> The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side.
This does sound like the sort of thing Musk would try, especially post-Starship, if the rest of the setup was physically possible.
One of the other problems is that the ultimate last hop for data would still have to be an rf link satellite to earth station through atmosphere, where lasers don't work well at all (there's a rain and junk in the air reason the telecom industry has given up on free space optics lasers for 1-2km, 1 to 20Gbps data links roof to roof and uses millimeter wave fdd radios instead)
This does sound like the sort of thing Musk would try, especially post-Starship, if the rest of the setup was physically possible.