I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Lasers are no longer low latency when distances are huge
Power may be accessible with solar panels, but power density is shit in space because solar panels force a flat design with limited depth, plus cooling issues, and you eventually need a construction so large that it’s incredibly fragile.
Lasers in space are speed of light in a vacuum which it considerably faster than speed of light in a fibre.
And then promptly loses out to the longer distance between nodes, slower network gear on the satellites themselves, the massive latency loss to requiring more complex higher redundancy signal coding due to the energy loss in the laser across the distance (since it spreads out, vs a fiber maintaining most energy). Even if you used dense LEO satellites like Starlink it remains unreliable and the motion of satellites means you can’t have a stable path length.
Tldr it’s useless for almost everything. You need to be able to not just use efficient live path selection when sending traffic, you have to be able afford to pay for QoS priority on wildly expensive satellites due to all the specifical equipment and hardware capacity limits. If you’re not doing high speed trading arbitrage you can’t make that money back.
Just look at what the experts say in the paper below. Below 3000 km it’s always slower. Starlink doesn’t have the capacity to beat the 3000 km threshold now. USA is something like 4500 km across. The investment alone to beat fiber from coast to coast (the ideal scenario) makes it not worth trying.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.05285
Exactly. It is lower latency.
You’re moving the goal posts now to the problem being commercial viability for a subset of activity.
Look at the paper I added. It does lose up to a huge distance because of the uplinks and satellite movement. It takes something ridiculous to get use of space lasers, because otherwise I was completely right, you ADD enough distance to the path for lasers to lose.
And if fiber gets improved further by fibers which slow light less (up from 67% of c) then the threshold distance grows proportionally