That would only buy you one increment of offshore range gain; it wouldn't cover the whole ocean unless you had a huge network of ships and used multiple up/down hops. And at that point the overall latency would suck so bad your customers might be better off with GEO.
It would depend on how fast the internal relay latency is on the ground terminals.
Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance.
There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to deploy them in fixed locations.
They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
There's enough of those around to provide a massive network of potential relays.
But they are deploying inter-satellite laser links on newer launches, so those will come on and provide more coverage too.
>They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
> Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
The thing that makes Starlink so appealing to airliners is that they can now do real-time telemetry of virtually every sensor on the plane without going bankrupt from the satellite data cost - not just for disaster recovery, but also for regular maintenance. Think of some random but unimportant component failing and the airline can dispatch a spare part and a repair crew to wait for the plane and do the maintenance right when it lands.
