All spacecraft of the Starlink satellite Internet system launched since September this year will be equipped with laser terminals, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell reports to SpaceNews.
According to her, the presence of laser communication between spacecraft will reduce the dependence of the system on ground stations and reduce the signal delay (ping).
The launch on the Falcon 9 heavy rocket of the first batch of the updated Starlink spacecraft equipped with laser terminals is scheduled for mid-September this year. The first ten experimental satellites of the system to receive lasers were launched into polar orbit in January.
Last September, ArsTechnica reported that SpaceX had begun testing an inter-satellite connection between Starlink spacecraft, resulting in about 100 gigabytes of data transferred between a pair of satellites using laser communication.
In November 2019, Breaking Defense reported that in December 2018, the Pentagon, as part of the Defense Experimentation Using the Commercial Space Internet program, conducted several experiments with the Starlink near-earth satellite system of the American company SpaceX.
