More than 150ms. There are currently satellite internet services that you can get that use geosynchronous orbits outside of that 150ms zone.

The idea is sound, but the zone needs to be a bit bigger in reality. I think the moon is close enough to earth to be in the same zone (assuming antennas on "both sides", and special routing protocols to deal with day/night cycles)

But if each node communicated within its 150ms sphere, and you place nodes 10ms (3,000 km?), could this serve as a mesh network?

I think you have an interesting idea, but might not be thinking of the physics involved.

> The minimum distance from the Earth to Mars is about 54.6 million kilometers. The farthest apart they can be is about 401 million km. The average distance is about 225 million km.

Loosely, the speed of light is ~300,000km/s. So 182s, 1333s, and 750s as an absolute minimum length of time from end to end.

So, there are varying orbits, that's one problem. The other problem is getting items into solar orbits.

I didn't think of this, but now you have an even bigger problem of trying to keep those items in some sort of array that is in a direct line between Earth<->Mars.

If we hand-wave away that problem, the next problem is that each hop is adding latency, so, the direct answer is: no, it makes things slower, and it's a significantly harder problem than just communicating across that distance.

Array? Nah, just a very dense distribution :)

But I appreciate the thought you put into this. Thank you!