zlacker

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+(OP)
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+yr
Volume is even larger than area…

>>andy_p+v11
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.

>>hinkle+r32
Until one of us does the actually maths and builds a model of the probability of intersection I guess our intuition on this being different is fairly irrelevant, either of us could be wrong. I didn’t really think much about my comment, maybe it was patronising I don’t know. I try not to treat the comments I write here (or receive here either) with much seriousness, often you can take most things I say here as me thinking out loud rather than some planned sarcasm or as you say Reddit type posting.