SpaceX Adds Laser Links To Starlink Satellites To Service Earth’s Polar Areas

SpaceX has started launching Starlink satellites with laser links that will help provide broadband coverage in the polar regions. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter Sunday, these satellites “have laser links between the satellites, so no ground station is needed above the poles.”

Laser links are included in 10 Starlink satellites that have just been launched into polar orbits. The launch came two weeks after SpaceX received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to launch the 10 satellites into polar orbits at an altitude of 560 km.

“All sats launched next year will have laser links,” Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday, indicating that laser systems will become standard on Starlink satellites in 2022. For now, SpaceX only includes laser links on polar satellites. “Only our polar satellites have lasers this year and are v0.9,” Musk wrote.

Residents of Alaska will benefit from polar satellites, SpaceX told the FCC in an app to change the orbit of some of its satellites in April 2020. The plan is to “ensure that all satellites in the SpaceX system provide the same low latency. services to all Americans, including those in places like Alaska that are served by satellites in polar orbits, “SpaceX said at the time. Satellites can serve both users residential and US government users “in polar areas otherwise impossible to reach,” SpaceX said.

Starlink satellites communicate with ground stations, about 20 of which are deployed in the United States so far. A SpaceNews article today describes how laser links reduce the need for ground stations and provide other benefits:

Inter-satellite links allow satellites to transfer communications from one satellite to another, either in the same orbital plane or in an adjacent plane. These links allow operators to minimize the number of ground stations, since a ground station no longer needs to be in the same satellite footprint as user terminals, and to extend coverage to remote areas where ground stations are not available. They can also reduce latency, as the number of hops between satellites and ground stations is reduced.

The 10 satellites were originally licensed by the FCC for altitudes between 1,100 and 1,300 km. FCC approval allowing SpaceX to cut altitude in half will help reduce latency.

With polar orbits, also called synchronous orbits with the Sun, satellites “traverse the Earth from north to south rather than west to east, passing roughly over the poles of the Earth,” as explained by European Space Agency.

“Space lasers have exciting potential”

In December, in an interview with Eric Berger, Ars Space Editor-in-Chief, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the demonstration of laser communications in space was among the most significant achievements. of the company in 2020.

SpaceX had revealed a few months earlier that it was testing space lasers for transferring data between satellites. Starlink engineers provided more details in a Reddit AMA in November; Here is an excerpt from our coverage at the time:

“The speed of light is faster in vacuum than in fiber, so space lasers have exciting potential for low latency links,” the Starlink team said on Reddit in response to a question about space laser tests. “They will also allow us to serve users where satellites cannot see a terrestrial gateway antenna – for example, over the ocean and in areas with poor fiber connectivity.”

Space lasers won’t play a major role in Starlink anytime soon, however. “We had an exciting flight test earlier this year with prototype space lasers on two Starlink satellites that managed to transmit gigabytes of data,” the engineering team wrote. “But reducing the cost of space lasers and producing a lot of them quickly is a really tough issue the team is still working on.”

SpaceX seeks FCC OK for more polar satellites

In November 2020, SpaceX urged the FCC for fast track approval “to facilitate the deployment of 348 Starlink satellites in polar orbits synchronous with the Sun at low altitude,” the FCC said in its decision to approve 10 satellites. The FCC has only approved these 10 because it assesses interference issues raised by other satellite companies.

“We find that the partial allocation of ten satellites will facilitate the continued development and testing of SpaceX’s broadband service in high-latitude geographic areas in the immediate term pending further action to address the case’s arguments regarding both granting the modification as a whole and the entire subset of polar orbiting satellites, ”the FCC order said.

Amazon’s project Kuiper, Viasat, Kepler Communications and Pacific Dataport urged the FCC to reject even the partial grant of 10 satellites because of the potential for increased interference with other non-geostationary satellite systems. But the FCC order said SpaceX was committed to “operate these satellites on a non-harmful interference basis to other licensed spectrum users until the Commission decides on its modification. its entirety “. A battle between SpaceX and Amazon is brewing, with Musk accusing Amazon attempted to “put the brakes on Starlink today for an Amazon satellite system that is at best several years of operation.”