We may earn a commission from links on this page. Image: SpaceX Elon Musk 'Has Been In Regular Contact With' Vladimir Putin For Years: Report Mars does not move in the same orbit around the sun, or at the same speed as Earth. At its closest, Mars is a mere 34 million miles away, about half the distance from the Earth to the Sun. When Mars is opposite Earth in its orbit, with the Sun between them, that distance increases to over 250 million miles. If you could communicate at the speed of light, as many laser-based satellite transmissions can, the speed at which you can load anything is still dependent on the speed of light. That 250 million miles takes 22 minutes and 22 seconds for light (or information) to traverse. Petabit/second speeds between Mars and Earth are impossible until we develop faster-than-light travel, which is, you know, not possible based on our current understanding of physics. Advertisement Elon Musk, again on Twitter, suggested that Starlink could create a “data bridge” to hop data from one satellite to another along a relay system. One follower even suggested a “web of satellites around the sun” to keep people in space and on other planets connected to the Earth internet. “A long chain of modified future generation Starlink satellites between 1 and 1.5 AU would do it,” claims Musk. If you don’t know, an AU (Astronomical Unit) is 93 million miles, or the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. Advertisement Here’s the problem. Satellite hopping does not reduce the speed at which you can communicate with a distant planet. Space is still space, lightspeed is still lightspeed, and the distance doesn’t get shorter because you put a few satellites between here and there. It’s possible that jumping from satellite to satellite could increase the size of the data transfer, but it will not reduce latency time between Mars and Earth in any way. In fact, hopping from satellite to satellite will actually increase processing time and make the whole thing slower. Is Elon Musk going to be the one to crack faster-than-light travel and quantum entanglement? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I have my doubts. SpaceX is scheduled to deploy five unmanned rockets to Mars in 2026, and Elon says people will be going to Mars by 2028 . Again, I have my doubts. Show all 78 comments