Boston's research

[boston745]

"While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on three areas," the page adds. Those areas are Earth observation, communications and hosted payloads (the ability to put a wide variety of instruments on the Starshield satellite bus).

Shotwell said the laser offering was called “Plug and Plaser,” suggesting the equipment could be easily installed by customers on their spacecraft.

This suggests that hosted payloads are for things like lasers as i have long thought. Meaning Brilliant Pebbles could become reality once there are working lasers that can effectively hit a ballistic missile from space. For now it seems that Starshield encompasses more the Brilliant Eyes component of Dr Griffin's vision.

I wonder if they can "plug and plaser" while the satellite is already deployed?

Quote Sources:
https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-satellite-internet-military-starlink
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-says-plans-sell-satellite-laser-links-commercially-2024-03-19/

Brilliant Pebbles seems to be a different approach to that of Project Excalibur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur