Amazon has just announced that two of its prototype internet satellites equipped with infrared lasers transferred data at 100 gigabits per second over a distance of nearly 1000 kilometers. The company says all of its upcoming 3236 Project Kuiper satellites will include such interlinks, forming a high-speed mesh network to route data around the world.
SpaceX’s rival Starlink system, which already boasts over 1.5 million customers including the Ukrainian military, has been experimenting with optical interlinks for about a year. It recently claimed to have more than 8,000 space lasers on its newest generation of satellites, which began launching earlier this year.
Now the race is on to build the first complete optical inter-satellite link (OISL) constellation, at a price that’s competitive with terrestrial 5G and fiber networks.
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(Via IEEE Spectrum.)
In The Tholian Web, an episode from the third season of Star Trek first broadcast in 1968, featured an "energy web" that effectively imprisoned the Enterprise.
Although obviously different in purpose, the visual similarity of these images strikes me. I wonder if any of the engineers working on the Kuiper Project saw this episode, and perhaps visualized a satellite network using satellite-to-satellite lasers.
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