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SpaceX has confirmed that Google is indeed contributing a large amount of funding to the company.
Earlier in the week, it was rumoured that the internet giant was ready to invest a very large sum of money into Elon Musk's SpaceX private space travel company.
Now SpaceX has issued a brief statement confirming that Google and Fidelity have become the latest investors in its venture.
The two companies have agreed to inject a total of $1 billion into SpaceX, which will give them ownership of just under 10 percent of the company.
As for what SpaceX will do with all that money, the statement claims that "This funding will be used to support continued innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite manufacturing."
In particular, Google will be interested in Elon Musk's and SpaceX's plans to launch hundreds of small internet satellites into orbit around the earth. The idea is to bring decent and affordable internet access to everyone.
More than three billion people in the world today still have poor access to the internet, and SpaceX's internet satellite programme would address that.
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Given Google's widely publicised and longstanding ambitions to bring the internet to everyone, it's easy to see why it would be willing to invest such a large amount of money into the venture.
Besides increasing access, it's thought that the space satellite programme would boost general speeds on the internet for the rest of us. That's thanks to the more direct path data will be able to take, with no need to bounce between routers.
