No, Starlink is in low earth orbit and they need to launch so many over time because they crash relatively quick. They're low enough to experience significant atmospheric drag.
It's his cheap launch capacity that actually let him do this (low orbit, low latency, big cloud). It's not a novel idea, it just would have been prohibitively expensive for old space.
The lingering stuff is the stuff that's much further out.
I’m not so sure that is true about latency. It’s my understanding that RF travels at near the speed of light, but I am open to learning more here. With that said it is definitely beneficial to reliable communication for the transceivers to be closer to the surface of the earth.
ETA: For those that decided in replies that I was wrong without the science to back it up, my understanding was exactly correct, but my knowledge of how fucking far away a typical satellite orbits was lacking.
My latency estimates below are purely based off of the RF transmission, neglecting real world bottlenecks of weather conditions, server latency, comms congestion, etc.
RF does travel at the speed of light, which means starlink’s altitude of roughly 550km would result in a round trip latency of 37ms.
Geosynchronous orbiting communications satellites (from my quick internet search) orbit at an estimated altitude of 35,786km, which would result in a round trip latency of 239ms. That’s a pretty big difference.
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u/francis2559 Mar 06 '25
No, Starlink is in low earth orbit and they need to launch so many over time because they crash relatively quick. They're low enough to experience significant atmospheric drag.
It's his cheap launch capacity that actually let him do this (low orbit, low latency, big cloud). It's not a novel idea, it just would have been prohibitively expensive for old space.
The lingering stuff is the stuff that's much further out.