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JumpCrisscross a day ago

At this scale could you do shielding?

mjhay a day ago | parent | next [-]

Orbital data centers are impractical for a lot of reasons (to put it mildly) but radiation shielding isn’t one of them. Proportionally less shielding is needed as one scales up, due to lower surface/volume ratios.

inejge 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are ways in which shielding in space can do harm: really energetic particles get trapped and produce a shower of daughter particles and rays over a greater area. So you'd need even more shielding. Or you accept that such things will happen and use rad-hard parts, redundancy etc. When you have the whole atmosphere above, it's much less of a concern.

Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.

ted_dunning a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure. At the cost of lofting that shielding from the ground and taking the economics from 500x to 2000x crazy.