

Elon Musk Touts Launch of ‘SpaceX Seattle’ - BinaryIdiot
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2025480750_spacexmuskxml.html

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marktangotango
The article says they'll be offering service from a fleet of satellites at
geosynchronous orbit. I thought there were nontrivial latency issues with
related to radio communication even at geosync orbit altitudes? Does that mean
these internet satellites host hardware for cacheing dns among other things?

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gus_massa
That sentence in the article is completely nonsense. There are 180 designed
spots in the geosynchronous orbit, and they are very expensive. (It's possible
to authorize to increase that number, but I doubt they will do it soon.
Perhaps a x2 if you have tons of money?)

From another article: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-17/elon-
musk-an...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-17/elon-musk-and-
spacex-plan-a-space-internet)

> _Hundreds of satellites would orbit about 750 miles above earth, much closer
> than traditional communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit at
> altitudes of up to 22,000 miles._

Also, as the orbit is 30x lower, the latency will be (hopefully) 30x smaller.

