SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

Re:SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit by sargun on Sunday May 31, 2020 @02:16AM (#23367621)

So, no idea the cost of O-O amplification or O-E-O these days, but it's expensive. You have to run power (usually there's power with the optics), and the bigger problem is real estate (At least in urban areas). 100x lower signal loss would do away with most of these.

For example, the MAREA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA) undersea cable is 6,600 km long. Current optical fiber requires repeaters every ~100km. If it's to be believed, ZBLAN could get rid of these repeaters all together.

The cable's design is _much_ more complicated because of the requirement to have electricity and repeaters.

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Re:SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit by londons_explore on Sunday May 31, 2020 @03:26AM (#23367892)

Presumably lower loss also means more bandwidth when background thermal noise becomes the limiting factor.

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Re:SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit by sandworm101 on Monday June 01, 2020 @01:23PM (#23381076)

Lasers. This stuff may be necessary for a new class of weapons. That is the reason for all the speculation.

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