It can be done in a dawn-dusk, sun synchronous orbit, less than 1000 km up.

jltsiren 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Low Earth orbit is 90 to 120 minutes, depending on altitude. Even if the satellite is currently close to you, it will soon be on the other side of the world.

Assuming that orbital data centers make sense, it will be an interesting challenge to figure out how to best mitigate that. Short tasks that require little data will be easy, but everything else needs rethinking. Can you tolerate variable latency? Should you duplicate the data across many satellites? Or should the data constantly migrate from satellite to satellite?

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echoangle 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s at least 20 ms of round trip time, realistically much more. Especially since it’s not geostationary so the distance to the closest ground station will in most cases be much longer than straight down. I would be surprised if the average ping is below 100 ms.

Probably still fine for most applications though.

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asciimike 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Latency isn't really the issue here (lots of inference serving happening across oceans, which is probably 100-150ms RT), but bandwidth ends up becoming an issue for large scale transfers (mostly model weights, not the actual inference tokens/queries).

	▲	echoangle 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		With laser terminals you’ll get a few gigabits per second. That’s possible both between sats and to the ground station. Probably not cheap though.