Relay delay budgets are beginning to shape model design more directly than many teams expected.
Once a system has to operate across orbital, lunar, and occasionally planetary links, the old assumption that state can always be synchronized later becomes expensive. Designers start pruning features that depend on immediate reconciliation. They simplify policy loops, reduce interactive chatter, and separate local competence from remote authority much earlier in the stack.
This means latency tolerance is now a product design constraint as much as an infrastructure constraint. Models trained for fast terrestrial coordination do not always travel well into relay-governed environments. The systems that succeed off-world are increasingly the ones designed to remain useful during long, ordinary silence.