| ▲ | e12e 5 hours ago | |
Starshield (military arm of SpaceX/Starlink) does this for satellite imaging. Normally in imaging, you first need to get the satellite over the location you want to image, at the right time - then let it orbit over a downlink location. There are companies making a lot of money by having downlink capability in useful places (eg: near the poles) - combined with a fat pipe to the Internet. With Starshield, the satellites talk to each other over laser - so the satellite doesn't have to wait to travel to a downlink location - just relay to of that is already there. So for certain special cases it can help - but I think you'll find a cable stuffed with multimodal fiber had vastly more bandwidth. | ||