Interesting there is an optical networking option for end users (claims ~6TBps). Maybe a really dumb question, but how would the end user's ground station maintain connectivity during cloudy weather? Do they have cloud-penetrating lasers from the MEO satellites? Would that interfere with aircraft, astronomy tools, etc?
Some short googling says they have lasers that clear a path for a data carrying beam, but that seems wasteful/infeasible for commercial uses
"Even Earth’s atmosphere interferes with optical communications. Clouds and mist can interrupt a laser. A solution to this is building multiple ground stations, which are telescopes on Earth that receive infrared waves. If it’s cloudy at one station, the waves can be redirected to a different ground station. With more ground stations, the network can be more flexible during bad weather. SCaN is also investigating multiple approaches, like Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking and satellite arrays to help deal with challenges derived from atmospheric means."
Seems like reusing some of Star Wars research could be used as well where the beam is constantly adjusted with independent mirrors to keep the beam coherent through the atmosphere. Also learned was the beam itself starts to distort the atmosphere requiring even more adjustments.
I think customer speeds is 144 and the 6Tb is their ground links to their stations. That is my take on it at least as its not super clear. I'm curious as to how it works as well.
My read was that they're going to have 144 Gbps RF for both regular users and their ground station gateways, and 6 Tbps optical for satellite-satellite back haul, but then you can also buy direct ground-MEO access to a back haul link. (Presumably MEO-only because it's hard to maintain the link to a fast-moving LEO satellite?)
They don't seem to mention using optical for their own ground stations - maybe too unreliable?
With both RF and optical you could see FEC or ARQ being used for something that isn't 100% signal loss. Downlink is optical, uplink is RF. Downlink transmits with FEC, user terminal fixes as many errors as possible, still missing packets so requests ARQ and either gets retransmission on optical or RF.
Assuming all these companies are interested in launching their own constellations of ~10K-100K satellites into L/MEO, how many companies could actually do this before cascading collisions starts becoming a real worry?
> how many companies could actually do this before cascading collisions starts becoming a real worry?
Twenty of them at 100,000 birds each to start approaching the density of planes in the sky [1]. Not around an airport. In all of the sky. Oceans and all.
Practically speaking, this is not a pressing concern for our generation.
It's interesting that people have a hard time visualizing this. The area in Earth's LEO is, definitionally, bigger than the Earth itself.
The SEA parking garage fits 12,000 cars in it. Two of those spread over the entire planet would be an imperceptible amount of space. You could drop a pin on a map your entire life and probably never hit one.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire eastern seaboard.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire western seaboard.
Send them in straight lines towards the other side of the country.
See if any collide. Almost certainly none of them will. Edit: They will almost certainly
For reference, if you placed all 50k boxes next to each other on the same beach, it would be about 10 miles wide. The total shoreline on either side would be ~1800 miles wide.
By my calculations there will be an average of 500 collisions, no? Each shoebox has an effective width of 2 feet, and with 50k of them that's about 1% density. With 50k in the other direction, and about a 1% collision rate, that's 500 collisions.
If they put their sats low enough (like Starlink already mostly does) any collision debris should be quickly deorbitted by drag, before a cascade can happen.
Debris moves in 3D. Debris moving up will continue moving up. There is no force acting on it to bring it back down. Your comment makes it sound like an explosion would only be in 2D along the same orbit as the original object.
... It is a very real possibility, but less of a problem below 550km altitude because the decay time is much shorter (and why all of these mega constellations tend to stay at lower altitude, even though ~1000km is generally better for a communications satellite).
It's really not. Not in the popularly-portrayed manner. Militaries have been researching how to intentionally cause such a cascade in even a limited orbit. To my knowledge, there isn't a solution.
It’s like announcing you’re going to sell corn starting a year from now when your competition owns all the land corn is grown on, started selling their corn 6 years ago, and has gotten really good at making it cheaper and producing more, based on real world experience.
Looks like they are using lasers for backhaul down to ground stations. What happens if the beam is obstructed for a brief moment (plane, kite, ufo, etc..)?
All those AI datacenters in space will need a way to get data to them.
Bezos can't even build his first constellation and already planning his second... Possibly the real play here is snapping up more frequency licenses on earth (we need them because we're launching any day now promise). They are the real constraining resource and could be used to keep others out of the market for a while.
For example, Starlink's "direct to cell" uses terrestrial-assigned 4G/5G frequencies which are already not globally coordinated.
Serving a given market from space already needs a national license anyway, and with today's small and region-dependent spotbeams for both GEO and LEO, I feel like we're going to move to a frequency regime more similar for terrestrial networks than for legacy communications satellites covering a whole hemisphere with one beam.
Readit News
Some short googling says they have lasers that clear a path for a data carrying beam, but that seems wasteful/infeasible for commercial uses
"Even Earth’s atmosphere interferes with optical communications. Clouds and mist can interrupt a laser. A solution to this is building multiple ground stations, which are telescopes on Earth that receive infrared waves. If it’s cloudy at one station, the waves can be redirected to a different ground station. With more ground stations, the network can be more flexible during bad weather. SCaN is also investigating multiple approaches, like Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking and satellite arrays to help deal with challenges derived from atmospheric means."
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/space-comms/optical-communic...
Some more info on Optical Communications for Satellites: https://www.kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/optcomm/presentations...
They don't seem to mention using optical for their own ground stations - maybe too unreliable?
Twenty of them at 100,000 birds each to start approaching the density of planes in the sky [1]. Not around an airport. In all of the sky. Oceans and all.
Practically speaking, this is not a pressing concern for our generation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711405
The SEA parking garage fits 12,000 cars in it. Two of those spread over the entire planet would be an imperceptible amount of space. You could drop a pin on a map your entire life and probably never hit one.
Satellites need to travel at 8 km/s to not fall down.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire eastern seaboard.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire western seaboard.
Send them in straight lines towards the other side of the country.
See if any collide. Almost certainly none of them will. Edit: They will almost certainly
For reference, if you placed all 50k boxes next to each other on the same beach, it would be about 10 miles wide. The total shoreline on either side would be ~1800 miles wide.
And that's only 2D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
The paper they cite [1] estimates "the no-manoeuvre collision time" for various orbits. It has no alarming results.
That paper cites another paper [2], which raises the possibility of runaway conditions. It, in turn, runs a model developed in this paper [3].
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09643
[2] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234449150_Critical_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
... It is a very real possibility, but less of a problem below 550km altitude because the decay time is much shorter (and why all of these mega constellations tend to stay at lower altitude, even though ~1000km is generally better for a communications satellite).
It's really not. Not in the popularly-portrayed manner. Militaries have been researching how to intentionally cause such a cascade in even a limited orbit. To my knowledge, there isn't a solution.
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-origin-introduces-teraw...
>The TeraWave architecture consists of 5,408 optically interconnected satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO).
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/blue-origin-we-want-to... ("Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation")
Deleted Comment
Same as with any dropped packet.
Bezos can't even build his first constellation and already planning his second... Possibly the real play here is snapping up more frequency licenses on earth (we need them because we're launching any day now promise). They are the real constraining resource and could be used to keep others out of the market for a while.
I'd love to see a betting market on a unified, global licensing regime lasting for another ten years.
For example, Starlink's "direct to cell" uses terrestrial-assigned 4G/5G frequencies which are already not globally coordinated.
Serving a given market from space already needs a national license anyway, and with today's small and region-dependent spotbeams for both GEO and LEO, I feel like we're going to move to a frequency regime more similar for terrestrial networks than for legacy communications satellites covering a whole hemisphere with one beam.