Author also forgot batteries for the solar shade transition period and then additional solar panels to charge these batteries during the solar "day" period. then insulation for batteries. Then power converters and pumps for radiators and additional radiators to cool the cooling infrastructure.

Overall not a great model. But on the other hand, even an amateur can use this model and imagine that additional parts and costs are missing, so if it's showing a bad outlook even in the favorable/cheating conditions for space DCs, then they are even dumber idea if all costs would be factored in fully. Unfortunately many serious journalists can't even do that mental assumption. :(

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torginus 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd say int makes much more sense to just shut off in the sunshade. The advantage of orbital solar, comes not so much from the lack of atmosphere, but the fact that depending on your orbit, you can be in sunlight for 60-100% of the time.

	▲	Yizahi 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That proposal I've seen a few times too, basically put up a constellation up there, linked with laser comms and then transfer data to the illuminated sats in a loop. That sounds possible, but I have doubts. First of all if we take 400 km orbit, the "online" time would be something like 50 minutes. We need to boot up the system fully, run comm apps, locate a peer satellite and download data from it (which needs to be prepared in a portable form), write it locally and start calculations, then by the end of the 50 min repeat. All these operations are slow, especially boot time of the servers (which could be optimized of course). It would be great if some expert could tell us if it is feasible or not.