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vel0cityyesterday at 10:17 PM2 repliesview on HN

He just mentions and walks through idea of having some amount of compute up there and what the heat rejection calculations roughly look like. He doesn't actually explore the economics of doing such a thing or discuss if it's actually worth doing.

It's not that you can't put a server in space, but the costs to do it almost assuredly don't make any sense. Because, if you can do it in space you can do it easier on the ground and save yourself millions in launch cost and extra complexity. Your cooling challenges are way cheaper and simpler in an atmosphere.

There's nothing much being in space really gets you, other than it makes it harder for a government to take your computers away. Not impossible, just harder.


Replies

scottyahtoday at 12:12 AM

Especially with everyone clamoring to have datacenters built in their backyards. There's absolutely no way there can be an advantage to figuring out compute outside Earth's magnetosphere, especially since none of the engineers as SpaceX would ever think of any long-term benefits of that.

dzhiurgistoday at 12:15 AM

I'm just responding to op saying it's impossible to get rid of heat. None of us touched economics.