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Starlink's too low to offer reasonable coverage for orbital stations. Even payloads lower than the constellation (and there aren't many) would only see very sma
by jccooper 6y ago
Starlink's too low to offer reasonable coverage for orbital stations. Even payloads lower than the constellation (and there aren't many) would only see very small beams, and would pass through them quickly. And the laser system, I think you'd basically have to be co-orbital with them to work.
That would be a better product for the traditional GEO comsat operators, but apparently there's not enough market there for them to bother. NASA already has a system for that, TDRS. I wonder how busy it is nowadays?
- sigstoat 6y ago> NASA already has a system for that, TDRS. I wonder how busy it is nowadays? last time i had anything to do with TDRSS (circa 2013), it was extremely busy, expensive, and it was the military that got the high bandwidth links. we could only use it to communicate with our research spacecraft during early orbit activities, or emergencies. and we got something like 2400 to 9600bps.
- joshvm 6y agoAt South Pole we use TDRSS for uploading science data. The upload speed is actually very good - easily our highest bandwidth connection because we have to get hundreds of gigabytes of data a week to the North (mostly South Pole Telescope and IceCube). We also get some "public" capacity for the station which is about 5 mbps while it's up. Competition for use is still strong. We tend to get a few hour-ish chunks every day and it varies a lot. (EDIT: Just realiesd if I'd waited a few hours to post, then I could say that this came via TDRSS ;) More info: https://www.usap.gov/technology/contentHandler.cfm?id=1971 https://www.usap.gov/technology/contentHandler.cfm?id=1971
- ncmncm 6y agoCurious if that bulk data is going via Aspera protocol, or what other accommodation is made for the extreme bandwidth-delay product.