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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I've sure they've considered that in the engineering. For example, the solar panels would shade it. The space station has a cooling system in it. Musk's Starlink satellites don't seem to be overheating.

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The problem is not shading them from the Sun. And the starlink satellites run at about 1 kW

good read: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

that's an amazing read, lots of concrete and convincing challenges; but otoh, technology is evolving at such a fast pace, maybe it is possible for breakthroughs that we couldn't imagine now to become reality sooner than we would have anticipated?

It is a good read. Thank you.

There's another way to look at it, though. If the data center satellites can be built and launched cheap enough, you can still come out ahead on performance/cost. I.e. if the space data center has 1/10 the performance of a ground one, and they can be built and launched for less than 10% of the cost, then you've got a business. And there are costs that won't be incurred - no electric bill, no cost for land, no charge for maintenance.

I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss Musk.

* no electric bill: if you use solar panels to provide your own power, you also have no electric bill on Earth.

* no cost for land: land in sunny places where crops don't grow (for instance) is good for solar power and very cheap compared to building out a datacenter

* no charge for maintenance: sorry, I really don't get this one. Why don't the computers in space need any maintenance?

> Why don't the computers in space need any maintenance?

Because it would be too expensive to maintain them. Replacing them would be cheaper (I presume).

Ah! That makes sense. But surely there is a point at which this economics becomes true for terrestrial datacenters too (in fact I saw some glimpses of that 10+ years ago, demonstrations of shipping-container-sized self-contained units that you just plug in power, and replace the whole container when it gets degraded). If they're not doing that today for terrestrial datacenters, then it probably doesn't make economic sense yet to do it in space either.

Why do your magic space computers not require maintenance?

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