He probably thinks that Alaska is on the far left and Russian is on the far right because he doesn’t understand globes.

There is still hope we will get the last three one day. Maybe we just have to wait a couple decades to let the time lines match up better.

The way I interpreted the article, you aren’t amplifying the signal but transferring it. Same as store and forward. I think that implies that degradation is not a problem as long as the new photon profile was a match. The real problem is matching the profile which they only managed at 10 meters.