[Starlink] Starship's 4th flight test was magnificent

[Michael Richardson]

Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
    > When they kicked into the Blue Danube, during Starship's coast phase, I
    > started dancing around the boat. The landing phase was a real
    > nailbiter, but seeing starlink maintain connectivity through nearly it
    > all of that plasma was amazing, too. To be massively cheered up about

Silly legal/technical question:

When starship is in a suborbital, ~140km apogee (coast phase) over Atlantic
Ocean or Africa, whose jurisdiction are the power limits set by?

If at 140km altitude, that's 20% to 30% closer to the satellites than on
land.  OTH, it's moving really fast, and does the hand-off really work?
Are they just using TCP (or maybe QUIC) for data, or something else?

Also, during the entire Tonga situation, Ulrich provided lots of really good
explanation of how hard it was to do a downlink.  That was before the space
lasers.  I would guess that this data link required inter-satellite lasers,
since downlink over oceans (and probably Africa) would be difficult.

    > Lastly, I couldn't help but imagine small repair robots deploying once
    > in orbit to get a full view of every tile on starship, and perhaps
    > effect repairs. Call 'em Hewey, Duey and Louie....

Naw. R2-xx are Astro *MECHS*. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfMoXBOjWBM

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT architect   [
]     mcr at sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

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