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A comment on Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?. Parent comment

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?

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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.

It’s why satellite internet was usually pretty terrible. A simple TCP handshake becomes a multi-second endeavor.

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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.

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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)
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