SpaceX is making a product out of Starlink’s space lasers.
The company is making its optical inter-satellite link technology available to outside operators, meaning third-party satellites in space could pass data across the Starlink mesh for near-real-time communications without having to wait until they reach a ground station.
Among early adopters is Muon Space, which said it was building SpaceX mini laser terminals to link its Earth-observation satellites directly into the Starlink network. Connecting spacecraft, the terminals can handle data rates of up to 25 Gbps between satellites, and, spread across a distance of some 4,000 km, they make for an orbital backhaul that looks much more like fiber than it does traditional radio downlinks.
Why Starlink’s Space Lasers Are So Important
Enabled by advances in electronics and lasers, optical inter-satellite links (OISLs) permit satellites to relay data among themselves at the speed of light in vacuum, ousting slow handoffs between ground stations and dodging crowded spectrum for radio frequency. For long-haul routes — especially over the oceans or the polar regions, or between continents — straight-line space routes can beat fiber’s longer rabbit-chase refraction paths, cutting latency and steadying throughput.
Starlink already uses lasers to transfer traffic between its own constellation. SpaceX has said its bigger in-house terminals can support aggregate capacities nearing 200 Gbps and that the mini units are “best suited for spacecraft with size or mass constraints.” In reality, just a handful of hops through optical fibers can traverse imagery, weather models, or spacecraft telemetry across continents at blinding speeds for one efficient downlink.
What Third Parties Get With Mini Terminals
The offer is about much more than a piece of hardware. What SpaceX is really selling is access to a managed orbital relay network — routing, timing, and pointing are done within Starlink’s framework, while the mini terminals just handle the optical handshake. For satellite builders, this shifts away the toughest problems of space networking: precision beam steering, link acquisition, and dynamic path selection in a fast-moving LEO mesh.
Muon Space presents that upgrade as a move from lonely satellites to real-time nodes. That has consequences for climate and weather missions, as data loses its worth when it sits in a recorder waiting for a ground pass. The company’s customers have been defense users like the US Space Force, which has helped nudge industry toward more resilient proliferated LEO networks that can route around threats.
Another potential user is Vast, which has talked about outfitting its private space station with Starlink-ready lasers. The requirement for always-on broadband on crewed platforms is what it is perfectly well suited to: optical interlinks could keep the station in contact even when it falls between any ground antenna footprints.
Who Stands to Benefit from Starlink’s Optical Links
Earth-observation and weather companies can stream imagery and sensor readings in near real time, for faster disaster response, insurance surveys, or maritime surveillance. Science missions get faster command and telemetry loops. With satellites acting as intelligent edge nodes, cloud synchronization becomes an on-orbit capability versus batch-dumping data hours after the fact for commercial operators in remote IoT, aviation, and shipping.
The economics are compelling. But a global ground network is expensive to build, slow to scale, and subject to the availability of permits, fiber backhaul, and site maintenance. Purchasing an optical “pipe” through Starlink transfigures that capex into opex, and can in turn piggyback on a network that SpaceX overhauls with regular launches and hardware upgrades.
Competitive and Regulatory Context for Space Lasers
SpaceX is not the only company pushing space lasers. Mandatory for its Transport Layer, OISLs have become the hallmark of the Space Development Agency, with vendors like Mynaric and CACI providing terminals. Telesat Lightspeed and the next-generation OneWeb have designed-in optical crosslinks, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper has teased some of its own. SpaceX’s move is distinct in this regard, by combining mature terminals with an already-crowded LEO backbone and a clear commercial path for third parties.
On the policy end, optical links don’t need spectrum coordination like radio does, but they’re still inside licensed satellites. In the US, operators work through the FCC for spacecraft authorizations and debris mitigation actions. Internationally, it is through ITU coordination filings. Security and export controls, too, are always an issue — particularly for defense users and cross-border service.
Interoperability is a looming question. Standardization bodies like the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems are working on profiles of optical links, yet vendor-specific solutions prove to be most popular. If Starlink’s interface is proprietary, then customers get performance with the trade-off that they are locked in. If SpaceX adopted open standards and broached the idea of cross-constellation routing, we could have the space equivalent of peering on the internet.
Important Technical and Business Decisions
Performance will be dependent on pointing accuracy, acquisition time, and terminal power draw — crucial for small satellites. Service-level agreements regarding uptime, latency, and priority are what will determine whether time-sensitive government and enterprise users can trust the service during busy periods or in case of outages.
Pricing will be closely watched. A hybrid model that combines hardware fees with per-gigabyte or per-link-hour rates and some premium for guaranteed quality of service. A 25 Gbps-capable backhaul system may be overkill for some CubeSats, but larger players will surely appreciate the enhanced capacity to support high-rate imagers or radar payloads that typically generate hundreds of gigabits per orbit.
What to Watch Next as Starlink Opens Its Laser Network
Operational field tests of satellites will demonstrate whether or not third-party traffic flows smoothly across Starlink as promised. Watch for highlights on interoperability with other optical constellations, extended coverage over polar routes, and any further clarity on how SpaceX prioritizes partner data over its own consumer broadband backhaul.
Delivered as promised, that rollout will be more than the selling of terminals; it will be selling time on a global, laser-linked space backbone. It would signal a move in the satellite business from being an owner of connectivity to merely dialing it up when it needs it, similar to the way that enterprise computing on Earth has been transformed by the cloud.