I'm really curious how the tracking works in such a system, and how "bad" the beam spread is (my impression is that from the diffraction limit alone the beam has to be spread over at least a ~10m radius after travelling 36000km).
Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?).
Tracking and actuation is nothing new or particularly challenging, IMHO. It's the laser/optical part combined with throughput at that distance that is the main area of R&D, I think.
Perhaps a little, however. Different paths through the atmosphere will perturb the phase of the signal; depending on conditions not all of that ~10m beam width is going to decode with an acceptable bit error rate.
The article says 2.6 gigabits/second which is 2,600,000,000 bits/second, 2,600,000,000b/s * 0.5s / 8 is 162,500,000 bytes, 162,500,000 / 1,000,000 is 162.5 megabytes
Some miniaturization required.
Nice, if you want a bit more details on the TNO side https://www.tno.nl/en/newsroom/2026/02/airbus-tno-demonstrat... relying on https://connectivity.esa.int/archives/projects/ultraair
"low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.
Getting it to work with one end stationary first sounds like a reasonable development plan. LEO adds a lot of complexity, but with huge benefits.
OTOH the number of engineers that focus on throughput over latency is quite staggering.
I guess if your goal is just to stream aircraft telemetry and black box like recordings then latency may not be high on the agenda.
I think it's the opposite? For small telemetry you want it now, but for the big data products there's no hope of "now" and so you settle for soon.
But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.
I suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets.
Laser TDMA! :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-division_multiple_access
If starlink satellites get laser downlink, it might work :P
I'm really curious how the tracking works in such a system, and how "bad" the beam spread is (my impression is that from the diffraction limit alone the beam has to be spread over at least a ~10m radius after travelling 36000km).
Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?).
Really cool project though!
Tracking and actuation is nothing new or particularly challenging, IMHO. It's the laser/optical part combined with throughput at that distance that is the main area of R&D, I think.
> and how "bad" the beam spread is
The spread makes the tracking easier, I suppose.
Perhaps a little, however. Different paths through the atmosphere will perturb the phase of the signal; depending on conditions not all of that ~10m beam width is going to decode with an acceptable bit error rate.
Impressive! I believe round trip latency would be 0.5 seconds.
That's ~162.5 MB in transit at any time
Excellent for pingfs (https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs)
Shouldn't it be 1000/16 = 62.5? Impressive nonetheless, of course!
The article says 2.6 gigabits/second which is 2,600,000,000 bits/second, 2,600,000,000b/s * 0.5s / 8 is 162,500,000 bytes, 162,500,000 / 1,000,000 is 162.5 megabytes
Weird.