Rocket Lad / dutch1664

Did @blueorigin get a jump on @RocketLab's constellation plans? $RKLB IMO this is Rocket Labs competition and opportunity. They've made it clear they want to be in the comms space. Beck, Spice and Peter Griffin (author of the RKLB book) have all stated this. The D2C market is well serviced by ASTS and SpaceX and spectrum is scarce. The Space-ISPs, Starlink and Amazon Kuiper also have a head start and again... spectrum. Pete has talked about not needing spectrum, so what can you do with Mynaric optical links? BACKHAUL Undersea fiber can cost $250M - $1B. I haven't done the math but it's not hard to see this being more cost effective with satellites, and you can terminate anywhere, including in-land. For ISPs, data-centers, governments, etc. This is a huge opportunity bringing fiber like speeds anywhere on earth. SPACE-TO-EARTH RELAY Data centers, space-stations, constellations, they all need more capacity for getting data up and down from space. Instead of every constellation relaying to earth directly, they could relay to a Rocket Lab node for data transmit down to earth. NASA Deep Space Network It's widely knows the existing network is overcapacity and needs replacing. An optical solution relaying data from an in orbit delay node down to earth could expand capacity and speed, connecting the moon, mars, and spacecraft with high speed capacity. For the record, I've had this in mind for a long time. Now that Blue Origin has validated the idea, it will be interesting to see what RKLB does... Maybe @aaronburnett or @VladSaigau have done some work on this?