{"id":43684,"date":"2025-10-22T20:27:54","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T12:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/satellite-operators-will-soon-join-airlines-in-using-starlink-in-flight-wi-fi\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T20:27:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T12:27:54","slug":"satellite-operators-will-soon-join-airlines-in-using-starlink-in-flight-wi-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/satellite-operators-will-soon-join-airlines-in-using-starlink-in-flight-wi-fi\/","title":{"rendered":"Satellite operators will soon join airlines in using Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi"},"content":{"rendered":"

A little over a year ago, one of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft flew a team of four private astronauts to orbit on a mission that made history with the first fully commercial spacewalk.<\/p>\n

Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis briefly floated out the door of the Dragon capsule, wearing SpaceX-built pressure suits to protect them against the hostile environment of space. It was the first time anyone ventured outside of their spacecraft without the involvement of a government space agency.<\/p>\n

The mission, named Polaris Dawn, made an important contribution in another area. It was the first space mission to connect with SpaceX\u2019s Starlink broadband network, using laser links between the Dragon spacecraft and Starlink satellites to communicate with the Earth.<\/p>\n

Most satellites only have sporadic connectivity with their operators back on Earth. As satellites zip around the planet, they periodically pass over ground stations designed to receive data and transmit commands back up to the spacecraft. One exception is the International Space Station, which enjoys near-continuous communications through a fleet of NASA data relay satellites.<\/p>\n

But those satellites are expensive. They exist only to serve government missions, like the ISS and the Hubble Space Telescope. The Starlink network, by contrast, connects with millions of users, whether they\u2019re at home, on the road, at sea, or in the air.<\/p>\n

One company, a California-based startup named Muon Space, is partnering with SpaceX to bring Starlink connectivity to low-Earth orbit. Muon announced Tuesday it will soon install Starlink terminals on its satellites, becoming the first commercial user, other than SpaceX itself, to use Starlink for in-flight connectivity in low-Earth orbit.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about the data<\/h2>\n

Muon was founded four years ago by a team of space industry veterans who sought to change the way satellites are built. While launch costs are coming down, satellite manufacturing remains an expensive business. Muon\u2019s mission is to combine hardware, software, and operations expertise to design, build, and operate constellations of low-Earth orbit satellites on behalf of customers.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

Essentially, Muon aims to become a one-stop shop for anyone with an idea and the money to use low-Earth orbit satellites for pretty much any purpose. The company has raised more than $180 million to date.<\/p>\n

One of Muon\u2019s first customers is FireSat, a program managed by a Google-backed nonprofit called Earth Fire Alliance to detect and track wildfires. The first FireSat demonstration satellite launched in March, and three more satellites are scheduled for launch next year, with the goal of fielding 50 satellites by 2030 to improve the fleet\u2019s coverage.<\/p>\n

FireSat\u2019s thermal imagery has another potential application. The National Reconnaissance Office, the US government\u2019s spy satellite agency, announced earlier this year it will buy FireSat data for its own use.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Muon Space employees pose with the first FireSat satellite before its launch earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Muon Space<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

But no matter how good the satellites are, their effectiveness is only as good as the data they deliver to the people who need it. In some cases, it can take hours for a satellite to pass over a ground station, so the data is stale by the time it arrives on Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the founding of the company, we were well-tuned to the fact that almost all of our customers are really ultimately interested in the data that they\u2019re able to receive from their constellations,\u201d said Pascal Stang, Muon\u2019s co-founder and chief technology officer. \u201cSo, we invested in the company substantially in making sure that the data delivered was easy for them, that it was high volume for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, Muon looked at ways to speed data delivery through ground stations and radio signals. Using lasers with Starlink is an \u201cexciting evolution\u201d of that approach, Stang said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHigh-speed, low-latency connectivity on orbit is foundational for modern space missions,\u201d said Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX. \u201cBy integrating Starlink mini-lasers, Muon\u2019s spacecraft can remain persistently connected through our in-space laser mesh, enabling real-time tasking, continuous command-and-control, and immediate data delivery to terrestrial points of presence. We\u2019re excited to support Muon Space as they bring these capabilities to commercial missions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putting a single Starlink mini-laser terminal on a satellite would keep the spacecraft connected 70 to 80 percent of the time, according to Greg Smirin, Muon\u2019s president. There would still be some downtime as the laser reconnects to different Starlink satellites, but Smirin said a pair of laser terminals would allow a satellite to reach 100 percent coverage.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

So long, data limits<\/h2>\n

Lasers have other benefits over ground stations. Optical links offer significantly more throughput than traditional radio communication systems, and they\u2019re not constrained by regulations on radio spectrum usage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat it does for our customers and for the company is we are able to get more than 10x, maybe even 50x, the amount of data that they\u2019re able to bring down, and we\u2019re able to offer them that on a latency of nearly instant,\u201d Stang said in an interview with Ars.<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s mini-lasers are designed to achieve link speeds of 25Gbps at distances up to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers). These speeds will \u201copen new business models\u201d for satellite operators who can now rely on the same \u201cInternet speed and responsiveness as cloud providers and telecom networks on the ground,\u201d Muon said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Muon\u2019s platform, called Halo, comes in different sizes, with satellites ranging up to a half-ton. \u201cWith persistent optical broadband, Muon Halo satellites will move from being isolated vehicles to becoming active, real\u2011time nodes on Starlink\u2019s global network,\u201d Stang said in a press release. \u201cThat shift transforms how missions are designed and how fast insights flow to decision\u2011makers on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Muon said the first laser-equipped satellite will launch in early 2027 for an undisclosed customer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe like to believe part of why SpaceX trusts us to be the ones to be able to lead on this is because our system is designed to really deal with very different levels of requirements,\u201d Smirin said. \u201cAs far as we\u2019re aware, this is the first integration into a satellite. We have a ton of interest from commercial customers for our capabilities in general, and we expect this should just boost that quite significantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

FireSat is one of the missions where Starlink connectivity would have an impact by rapidly informing first responders of a wildfire, Smirin said. According to Muon, using satellite laser links would cut FireSat data latency from an average of 20 minutes to near real-time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just for the initial detection,\u201d Smirin said. \u201cIt\u2019s also once a fire is ongoing, [cutting] the time and the latency for seeing the intensity and direction of the fire, and being able to update that in near real-time. It has incredible value to incident commanders on the ground, because they\u2019re trying to figure out a way to position their equipment and their people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinking big<\/h2>\n

Ubiquitous connectivity in space could eventually lead to new types of missions. \u201cNow, you\u2019ve got a data center in space,\u201d Smirin said. \u201cYou can do AI there. You can connect with data centers on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

While this first agreement between Muon and SpaceX covers commercial data relay, it\u2019s easy to imagine other applications, such as continuous live drone-like high-resolution streaming video from space for surveillance or weather monitoring. Live video from space has historically been limited to human spaceflight missions or rocket-mounted cameras that operate for a short time.<\/p>\n

One example of that is the dazzling live video beamed back to Earth, through Starlink, from SpaceX\u2019s Starship rockets. The laser terminals on Starship operate through the extreme heat of reentry, returning streaming video as plasma envelops the vehicle. This environment routinely causes radio blackouts for other spacecraft as they reenter the atmosphere. With optical links, that\u2019s no longer a problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis starts to enable a whole new category of capabilities, much the same way as when terrestrial computers went from dial-up to broadband,\u201d Smirin said. \u201cYou knew what it could do, but we blew through bulletin boards very quickly to many different applications.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little over a year ago, one of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft flew a team of four private astronauts to orbit on a mission that made history with the first fully commercial spacewalk. Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis briefly floated out the door of the Dragon capsule, wearing SpaceX-built pressure suits to protect them against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}