zlacker

>>alden5+(OP)
Random thought I just had: What are the odds of a rocket launch crossing through one of these laser links on its way to a higher orbit and disrupting traffic for a fraction of a second?

I know space is really big and so the odds of a rocket hitting a satellite on its way up are incredibly low, but now we're talking about lots of lines between each satellite rather than just the satellites themselves. Are the odds still tiny?

Not that it would be a big deal if it happened, just curiosity.

>>why_at+HI5
It's absolutely incredibly small, think of how large the surface area of a sphere of LEO and the surface area of these lasers linking the vertices of the 5,289 satellites. The gaps between them are probably hundreds of kilometres. I would imagine that each link has multiple routes so if there was a failure traffic can still be routed in the same way the Internet has many routes.

https://satellitemap.space is pretty amazing but a Starlink satellite looks massive on there, really at the scales we are talking they wouldn't even be a pixel. Do we know how many of the satellites are actually interlinked by lasers?

>>andy_p+PP5
There’s no friction in space. So the question is not how wide the plume of a rocket engine gets, but how spread out does the vapor trail need to be before it stops being an optical impediment?

>>hinkle+nh6
Volume is even larger than area…

>>andy_p+kR6
You’re being condescending. That belongs on Reddit, not here.

If you’re in low earth orbit you’re traveling through rocket exhaust. That doesn’t mean you’re seeing enough to affect optical transmission gain. Or orbital decay. But the notion that you’re going to miss because there’s 100’s of kilometers between fast moving satellites? That’s the part of this conversation that deserves condescension, if anything.