Sanjay Bhargava joins SpaceX to serve as Starlink Country Director, India starting October

In an effort to expand its presence in India, Elon Musk run SpaceX has now appointed a top executive in the country. The leading space firm in the world has announced that Sanjay Bhargava will be joining its team as Starlink Country Director India, effective from next month.

From October 1, 2021, Sanjay Bhargava will be working with SpaceX as the Country Director for Starlink in India. Bhargava shared the update recently through a LinkedIn post. He wrote about his upcoming role in the post and further stated that he shared a common vision with Starlink to support a connectivity transformation in India, starting with the rural parts of the country.

Bhargava also mentioned that he had previously worked with Elon Musk. This was in the early 2000s when Musk came out with his digital payment platform PayPal. Bhargava was a part of the founding team of the service.

Since 2004 though, Bhargava moved to India to work on other projects. Now that he will be working with another Elon Musk-run venture, Bhargava will be aiming to expand the presence of SpaceX’s satellite broadband service Starlink in India.

Starlink, an initiative of SpaceX, is one of the leading satellite broadband service in the world that is quickly expanding its presence in countries. The service relies on a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to provide Internet connectivity to even the remotest parts of the world.

As per Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, Starlink will break traditional limitations to bring connectivity to such remote areas. The idea, thus, is to provide the service where no other forms of internet connectivity have been observed as yet. For the rest of the world, Starlink promises faster connectivity speeds than what is possible through cables.

As noted by ET in a report, Starlink launched its public beta service in several countries in October last year. Just over a week ago, Musk confirmed that the service is now ready to come out of the beta testing phase by October this year. SpaceX is then likely to launch Starlink programs for Indian consumers by next year, provided it clears all the regulatory approvals by then.

SpaceX is even planning to maintain a local manufacturing of satellite communications (satcom) equipment in India, including the likes of antenna systems and user terminal devices. For this, it has been in talks with industry players and stakeholders, including the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). India Today