Reddit AMA — the Starlink team, with Elon Musk (r/Starlink, 2020)
During the Starlink team's AMA on r/Starlink, held while the “Better Than Nothing” beta was under way, Elon Musk stepped in twice: once to tease the inter-satellite laser links, once to recruit.
The AMA was run by the Starlink engineering team (under the u/DishyMcFlatface account, named after the user terminal) three weeks after the public beta opened in the northern United States. Musk himself answered only twice, but the first answer is the earliest public confirmation from him that the optical inter-satellite links — the “space lasers” that let satellites relay traffic to each other instead of via a ground station — were real and coming.
Transcript
u/Nixon506E: Any updates about the space lasers? How much better can the latency be with them? How much better can transcontinental connections be with them? When will real world testing begin?
Elon Musk: Did you say space lasers? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ykL-iMtpV50
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the_starlink_team_ask_us_anything/gd3vtl4/u/DishyMcFlatface (the Starlink team, opening the AMA): We are the Starlink team, ask us anything!
Elon Musk: If you want to build the Internet the way it should be, join Starlink
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the_starlink_team_ask_us_anything/gd3x8et/