alt Hacker NewsAnyone who has googled just once to ask if datacenters in space make any sense, has found out they don't because they can't get rid of heat.
That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
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SpaceX have presented on this and it's fairly straightforward and they already do it with starlink satellites, just at a larger scale. Sound like you are the uniformed one (or an EDS victim)
The area you need in radiators is only half the area you need in solar panels. So it's definitely not a deal breaker.
Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
what do you mean they can’t get rid of heat? radiators exist
Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away.
And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC).
FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.
The existence of starlink proves that this is false. Look at most current pitches, they don’t talk about GW-class monsters anymore. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a 20-30kW satellite bus the size of starlink (or I guess up to 100kW? once starship is available - it’s all about payload fairing diameter) from hosting ~1 rack of compute and antennas. The economics may or may not make sense, we’ll have to see.
There’s very little research work needed to make this happen; it’s all about engineering some satellite buses and having them fly in close formation to get a “data center”. And this group of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit would relay to a comms constellation e.g. starlink itself) and operate as a global scale data center. The heat management and orbital mechanics are all straight forward really.