The laser part is missing both the technical demo of Dragon having livestreams, and hours of uninterrupted signal, the fact that their minilasers are mentioned on the site, offer 25gbps links, and already planned to be integrated with 3rd parties (you can get confirmations from their partners with a simple google search). And apparently as of Jan '26 SpX plan for space-to-ground optical systems as well.
What a weird article.
If we get to the point where we can reliably make a round trip to LEO once per day every day, I think some new bandwidth options open up.
Transmitting information through the air seems very obvious, but there are certain advantages to physical transport.
> And while constellations like Starlink and Kuiper will eventually have optical relay capability, there's no confirmation that either will allow open access to their terminals. There have been successful demonstrations, but widespread deployment still feels like it's a ways off.
But their radar link to ground is Ku band, which is already getting congested (partly by Starlink itself!). That’s why everyone’s talking about moving to Ka, despite the worse attenuation and higher cost. Much more bandwidth is available at Ka band, as well.
Edit: I’m slightly out of date, Starlink now also operates at least partially in the Ka band.
...then I look at what I'm doing at my new job in nuspace (I jumped out of LEDs and LASERs,) and realize I'm one of the people that is tasked with making this some sort of a possibility, without having been explicitly told so.
Faaaaaaaaaaack me. Well, I have a chance to shine if I can talk sense into the right heads.
Unless you mean Golden Dome could be a risk to our project, which is already an obvious thing.
It's a bit like how one guy bought alpaca socks on the silk road and thousands pointed to those socks and said "see, it's not for crime."
Next-gen spacecraft are overwhelming communication networks
https://atempleton.bearblog.dev/how-next-gen-spacecraft-are-overwhelming-our-communication-networks/