Phil points out that the 26 Starlink V3 satellites deployed by Starship 14 today - which each have six space lasers capable of 400 Gbps apiece - gives Starlink the beginnings of a much more powerful network within space.
Starship 14 injected 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit on today's flight.
This is an extraordinary achievement and a necessary reality for the build-out of Starlink.
V3 is designed for Starship and is too large for Falcon 9. And V3 represents the future of Starlink.
Often, user capacity is what's quoted when talking about these satellites: 1.16 Tbps per satellite— 1 Tbps down + 160 Gbps up.
But what's often forgotten is the 2.4 Tbps of optical inter-satellite link (ISL) capacity. Six 400 Gbps space lasers.
This is an important technology to understand when thinking about how Starlink eventually gets to 90% of routed IP traffic.
Much of Starlink's future isn't traffic going from space to the ground.
It's traffic staying inside the network.
Think about the emerging architecture:
User nodes → Starlink → compute nodes (Starmind) → Starlink → user nodes.
Users on aircraft, ships, vehicles, or anywhere else on the network can communicate with other Starlink endpoints without that traffic ever needing to leave the Starlink network.
And as Elon has pointed out, it's easy to see a future where the overwhelming majority of compute goes to space. Terrestrial data centers could eventually look like a rounding error.
That makes the ISLs much more than a nice feature.
They become the routing backbone of the Starlink network— and eventually the Starlink + Starmind (compute) network.
When traffic does need to leave the network for an off-network destination, it can be routed through the ground infrastructure. V3 also has up to 1.2 Tbps of RF backhaul to the ground.
So think about what Starship is really enabling.
It's not simply putting more Internet satellites into orbit.
It's building a massive, high-capacity network in space.
And eventually, much of the world's data and compute may never touch the ground at all.