Yeah, going from coastal waters only to full coverage seems like a herculean feat to pull off that quickly as I imagine the constraints keeping it to coastal waters at the moment would all need solved.
It’s seems as if current coverage is ground stations, next phase will be supported by constellation laser links, and final coverage stage is more satellites in the necessary latitudes/orbital planes (as they’re currently constrained by F9 payload capacity and desperately need Starship lift capacity to more rapidly deploy the constellation).
Don't most of the satellites in the current constellation not have the laser links needed for intraconstellation communication? So they'd need to replace those too to keep consistent coverage.
>Don't most of the satellites in the current constellation not have the laser links needed for intraconstellation communication?
Nope, all v1.5 sats have them, so everything launched since January 2021. They experimented with them earlier for polar orbit sats. At this point that's by far the majority of the constellation and either approaching or at critical mass for the mesh. They're probably testing it globally now.
To sibling: they definitely need Starship, but not so much for pure launch numbers as the ability to launch v2.0 at all. F9 fairing isn't big enough. 2.0 will let them shrink cell sizes and improve density and performance which they need too (obviously now more in light of yesterday's announcement). More 1.5 sats wouldn't help as much with that, though the mesh will help relieve ground station chokes as well as ilenabling beyond station service.
From what I can glean, it looks like about half of the units in orbit are V1.5 with laser links. I know that they had issues getting the links working, but it seems that they have worked the bugs out.
I can't believe the oceans would have anywhere near the usage you find in-land, so the links between satellites could be relatively small compared to the rest of the system.
I haven't double checked this, but I strongly suspect they're bandwidth limited by the total amount of uplink/downlink they have, not the inter-satellite bandwidth.
Inter satellite links are basically fiber, just without the fiber (instead they just point the laser in the right direction and rely on the fact that space is empty). Up and down has to use valuable radio spectrum, handle interference and atmospheric effects, etc.
You wind up with the same satellite average satellite density across the middle latitudes anyways because the orbits are very low for satellites. Any particular satellite will eventually service every cell (except for those above the inclination of the main constellation iirc those will eventually (tm) be covered by separate satellites in more polar orbits) between 53N and 53S, which is the orbital inclination of the majority of the constellation. Because of this you don't really have any distinction in function between land and sea servicing satellites because any given satellite will be both.
Those same satellites will cover land as well, right? I would guess that they are hugely over provisioned for their maritime usecases in support of their main mission.
Yeah to consistently cover land you'll have the same density over the ocean because they're LEO satellites so they're eventually covering the whole surface between the latitudes it flies over due to it's inclination.
Maybe the constraints are artificial. From a layman’s perspective it doesn’t seem all that hard. The satellites are already up there, so why would it be any different from providing coverage on land.
Right now Starlink is a bent pipe model. The customer's station connects to a satellite which relays data to the closest ground station. Therefore, the satellite must be in contact with both the customer station and a ground station at the same time. This is not possible over oceans.
Newer Starlink satellites also have a satellite to satellite laser link which is intended to allow relay from consumer station -> satellite -> other satellite -> ground station to provide coverage over oceans, but this functionality has not yet been enabled and relies on enough satellite density that each satellite can see a neighbor.
