Right, so if you can't go through the crust then going up would be another option. Over long enough of a distance, say NYC to London (or even farther), the over

Right, so if you can't go through the crust then going up would be another option. Over long enough of a distance, say NYC to London (or even farther), the overhead of going up first and then a "straight" line horizontally (it's not completely straight because it has relay between the satellites via LOS laser but each arc would be fairly long) and back down would be shorter than a line following the curvature. (Edited: This is wrong. I had conflated the lower latency with shorter distance as others have pointed out.) BTW, I want to give full credit to my source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs It also does a much better job of explaining it than I have but it is a convincing argument for how Starlink can be useful and why traders would be willing to pay a lot for it.