announcing plans a month later<\/a> to integrate them on the Haven-1 spacecraft now slated to launch in 2026.<\/p>\nMuon president Gregory Smirin told SpaceNews the company plans to test the capability in LEO in the first quarter of 2027, ahead of customer deployments the following quarter.<\/p>\n
While financial and other details were not disclosed, Smirin said Muon aims to \u201chave this capacity for every one of our customers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Each Halo satellite, ranging from around 100-500 kilograms, would typically carry one to four Starlink mini laser terminals, depending on connectivity and redundancy needs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d say the vast majority of our customers who we\u2019ve talked about this with have expressed interest in one,\u201d Smirin said in an interview, enough for 70-80% persistent connectivity, depending on orbit, as the satellite hands off to new Starlink nodes coming into view.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s still a huge step forward from \u2014 depending on what\u2019s being designed for a particular satellite or constellation \u2014 anywhere between 10% and 30% connectivity persistence with ground stations,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Ideal use case<\/p>\n
Muon operates its satellites on behalf of customers, who would pay for Starlink usage much like existing ground station services that are based on data volume or access time.<\/p>\n
The company has deployed four Halo satellites so far, including a prototype in March for FireSat, a wildfire-monitoring system developed with the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance that Muon highlighted as an ideal application for the optical connectivity.<\/p>\n
Adding Starlink terminals to future FireSat spacecraft could cut data latency from an average of 20 minutes to near real-time, according to Muon, enabling incident commanders and first responders to receive almost instant alerts of new ignitions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just for initial detection,\u201d Smirin added, \u201cthe quicker you can update what\u2019s happening with the perimeter, the intensity and the speed of movement, then the easier it is for the incident commanders to be able to move their people on their equipment.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo really driving down the latency to near zero is a huge operational win.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the deal with SpaceX is not exclusive, he said Muon\u2019s vertically integrated approach positions the company to get the most out of the terminal hardware.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think that full vertical integration of all the components of hardware that we put into our spacecraft, the software and the operations, sets us up really nicely to make the mini laser terminal the most productive it can be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause if you put it on something else that\u2019s part of some Frankensat that\u2019s constrained by power or processing or something else, then it\u2019s not going to really perform as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Muon said in June it was buying satellite propulsion startup Starlight Engines<\/a> as part of its vertical integration strategy, while announcing it had extended its Series B round to $146 million.<\/p>\nSeven Muon satellites are scheduled for launch next year, and Smirin said the company is on track to at least double its output annually as it ramps up production capacity at its new facility in San Jose, California. The company ultimately aims to be able to build up to 500 spacecraft a year.<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX is supplying optical terminals to Muon Space, the four-year-old Californian manufacturer said Oct. 21,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[59714,61,60,59715,22224,82,1935,247,2306,1390],"class_list":{"0":"post-94765","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-data-relay","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-muon-space","12":"tag-optical-communications","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-sn","15":"tag-space","16":"tag-spacex","17":"tag-starlink"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}