For Mars, at least, that would be tens of minutes round trip because of the speed of light. It works for some things, but for pathfinding it isn’t a great fit.

For Mars, at least, that would be tens of minutes round trip because of the speed of light. It works for some things, but for pathfinding it isn’t a great fit. The other issue is bandwidth between the craft and Earth, which is quite limited. Maybe there would be benefits to a “orbiting datacenter” around Mars carrying a bunch of rad-hardened compute? I assume NASA has considered this and decided it would be a bad idea.