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Very interesting, thanks for the follow up.

Would this issue be any way relieved with things like AWS ground station?

If you can only see a ground station from a satellite for 20 minutes, could you just add more ground stations?

Or is that 20 minutes window constrained by something other than having a ground station within receiving range?

More ground stations will definitely make things better, but 24/7 connectivity to assets in LEO will take monumental, Starlink-scale level of effort.

Would it be possible to use Starlink for comms if a sat is flying in a lower position?

In theory, yes.

In practice, this will depend more on my negotiation skills when talking to Elon Musk and less on any technical challenge :)

No, it will not be possible, no matter what Elon says.

Starlink operates in portions of the Ku and Ka bands that are reserved for Earth-to-space comms, not for space-to-space comms.

My impression was that Starlink relies on inter-satellite links to route traffic. We can use the same links for our own extended network.

The current satellites do not have crosslinks, and in any case, in their FCC filings SpaceX talks about optical crosslinks, not RF.

You can get 24/7 connectivity to LEO right now (and 25 years ago too) using TDRSS.

The system costs a fraction of what Starlink will cost, as you only need 3 GEO satellites.