DoD space agency funds development of laser terminal that connects to multiple satellite at once:
The Space Development Agency [SDA] awarded BridgeComm and Space Micro a $1.7 million contract to demonstrate point-to-multipoint communications
Each of the satellites in the Pentagon’s planned mesh network of communications satellites could have as many as many as four laser links so they can talk to other satellites, airplanes, ships and ground stations.
Optical inter-satellite links are critical to the success of the Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit constellation — known as Transport Layer — that will be used to route data traffic. Lasers provide much higher transmission data rates than traditional radio-frequency communications but are also far more expensive.
SDA recently awarded nearly $1.8 billion in contracts for 126 satellites for the Transport Layer. By some estimates, about $500 million of that total would be for optical terminals, said Michael Abad-Santos, senior vice president of business development and strategy at BridgeComm, a Denver-based optical communications startup.
The company developed a so-called “one-to-many” optical communications technology for point-to-multipoint transmissions. This technology could help reduce the cost of building constellations by requiring fewer terminals, Abad-Santos said.
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https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming-42-million-gb-of-data-per-day
SpaceX's laser system for Starlink is delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, an engineer revealed today. That translates into 42 million gigabytes.
"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.
[...] Although Starlink uses radio waves to beam high-speed internet to customers, SpaceX has also been outfitting the company's satellites with a "laser link" system to help drive down latency and improve the system's global coverage.
[...] Brashears also said Starlink's laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long "it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth," he said, before the connection broke.
"Another really fun fact is that we held a link all the way down to 122 kilometers while we were de-orbiting a satellite," he said. "And we were able to downstream the video."
[...] For the future, SpaceX plans on expanding its laser system so that it can be ported and installed on third-party satellites. The company has also explored beaming the satellite lasers directly to terminals on the Earth's surface to deliver data. But Brashears said a "deeper study" is necessary to enable the technology.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14 2022, @06:00PM (3 children)
If I wanted to put a multi-laser weapon in space I'd disguise it as a com sat and actually use it that way... until the day when you need to flip a switch to turn up the laser output to weapon status.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14 2022, @06:39PM (2 children)
Good luck building a laser capable of operating in both modes. Assuming it is even possible I suspect it would make even the SLS look cheap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14 2022, @07:06PM
Shhhhhhh, don't go ruining a good fantasy in his head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:21AM
Uh... It's easier than you think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14 2022, @06:46PM (2 children)
For Starlink satellite communication?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14 2022, @08:22PM
No, not in any meaningful way. Lots of talk about it, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:08AM
Starlink has point-to-point lasers and one-to-many radios. This is something they might be interested in as an upgrade, assuming the price is low enough.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday March 14 2022, @08:16PM (2 children)
Lasers, eh? Light, maybe? What frequency range do they use to get through clouds?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday March 15 2022, @01:56PM (1 child)
Does your radio, TV, and cell phone stop working when it's cloudy? All of them transmit and/or receive light, just frequencies of light that are invisible to you. LASERs aren't confined to visible light. A photon is a photon no matter what its frequency.
The more I learn, the more I realize how abysmally ignorant I am.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @07:16PM
Does your radio, TV, and cell phone stop working when it's cloudy?
It's a scientific fact that clouds do indeed affect radio and light... you unscientific Jack.