If you are a customer of Elon Musk’s internet service Starlink you might start to have some visitations from cold animals. As reported by Futurism, a customer went viral after sharing a photo of 5 cats cuddling on his dish. “Starlink works great until the cats find out that the dish gives off a little heat on cold days,” Twitter user Aaron Taylor tweeted on New Year’s Eve.
It looks like cats have been interested in the dish since Spacex released it. A Reddit thread dedicated to the topic has been around for 11 months and one user wrote, “I was checking my dish with a thermal sight and it actually looks like the whole dish, even the backside is warm. So you might animals under or around it in general if it‘s ground-mounted.”
As suspected by the Reddit user, it‘s not just cats finding the dishes useful. A Twitter user responded to the viral tweet by sharing a photo of a bird resting on one. “Different species, same problem,” they wrote.
Starlink provides internet to over 140,000 customers across 20 countries and hopes to serve rural and remote communities around the world where the internet is unreliable or unavailable, per Tasmanian. They have nearly 2000 satellites operating in low Earth Orbit and the company plans to launch over 12,000 satellites.
However as noted by NY Post, the billionaire upset Chinese Chinese state officials after one of SpaceX’s orbital satellites nearly collided with Beijing’s space station- twice. They urged the Tesla founder to “act responsibly,” as it potentially put the “life or health of astronauts” on board in danger, in a note filed with the UN’s space agency in December.
