SpaceX serves Starlink customers with a record 42 petabytes (42 million GB) of data per day
SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering more than 42 petabytes of data per day to customers, one of the company’s engineers said today. This is 42 million GB.
We transmit more than a terabit per second [of data] every day through 9,000 lasers. We actually serve all of our Starlink users via lasers at a specific time during a roughly two-hour window.
– said SpaceX engineer Travis Brashear at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco dedicated to the latest advances in optics.
NEWS: SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering more than 42 petabytes of data to customers per day, an engineer revealed today. That translates into 42 million gigabytes.
“We’re passing over terabits per second every day across 9,000 lasers“https://t.co/dauGw2sKrH
– Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) January 30, 2024
While Starlink uses radio waves to transmit high-speed Internet to customers, SpaceX also equips satellites with a “laser communication” system to reduce latency and improve the system’s global coverage. The lasers can support connections at 100 Gbps per line, and are especially important for helping satellites receive data when there is no SpaceX ground station nearby, such as over the ocean or Antarctic. Instead, the satellite can transmit data to and from another Starlink satellite in Earth orbit, forming a mesh network in space.
Brashear’s Tuesday report showed that the laser system is quite reliable, despite the fact that the equipment is on board thousands of Starlink satellites that constantly orbit the Earth. Despite the technical challenges, the company achieved a laser communication uptime of over 99%.
The satellites are constantly forming laser communication lines, resulting in about 266,141 “laser captures” per day. But in some cases, the connection can be maintained for weeks and even reach data rates of up to 200 Gbps.
Brashear also said that the Starlink laser system was able to connect the two satellites at a distance of more than 5,400 kilometers from each other. According to him, the connection was so remote that it “cut through the atmosphere 30 kilometers above the Earth’s surface” before the connection was broken.
Another interesting fact is that we kept in touch at an altitude of 122 kilometers when the satellite was deorbited. And they were able to transmit the video.
During his presentation, Brashear also showed a slide depicting how the laser system can deliver data to the Starlink dish in Antarctica via seven different paths. “We can dynamically change these routes in milliseconds. So as long as we have some sort of path to the ground [station], you’re going to have 99.99% uptime. That’s why it’s important to have as many nodes as possible,” he added.
Most of the Starlink satellites currently in orbit use Gen 3. But recently, the company has modernized the technology, creating a new model, the Gen 4. SpaceX can produce about 200 units per week, but to reduce costs, the company uses off-the-shelf components, including sensors and actuators. SpaceX also had to make sure that all the components were “removable” and would not leave any traces when the Starlink satellite decommissioned and burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
In the future, SpaceX plans to expand the laser system so that it can be transported and installed on third-party satellites.
