I'll be somewhat curious to see exactly what this entails, at least to the extent we ever get any details. One aspect could be another facet of Starlink that I

I'll be somewhat curious to see exactly what this entails, at least to the extent we ever get any details. One aspect could be another facet of Starlink that I think still hasn't gotten enough appreciation: the possibilities opened up by a heterozygous orbital mesh network. The orbital mesh of course is primarily first order about making service available from LEO worldwide, including areas too far from any possible ground station to allow a simple bent pipe. Second order is more redundancy and load balancing, lower latency for long enough distances vs terrestrial networks, etc, which has all gotten discussed. But the physical nature of it means that once tech and protocols are there for the laser mesh, that acts as a standardized interface that any satellite could "plug into". They're of course needed to do have this in mind from the start due to how fast they've been iterating, with laser v0.9/1.5/mini-2.0 and full 2.0 once Starship is going sats all needing to talk to each other. But that means SpaceX could also easily mix in some percentage of Starlink sats that do other stuff entirely. They could have optical or radio bridge sats facing "up" for example, so that other higher satellites, space stations, probes and so on can talk directly into Starlink from medium/high Earth orbit or beyond. That could be an alternative to the Deep Space Network that could be quite attractive particularly as the DSN has been getting seriously overloaded [0]. Which also means it could be an important thing for SpaceX in driving cadence for Starship, all the stuff they want to launch and open up with it will need a lot more bandwidth back to Earth. But they could also potentially have dedicated ground facing sats for a customer like the US DOD. Just spitballing, but perhaps ones that use broadcast frequencies forbidden to commercial providers. Or even ground/space optical (at least for aircraft, clouds would be an issue below), which would offer tens of gigabits to terabits of bandwidth and be unjammable. That would offer a range/reliability boost in a remote theater for the 1st Earth <> LEO leg of things, then plug right into the overall mesh for comms back to the US via the normal sats, so it'd be cheaper, lower latency and higher bandwidth then military trying to do their own completely physically separate thing. Distinct capability for less. ---- 0: "NASA officials sound alarm over future of the Deep Space Network" https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-mission-nearly-broke-the-deep-space-network/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-missio...