[maxov]

Interesting. I am not a rocket scientist, but I think there’s a few fundamental problems with doing this:

1. You can’t keep the satellites in a “line” between Earth and Mars, as objects in orbits of larger radii travel slower and so have longer orbital periods. This is the reason why for example geosynchronous orbits are only possible at a particular distance. They would only align with some frequency, which I’d guess would be closer to a geologic timescale than a human one. I think the fact that Mars and Earth’s orbits are slightly eccentric only makes this harder.

2. A solution to the above could be launching way more. But launching so many satellites carrying enough fuel to escape Earth’s gravity well would be prohibitively expensive compared to cost of LEO of existing Starlink satellites.

3. Starlink satellites are only designed to transmit maybe a few hundred km? In any case that’s 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the distance between Mars and Earth. You’d need dramatically more power consumption to transmit effectively over those distances, which is why existing bitrates are so low.

Anyway this is pretty cool, I found a NASA dashboard that also shows bitrates for current spacecraft: https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

[dredmorbius]

Those units, e.g., 24. 25. 26 for Goldstone, are bitrates? Bits/second?

[maxov]

I think those are just identifiers for the telescopes. If you click on the telescope to expand you can see what it’s communicating with and some info about the link, and the bitrates are closer to e.g. 20 Kbit/s - 1.0 Mbit/s.

[dredmorbius]

Thanks. The dataviz is unclear.