It's a good idea for future satellites, but upgrading existing satellites is probably not feasible.
And these polar orbit satellite typically live a lot longer than the relatively short lived starlink satellites, potentially opening you to a (perhaps unlikely?) scenario where starlink moves to new and incompatible hardware for inter-satellite communications, and your satellite is then made obsolete.
Vertical integration is not cheap, but it does have it's upsides.
That would require replacing all the satellites with new ones capable of doing that, which doesn't seem feasible. Starlink also doesn't have great coverage of the polar regions.
“We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,” SpaceX engineer Travis Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window.”
Again though, you can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station" unless all of the satellites support talking to Starlink, which they don't. That means they'd have to be replaced.
As I understand it, the Starlink network has a number of ground stations, and an active inter-satellite "mesh," thanks to laser links, which would allow it to route around the loss of one or more ground stations? (although obviously it requires at least one ground station to be live in order to access the non-Starlink-connected Internet)
The lasers began being integrated between 2020 and 2021, so it's likely SpaceX has made decent progress equipping their network with this capability, although I can't find the latest figures for the proportion of satellites that have lasers.
It sounds like there's something I'm missing if we can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station"
Do you understand what the problem trying to be solved is?
There are satellites in orbit today that have nothing to do with Starlink. Some of these have been up for a long time. We're talking weather satellites and research satellites. The ones in a polar orbit can only use one of two ground stations to communicate back with the earth, simply due to their location. One of those ground stations has lost it's fiber optic connection so it can't be used at full bandwidth right now.
None of that so far has anything to do with Starlink. We're talking about a system os satellites that already exists and predates Starlink sometimes by decades.
The person that started this thread proposed: "Maybe just use Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station." In other words, have these already existing satellites integrate with the (relatively new) Starlink system.
So they're saying that we somehow make those old satellites, which are already in orbit and have their own communication systems designed to interface with ground stations, somehow stop using the ground station and start using Starlink instead.
>> We're talking backup vs. primary. Of course the backup is not going to be as good.
Then it isn't really a backup. A lower-bandwidth failover capacity is properly described as an alternative or degraded pathway. To be a proper "backup" a thing has to actually do the primary job at least temporarily.
aye. Starlink could be, best case, an Out of Band (OOB) management interface.
good for getting into the other side of a connection or doing some management tasks like back-up telemetry -- but we're talking SNMP, SSH connections to routers, etc, not GigE levels of data.
But the "negative learning" was exactly because they abandoned the standardized approach.
"Conversely, the gradual erosion of EDF’s determination to
standardize (caving in to proposals of numerous design changes
in the wake of the ‘‘frenchifying’’ of the Westinghouse de-
sign—the P’4 reactor series—and above all to the new N4 reactor
design pushed by the CEA), as well as the abrupt slowdown of the
expansion program after 1981, paved the way towards a gradual
demise of the French success model, as borne out in lengthened
construction times and ever higher cost escalation towards the
end of the program (cf. Section 4 below)."
Where no investment decisions are taken and EDF has publicly said they can’t self finance any new construction without direct state aid.
It is simply a ploy to hide military spending since the French army can’t fund the nuclear industry in their own.
> "Without civil nuclear power, no military nuclear power; and without military nuclear power, no civil nuclear power," the president had said, praising a sector that employs 220,000 people in France.
> Where were the tugboats? Bridges are not bumper cars. You cannot hit them.
Through a bridges lifetime in a busy shipping lane you can expect it to get hit. Thus any reasonable bridge is designed with, or has barriers retrofitted to them.
It just US infrastructure lagging behind as is typical.
> It also isn't wrong to say that if you are operating a large container ship, you should ensure it has failsafes in case of power failure. I don't know what failsafes exist (emergency anchors? Some kind of manual rudder?) that would be effective on a ship that large.
All large vessels require emergency generators. The requirement is usually startup within 45s but better performance is generally expected.
Here is an in-depth look on how steering systems on such vessels work:
