| ▲ | 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. | ||