They didn't make that up.. the satellites are literally no closer then 118ms (one-way). If you and the source/destination are directly under the satellite you may be able to get a packet + response in 480ms under most-ideal conditions. (that is four legs of transit between ground & space)

Elevation of orbit is 35,768,000 meters [1], and light moves at ~300,000,000 meters per second.

[1] https://www.hughes.com/resources/press-releases/echostar-xix...

In case someone doesn’t know that the sp is joking, geosynchronous satellites are 36k kilometers above us. The speed of light being what it is, you’re looking at 250ms just to bounce the radio wave from earth to the satellite and back. That’s just between earth and the satellites, it does not include the trip from the satellite base station to hackernews or google or whatever and back. Processing and other silicon latency gets you the rest of way to half a second or worse.