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?).
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'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!
> and how "bad" the beam spread is
The spread makes the tracking easier, I suppose.
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.
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!
Weird.