[askvictor]

Are you talking satellite-to-satellite relaying? Assuming they're all moving relative to each other, then probably not, unless the laser transmitter or receiver are moving as well. And moving parts wear down and require power, so you'd want to avoid them on a satellite if possible. However, if parts of the constellation are following each other in exactly the same orbital path, then those parts might be able to optically relay without moving parts.

[jerich]

My first job in 1998 was working on the integration and test plans for Teledesic’s Optical Inter-Satellite Link Tracking (or OISLT, pronounced “oyselt”—probably the worst acronym I ever used). The design wasn’t done yet, but we were already planning integration tests to prove them out before anything was launched.

We were planning on tracking satellites in adjacent orbital planes (which were orbiting in the opposite direction) as well as in-plane. So, yeah, moving parts.

Whenever this topic comes up, I wonder what happened to all the work we did at Motorola in 98-99. There were several hundred engineers in Tempe generating thousands of pages of design documents for over a year. We archived all our work in spring 1999 sand were all shuffled off to other projects.

[jacquesm]

Yes. They already did some tests doing this.