Product design question

As a product manager, how would you design a communication solution for use by astronauts on a mission to Mars landing?

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What this question tests

Tests product design under extreme constraints, latency, reliability, and life-safety stakes, far outside typical consumer product norms.

Define the core constraint: Earth-Mars communication has a delay of 4 to 24 minutes one-way depending on orbital position, ruling out real-time conversation.
Design around asynchronous communication: structured message queues (text, voice, video) with clear delivery confirmation and priority tagging for urgent messages.
Prioritize reliability over richness: a low-bandwidth, highly compressed text/telemetry channel as the guaranteed baseline, with video as a lower-priority, best-effort layer.
Add redundancy: multiple relay paths (e.g. orbiting relay satellites) so a single link failure doesn't cut off communication entirely.
Define success: message delivery reliability (percent successfully delivered) and time-to-acknowledgment for priority messages, not bandwidth or richness.

Correctly identifies the fundamental physics constraint (light-speed delay) that makes this an asynchronous, not real-time, design problem.
Prioritizes reliability and redundancy over feature richness, appropriate for a life-safety-critical communication system.
Uses a priority-tagging system for messages, recognizing not all communication (chit-chat versus emergency) has equal urgency.
Picks reliability and acknowledgment-time metrics over typical consumer metrics like engagement, matching the actual use case.

Designing a real-time chat-like experience without accounting for the multi-minute communication delay.
Ignoring redundancy and reliability, which matter far more here than in a typical consumer product.

How would you handle a scenario where the primary relay satellite fails mid-mission?
How would you prioritize which messages get bandwidth when the link is degraded?