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Next-gen spacecraft are overwhelming communication networks

87 points by korrz

by NitpickLawyer

0 subcomment

I'm getting weird vibes about this post. It seems to be a cleaned-up version of an LLM draft. Some of the tell-tale signs are sections that blab without much substance, some things that don't make much sense (environmental monitoring MUST capture more data to meet regulatory standards?!), highly hallucinated parts ("Refueling and orbit boosting missions are becoming more common" -> no, these are not common, but planned to be tested soon-ish) and the general feeling that the knowledge cutoff is somewhere in '24 (which would match with the current generation of SotA models).
The laser part is missing both the technical demo of Dragon having livestreams, and hours of uninterrupted signal, the fact that their minilasers are mentioned on the site, offer 25gbps links, and already planned to be integrated with 3rd parties (you can get confirmations from their partners with a simple google search). And apparently as of Jan '26 SpX plan for space-to-ground optical systems as well.
What a weird article.

by ExoticPearTree

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Low orbit space relays. You can hit them from high above with what you want to transmit, buffer it there and they can upload it (or download it?) to Earth pretty fast. Having a few hundred terabytes or a petabyte or two in space for storage I think it is pretty doable nowadays.

by bob1029

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I think it could become economically viable to physically send storage devices back and forth. You can put a lot of bits in a kilogram of mass.
If we get to the point where we can reliably make a round trip to LEO once per day every day, I think some new bandwidth options open up.
Transmitting information through the air seems very obvious, but there are certain advantages to physical transport.

by NooneAtAll3

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so... can "datacenters in space" talk be a poorly thought out attempt to move compute to orbit to not fight for bandwidth?

by wmf

4 subcomments

by ge96

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by bastawhiz

1 subcomments

by infinitewars

1 subcomments

by ForOldHack

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by condiment

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For the skeptics here, this is the exponent thats driving the development of datacenters in space. The data has utility but it will be stuck in orbit. Space-based storage and processing makes a lot more sense when you consider that getting all that data to ground is challenging now, and will soon be impossible.