Previous discussions on HN: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390781

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667458

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188

I will not re-read them, but from what I recall from those threads is numbers don't make sense. Something like:

- radiators the multiple square kilometers in size, in space;

- lifting necessary payloads to space is multiples of magnitudes more than we have technology/capacity as the whole world now;

- maintanence nightmare. yeah you can have redundancy, but no feasable way to maintain;

- compare how much effort/energy/maintenance is required to have ISS or Tiangong space stations - these space datacenters sound ridiculous;

NB: I would be happy to be proven wrong. There are many things that are possible if we would invest effort (and money) into it, akin to JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon" talk. Sounded incredible, but it was done from nearly zero to Moon landing in ~7 years. Though as much as I udnerstand - napkin math for such scale of space data centers seem to need efforts that are orders or magnitude more than Apollo mission, i.e. launching Saturn V for years multiple times per day. Even with booster reuse technology this seems literally incredible (not to mention fuel/material costs).

A giant space datacenter with square kilometers of solar panels doesn't make sense. A cluster of Starlink-sized satellites, which orbit near each other(1) and which are connected using laser-links might make sense.

(1) There are orbital arrangements that allow satellites to stay close together with minimal orbital corrections. Scott Manley mentioned this in one of his videos.