zlacker

I believe Starlink (like Iridium) doesn't even try to establish connections "across the seam," ie the one place the satellites in the adjacent plane are coming head on at orbital speed.

The slide showing the multiple possible paths traffic can take seems to disagree with this statement?

>>try_th+(OP)
Impossible to tell from the slide, because such a seam only occurs at one longitude, and moves over the day.

However looking at other sources, it seems Starlink (having more satellites) actually wraps the orbital planes 360° around the Earth (vs Iridium's minimalist 180° configuration), overlapping both North-moving and South-moving satellites in the same sky simultaneously. This means the Iridium seam disappears entirely. Neat! TIL.

Another problem that vanishes simply by being "hardware rich."