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Comment by burnished

1 year ago

Interesting question. It used to be zero, before the satellites and before the rockets, but now is probably not zero.

I think you could take the time a rocket would be in the way and compare it to the time it would take any given satellite link pair to make an orbit to form an estimate of the chance of a single interference. Then multiply by rockets and satellite pairs to form an overall estimate.

I've done some research, I don't have a probability but from what I've found. A Falcon 9 shortly before stage 1 separation is around 50km altitude[0] doing ~2000 m/s. Preseperation the F9 is 70m tall, add 130m for plume[1] so 200m total. At 2000 m/s it'll cover it's own length and plume in 100ms. If the laser link is running at 100 Gbps that's 10Gb of data lost.

Which is actually a lot more then I estimated when I started this math, kinda puts into perspective more then 1 of the scales at play here.

Tl;dr Rockets are fast, data is apparently faster.

[0] Apparently on its longest distance link Starlink intersected 30km altitude

[1] Ref: my ass