May 5, 2021 at 2:34 AM EDT SpaceX, the private space company founded by Tesla head Elon Musk, announced on Tuesday that the company’s Starlink satellite internet service received more 500,000 pre-orders. “To date, over half a million people have placed an order or put down a deposit for Starlink,” SpaceX operations engineer Siva Bharadvaj said during the launch of the 26th Starlink mission. “Only limitation is high density of users in urban areas,” Musk said in response to CNBC reporter Michael Sheetz’s tweet that broke the news. “Most likely, all of the initial 500k will receive service. More of a challenge when we get into the several million user range.” In this photo illustration a Starlink logo of a satellite internet constellation being constructed by SpaceX is seen on a smartphone and a pc screen. Initially, the company had planned for a 2020 release of the Starlink service, but that did not happen. Eventually, SpaceX plans on launching 12,000 satellites at the total cost of nearly $10 billion. Last month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX’s plan to deploy the Starlink satellites at a low Earth orbit. In the FCC agreement, Musk and SpaceX also agreed to “accept that their lower-altitude satellites may encounter interference from satellites deployed under Amazon’s Kuiper Systems satellite project,” according to Reuters. Like SpaceX, Amazon is also planning on launching low-earth satellites in the near future in what is becoming a modern-day space race. Originally Published: