Re:Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
by ktm5j on Friday June 05, 2026 @12:53PM
(#48415193)
> If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge delay in your packets.
How does that introduce a delay?
Re:Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
by martin8412 on Friday June 05, 2026 @01:10PM
(#48415416)
The distance is greater = higher latency.
Itβs why satellite internet was usually pretty terrible. A simple TCP handshake becomes a multi-second endeavor.
Re:Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
by joezydeco on Friday June 05, 2026 @01:34PM
(#48415714)
It's radio waves. Takes about 125 mSec for a request to reach the satellite (it's 36,000 km up there) and then the same amount of time to come back down.
If you can reach a terrestrial data center in 10 mSec over fiber, the flying data center is 12x slower. And now, like the other replay said, do a TCP handshake and see how long it takes.
Re:Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
by midnight_eclair on Friday June 05, 2026 @02:29PM
(#48416374)
because earth's geosync orbit is at 36k kilometers (function of gravitational force and rotation speed)
If you put them in low earth orbit, now you need complex ground stations and/or phased array antennae to track them and move data. And then your cat image generator is on the other side of the planet every 60 minutes unless you have fancy lasers relaying stuff between satellites.
If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge delay in your packets.
And I can't even do the first steps on computing what a typical data center needs in network bandwidth. A few terabits per second? A few petabits? More?