiFi to punters paying $5000 a week to surf in deepest, darkest Fiji is easily worth $500 up front and $99 a month.
And Martin Daly, skipper of The Indies Trader surf-exploration fleet and lord of an isolated surf resort on Beran Island, in the Marshall Islands, had some insight and inside scoops on the genesis of STARLINK and also high hopes it would all come on line soon to save heaps at Ailinglaplap atoll and on his surf-exploration boats around the world:
https://beachgrit.com/2022/01/worlds-most-famous-surf-explorer-reveals-hes-been-sequestered-on-his-famous-yacht-for-past-three-years-as-he-rides-out-pandemic-ive-been-watching-the-world-go-mad/)
And for Malibu people who already have solid internet and WiFi, the recent Thanksgiving Day Massacree might inspire citizens to have STARLINK on hand in case the Santa Ana Devil Winds knock out power and comms - or PGE throws the switch that shuts it all down.
Malibu people get nervous when they can’t communicate and/or nervously check their Robinhood accounts and/or get the surf report from Surfline so having STARLINK running off a generator or battery pack will allow people to maintain their comms - and their calm.
Whether you’re hidden away up in some holler or along the cliffs on the beach - or if you just want a backup WiFi system - STARLINK seems to be the go. It works already, even on Malibu Road, and it’s going to get better as Musk and Co continue lobbing dozens, scores and hundreds of satellites into low earth orbit.
$500 for the equipment, and then $99 a month for the service.
What price clean communications?
3:45 PM John just came back from the home of CLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED up CLASSIFIED Canyon.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Worked better up there than it did down here,” John said, and smiled quietly to himself.
CLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED will be pleased, and John aims to please.
If you want John Ortiz to hook you up to the cosmos, contact JCO Communications at:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcotechnologies/
Phone: 310 740-5271
Email: nobs.net@gmail.com
For more information on Starlink, contact:
www.Starlink.com
Elon’s personal smartphone: CLASSIFIED.
To catch the next launch out of Vandenberg and hope it does that Glowing Jellyfish thing, check out:
RocketLaunch.live: https://www.rocketlaunch.live/?filter=spacex
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