A schematic of the optical hops. Neighbour lasers are the measured Starlink mesh. The Moon and Mars paths are light-time, plus a rate only where a mission has published one. Nothing here is a link budget, and the four scenes do not share a scale.
Four schematics. The mesh is a low Earth orbit ring. The Moon view places Earth and the Moon side by side and draws an elliptical lunar frozen orbit, of the family ESA’s Moonlight programme uses for its south-pole communications satellite, plus a small halo just past the Moon for an Earth–Moon L2 relay. The Mars view puts Earth and Mars on circular heliocentric orbits and a relay on a tight loop around Mars. The conjunction view freezes Mars on the far side of the Sun and puts one relay 60° ahead of Mars on its orbit, the Sun–Mars L4 region. Earth is then 120° (2π/3) from L4 as seen from the Sun, so Earth to L4 is about 2.20 AU and L4 to Mars is 1.524 AU (an equilateral triangle with the Sun), 3.73 AU in all, about 31.0 minutes of light. The direct Earth–Mars line passes through the solar exclusion zone, drawn as a glare around the Sun, and the beam breaks there. Orbits move faster than real time, at an illustrative rate (the speed buttons change only the orbits). Planet positions are circular and not tied to a date.
How time is shown. Packets on the Moon scene fly in real time: a pulse on the 384,400 km line takes 1.28 s of your clock, measured with the browser’s frame clock so it holds at 60, 120 or any refresh rate. A single mesh hop is 18 ms, too short to see, so the mesh heartbeat is drawn 50× slower and says so. Mars light times are minutes, so the Mars and conjunction scenes are drawn 60× faster than light (1 s on screen = 1 min of light) and say so. The 5,400 km handoff on the Moon scene is 18 ms at real time, so it is drawn as a steady lit beam rather than a pulse. The ruler under the readout fills over the selected path’s delay on the same stated scale. Speed buttons never change the light scale.
Pulse trains. The number of packets in flight on a path is 1 + 2·log10(rate ÷ 1 Mb/s), from the published rate only. A published range draws two faint trains, one for each end. A path with no published rate gets a single packet, and the readout says “No published rate”. A soft ring marks each arrival. Nothing here is a modelled throughput.
Mars rate marker. On the Mars scene a marker places the drawn Earth–Mars distance on the axis between the two published Deep Space Optical Communications endpoints, 0.36 AU at 267 Mb/s and 2.68 AU at 8.3 Mb/s. Only those two measured points are labelled. No rate is read off between them.
Light time is path length divided by 299,792.458 km/s. The lunar mean distance used for the straight Earth–Moon hop is 384,400 km. One astronomical unit is 149,597,870.7 km. Mars’s orbit is drawn at 1.524 AU. The conjunction path via L4 is the sum of the two straight legs, Earth to the L4 point and that point to Mars, computed from the drawn heliocentric positions. The far-side path is the same kind of sum: 64,500 km from the far side to a halo 64,500 km beyond the Moon, then 448,900 km from that halo back to Earth.
A rate is printed only when the source states one. The mesh rate is 100 Gbps, from Travis Brashears, SPIE, 2024, including the longest reported link of 5,400 km. The Mars cruise rate is the Deep Space Optical Communications span, 8.3 to 267 Mb/s, measured from 0.36 to 2.68 AU with a 22 cm flight terminal. It is not interpolated to the angle on screen. The conjunction rate, 28 to 44 Mb/s return, is a Jet Propulsion Laboratory study of a proposed 50 cm optical terminal in a long-period Sun–Mars L4 or L5 orbit, not a flight. No Starlink rate is published at lunar or Martian range, so those hops show light time and say so. No link budget was calculated.