[chtitux]

Maybe just use Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station.

Starlink Ground Station Network is global, spread in many different countries and look more resilient than a single one.

[amarant]

It's a good idea for future satellites, but upgrading existing satellites is probably not feasible.

And these polar orbit satellite typically live a lot longer than the relatively short lived starlink satellites, potentially opening you to a (perhaps unlikely?) scenario where starlink moves to new and incompatible hardware for inter-satellite communications, and your satellite is then made obsolete.

Vertical integration is not cheap, but it does have it's upsides.

[tedivm]

That would require replacing all the satellites with new ones capable of doing that, which doesn't seem feasible. Starlink also doesn't have great coverage of the polar regions.

[cbeach]

Starlink's laser system is already up and running. Back in January it was delivering over 42 petabytes per day:

https://uk.pcmag.com/networking/150673/starlinks-laser-syste...

“We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,” SpaceX engineer Travis Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window.”