[cbeach]

Starlink's laser system is already up and running. Back in January it was delivering over 42 petabytes per day:

https://uk.pcmag.com/networking/150673/starlinks-laser-syste...

“We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,” SpaceX engineer Travis Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window.”

[tedivm]

Again though, you can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station" unless all of the satellites support talking to Starlink, which they don't. That means they'd have to be replaced.

[cbeach]

I feel like I'm missing something here.

As I understand it, the Starlink network has a number of ground stations, and an active inter-satellite "mesh," thanks to laser links, which would allow it to route around the loss of one or more ground stations? (although obviously it requires at least one ground station to be live in order to access the non-Starlink-connected Internet)

The lasers began being integrated between 2020 and 2021, so it's likely SpaceX has made decent progress equipping their network with this capability, although I can't find the latest figures for the proportion of satellites that have lasers.

It sounds like there's something I'm missing if we can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station"

Could you help me understand the limitation?

[tedivm]

Do you understand what the problem trying to be solved is?

There are satellites in orbit today that have nothing to do with Starlink. Some of these have been up for a long time. We're talking weather satellites and research satellites. The ones in a polar orbit can only use one of two ground stations to communicate back with the earth, simply due to their location. One of those ground stations has lost it's fiber optic connection so it can't be used at full bandwidth right now.

None of that so far has anything to do with Starlink. We're talking about a system os satellites that already exists and predates Starlink sometimes by decades.

The person that started this thread proposed: "Maybe just use Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station." In other words, have these already existing satellites integrate with the (relatively new) Starlink system.

So they're saying that we somehow make those old satellites, which are already in orbit and have their own communication systems designed to interface with ground stations, somehow stop using the ground station and start using Starlink instead.

[cbeach]

I understand the point you were making, now. Thanks for explaining.