This is not as good as it sounds, because Starlink required many satellites in low Earth orbit to achieve this bandwidth improvement globally.
That said, there will ultimately be over 100k SpaceX communications satellites, most of which will be V4 or V5. Good chance that this system carries about half of global traffic.
显示更多
50 Tbps per Starship is massive. Global international bandwidth is ~2,260 Tbps total. One flight adds over 2% of all cross-border capacity. It unlocks fiber-like speeds nearly everywhere, supports millions of concurrent high-res streams or AI transfers, and creates a resilient space mesh that reduces reliance on undersea cables while enabling high-bandwidth links for lunar and deep-space missions.
显示更多
Grok Bot summary: IAC 2026 presentation by SpaceXAI President Michael Nicolls.
🎯 The main message
- SpaceX was founded in 2002 to make life multi-planetary and "extend the light of consciousness to the stars."
- He said the biggest risk as constellations grow is not debris. It's satellite operators not sharing data with each other.
🌍 How Starlink grew
- Starlink began in 2019 with 60 V0.9 satellites. User service started in late 2020 as the "Better Than Nothing Beta."
- V1.5 added space lasers, which let the satellites link into a mesh. That's when Starlink really took off, reaching oceans, Antarctica and airplanes.
- V2 (2023) has 4x the capacity of V1. Falcon launches V2 satellites 2–3 times a week, and each launch adds about 3 terabits of capacity.
- V3 launched on Starship about a week before the talk. Each V3 satellite has another 10x capacity, and each Starship launch carries 20–30x what a Falcon launch does.
- Starlink now has over 11,000 satellites, about 60% of all active satellites in low Earth orbit.
- It serves more than 13M customers in about 170 markets, plus ships and planes.
- The laser mesh means Starlink doesn't depend on local ground infrastructure. During last year's fires and power outages in Spain, it kept tens of thousands of customers and emergency responders online.
🚀 The life of a Starlink satellite
- **Before launch:** SpaceX checks that deploying the satellites won't bring them close to anything else, and shares where they'll be.
- **Deploy:** satellites are released below 300 km, where almost no other operators fly.
- **Orbit raising:** each climb path is checked against other satellites and crewed space stations, and SpaceX publishes the satellites' positions every hour on the way up.
- **Lower orbits for safety:** the original plan was about 1,000 km. Now every satellite flies below 500 km, and V3 will fly at about 350–360 km. At these heights a dead satellite falls back to Earth within months instead of staying up for centuries.
🛡️ How they avoid collisions
- Each satellite makes small station-keeping moves about once a day and a collision-avoidance move about every 10 days.
- Across the fleet, that's about 1,000 avoidance moves a day.
- Starlink's threshold for moving is nearly 100x more cautious than the industry standard, so the whole fleet's collision risk is about the same as a much smaller constellation's.
- "Ducking" moves turn the satellite so it presents a smaller target during a close pass, cutting the collision risk about 10x more.
- Automated software makes these decisions, which is why Starlink tries to stay in contact with every satellite at all times.
📡 Always connected
- Starship's live launch video was streamed over Starlink.
- The new V3 satellites connected to the network within 2 minutes of release, because Starlink terminals are built into the satellites. Their lasers link into the mesh within tens of minutes.
- The goal is to make contact right away and never lose it.
🌬️ Space weather
- During a 2024 solar storm, air density in orbit jumped 5x in a few hours, which throws off predictions of where satellites will be.
- Starlink is "probably one of the best sensors" for this. It measures density in real time and automatically corrects its position forecasts.
🔭 Working with astronomers
- **Optical:** SpaceX tried Vantablack paint and sun visors. What finally worked was a mirror-like film that reflects sunlight away from the ground, combined with careful steering. A V2 satellite now looks about as bright as a sheet of paper. This was done with groups like the Vera Rubin Observatory.
- **Radio:** working with observatories like the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Starlink steers its beams and frequencies around where the telescopes are pointing. As a result, the telescopes can now observe more often.
♻️ End of life
- SpaceX uses statistics to predict when parts will fail and deorbits satellites early. Many of those satellites would have kept working.
- Retired satellites are steered down within weeks, not left to drift for the 5 or 25 years regulations allow.
- They're built to burn up completely, and reentry is aimed over the ocean.
- Of about 10,000 satellites launched by early 2026, only a few dead ones remain in orbit. The goal is zero.
- "Reliability and rate go together."
⚠️ The biggest danger: other operators
- Tracked debris is like obstacles on a road: if you can measure it, you can avoid it.
- What you can't avoid is a satellite that maneuvers without telling anyone. Starlink has had passes as close as tens of meters this way.
- Starlink has maneuvered around satellites from about 650 operators in recent months, but shares position data with only about half of them. "That number is too low."
- SpaceX shares data with China's space station and some Chinese operators. Many operators don't share at all, including some in the US, Europe and Japan.
⭐ Stargaze: Starlink's own space tracking
- Over 30,000 star trackers on Starlink satellites spot passing objects as streaks against the stars.
- Stargaze now tracks over 17,000 objects, including about 90% of the maneuvering satellites that cross Starlink's orbits.
- In one example, an untracked satellite's predicted 9 km miss shrank to about 60 m after it maneuvered toward Starlink. Stargaze caught the move and the Starlink satellite dodged in time.
- He said it's still no substitute for operators sharing their plans in advance.
🤝 The ask: share your data
- SpaceX runs its own space safety data platform, and over 100 operators have signed up.
- Operators can upload their satellite positions and check them against Starlink and against Stargaze tracking.
- His message to every operator was to join the platform and share their positions.
🧠 StarMind: AI compute in space
- StarMind is SpaceX's planned AI satellite constellation, starting launches and scaling next year.
- The goal is to move AI compute off Earth. He expects StarMind to drive demand for Starship launches the way Starlink did for Falcon.
- On the ground, SpaceX is building over 2 GW of compute in Memphis. He said AI demand will be nearly limitless, and Earth's resources make that hard to keep scaling there.
- In space, the satellites run on solar power and shed heat through large radiators.
- Each satellite is simpler than a Starlink: basically a computer with big solar panels and radiators.
- Each one has about 250 kW, roughly one NVL72 rack of compute.
- They'd fly in tight clusters of about 10 satellites linked by about 10 terabits of bandwidth, then connect to Starlink.
- SpaceX has filed for up to **1 million satellites**, in low-inclination and sun-synchronous orbits. Building them could mean thousands of satellites a week.
- New challenges include much higher reliability and redundancy, flying in close formation, and micrometeoroids. Dead satellites might be sent away from Earth instead of burning up in the atmosphere.
🌙 Beyond Earth
- Starlink is developing very high-bandwidth lasers to connect the Moon, then Mars, building an "interplanetary mesh."
- All of that depends on getting safety right in low Earth orbit first.
💡 Key takeaways
- Starlink is the world's biggest constellation, and it's moving lower to be safer.
- It makes about 1,000 collision-avoidance moves a day, with nearly 100x more caution than the industry standard.
- The biggest risk is operators who don't share where their satellites are going.
- StarMind could scale to 1 million AI satellites, with launches starting next year.
- "Coordination is a key element for realizing all of our ambitions."
显示更多
Michael Nicolls just just laid out SpaceX's ambition for connectivity that extends beyond Earth
“We will connect the Moon with a constellation, and then we will connect Mars”
"Our goal, again, is to extend consciousness beyond this planet, and we want to go and connect the Moon and Mars
But before that on Starlink, we're creating the technologies to connect the Moon with very high-bandwidth connectivity systems, very high-bandwidth lasers
And we will connect the Moon with a constellation, and then we will connect Mars, and we will form an interplanetary mesh of connectivity that is fundamentally driven by the same technologies we're working on with Starlink
To make this happen, SpaceX needs to keep improving safety in LEO so everyone can operate and scale safely”
Build safe, coordinated infrastructure in LEO first then extend connectivity and human presence to the Moon, Mars, and beyond
显示更多
Chronic stress & elevated cortisol quietly drain emotional bandwidth, often eroding daily connection & intimacy in a way that feels more insidious than a single event like infidelity.
Vitamin D helps control stress hormone levels by influencing the brain & adrenal feedback loops.
显示更多
🛠 TokenB v1.5.5 is Live!
Key fixes & upgrades:
1️⃣ Keyboard: Fixed decimal input issues on keyboards.
2️⃣ TRC-20 Fees: Fixed missing bandwidth fee estimates for Netts transfers.
3️⃣ Approvals: Cross-chain swap approvals now match the exact transaction max.
4️⃣ Android UI: Fixed cut-off transfer button display.
5️⃣ Security: Hidden identified spam and phishing transaction records.
6️⃣ Swaps: Optimized swap prompts & routing for more pairs and amounts.
7️⃣ Sync: Faster on-chain data sync for quicker balance updates.
Update now for a smoother, safer experience! ⚡️
显示更多
We cut our RAM in half for the Tesla AI5 chip (now 72GB of LP5) and 1/3 for AI6 (now 144GB of LP6).
This was the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production and greatly reduces cost.
As it turns out, we think this will have a negligible effect on Optimus performance, as memory bandwidth is a bigger limiting factor than total memory storage (bandwidth was held constant).
显示更多
Retentive highlights the extraordinary potential of peer-to-peer infrastructure, positioning Perceptron Network as a cornerstone of next-generation artificial intelligence research, decentralized bandwidth sharing, and sovereign data management.
@PerceptronNTWK #
NodeAndProud#
显示更多
BREAKING: Elon Musk’s new full interview with CMG.
0:15 On Xi Jinping
1:03 Tesla Shanghai factory
2:27 Cybercab rollout
3:55 Speed of AI breakthroughs
4:29 Grok 4.7 and Grokbot
5:48 SpaceX/Tesla data for real-world AI
6:48 Chinese AI models and the compute gap
8:16 China’s electricity output
9:01 US-China AI safety
9:27 Humanoid robots and Optimus
10:55 1 billion robots in 10 years
13:04 Money may not matter
16:27 10 billion to 100 billion robots
17:09 Space cooperation and Mars
21:07 Neuralink and human bandwidth
22:37 Education in the AI era
24:02 Visit Shanghai, and Beijing
24:38 Beijing high-speed rail
24:59 “Words do not do justice to China”
显示更多
A note on recursive STARK mempools (EIP-8288)
This is an EIP that I am hoping we can get included in I-star (the fork after Hegota) that you can think of as the next step after Frames, that would unlock extreme amounts of power. Particularly:
* Ultra-cheap quantum-safe signatures (SPHINCS-). Much of the cost savings comes from the fact that the signature data (~3 kB) does not have to go onchain
* Ultra-cheap quantum-safe privacy protocols. Status quo minimum cost for private txs is ~300k if you engineer very well (no one does), status quo quantum-safe is ~10M gas, this could reduce it to low tens of thousands.
* Universal support for your favorite new signature or proof scheme without needing EVM changes. Whatever you use (Falcon, ML-DSA, some other lattice-based thing, something code-based or isogeny-based or even more esoteric), you can just wrap it client-side in a STARK, onchain gas cost low tens of thousands just like privacy protocols. Hopefully, Ethereum will never need "please support my favorite cryptographic algo" politics again.
* Private account abstraction: keep your account logic private, and in a private location onchain. Then you can make one transaction to change the ownership of all your onchain state - accounts, defi positions, privacy protocol notes, everything - without revealing which objects' ownership you're changing.
Here's how it works.
Your transaction can include a type of frame that we call a "dependency frame". The frame is a list of statements, asserting claims like "message hash M was signed by SPHINCS- public key P" and "data hash D was proven to satisfy a statement defined by verification key V".
When you send your transaction, you send it in an envelope, which includes a signature or a STARK for each statement in a dependency frame.
Once the transaction reaches the mempool, nodes aggregate them. Each node runs a loop: wait one tick (eg. 500ms), aggregate all new envelopes (either single-tx or multi-tx) that you've seen, remove any transactions that are expired, generate a STARK recursively proving all dependencies, and send a new multi-tx envelope containing that STARK.
Hence, the bandwidth load is bounded: each node's outbound is one STARK (~100-300 kB) per tick, plus each transaction getting broadcasted through the network once (as happens already).
The block builder acts as "yet another mempool node", receiving envelopes from the mempool (plus any side channels), generates its own STARK covering the subset of transactions it intends to include in the block, and adds that STARK to the block.
Total onchain overhead: one STARK (100-300 kB), plus 96 bytes for each statement being proven.
This is what I've called before ( ) "The Proof Singularity". Today, we have all the ingredients to actually implement it.
As a developer, this requires a somewhat different workflow than you are used to, but it is conceptually simple. Any signatures or STARKs, you put into a separate frame. Then the main logic that today is verifying a signature or STARK, you replace with checking for the existence of a frame that includes the correct statement as a dependency.
Examples of useful statements:
* [tx sighash] verifies against [the pubkey at sload(0)]
* there exists a secret and a merkle branch such that hashing secret+0 and applying the merkle branch outputs (public) root R, and hashing secret+1 outputs (public) nullifier N
* there exists a secret address A, salt S and signature Z such that sload(0) = hash(A, S) and a merkle proof of address A inside a recent ethereum state contains some pubkey D where [tx sighash] was signed by D [this is private account abstraction; all variables except [tx sighash] and sload(0) are private; you can also make D a STARK verification key]
* there exists an ML-DSA signature signing [tx sighash], that verifies against an ML-DSA pubkey whose hash is sload(0)
At the core, this is moving any compute and data other than bookkeeping "business logic" outside the core path of Ethereum execution, sharding and parallelizing it via the mempool.
Notice also that this requires agreeing on a _language_ (aka. an ISA) for the recursive STARKs to define statements in. The current leading candidate is RISC-V. So this would also de-facto be Ethereum adding RISC-V (or something else we decide on) as a canonical ISA - a big decision that should be done carefully, but that I think will be necessary to drive Ethereum forward.
显示更多