Starlink makes sense where you've got people distributed all over the surface who need to talk to each other. Any initial Mars settlement is going to be concentrated in one place and the only distant thing they'll need to communicate with is Earth. You could just as easily do that with one or two large comms sats instead of 25,000 small ones.
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Tue 21 Jul 2020, 19:37,
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I'm not saying we'd need anything like Starlink (they wouldn't have the power anyway)
but a good dozen or so decent sized (around 1t or so) comms satellites would do.
You could probably get away with three giant ones if they are all high enough up. Just having one in geostationary orbit (areosynchronous if you're a pedant) would mean being cut off from Earth whenever your side of Mars was facing away from Earth. A small network of big satellites in geo would make constant communication possible.
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brb top shit, Tue 21 Jul 2020, 19:53,
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Three big ones is probably the way to go to get the bandwidth back to earth. They wouldn't need to be stationary either as long as they were 120 degrees apart in the same orbit, that orbit could be anything you choose. Tracking satellites is a solved problem.
If you could live with short breaks, you could probably stick two in a really high orbit at 180 degree separation. You've got the communication delay to factor in anyway, so you could probably live with that.
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Tue 21 Jul 2020, 20:31,
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