But why would you?

Space has some huge downsides:

* Everything is being irradiated all the time. Things need to be radiation hardened or shielded.

* Putting even 1kg into space takes vast amounts of energy. A Falcon 9 burns 260 MJ of fuel per kg into LEO. I imagine the embodied energy in the disposable rocket and liquid oxygen make the total number 2-3x that at least.

* Cooling is a nightmare. The side of the satellite in the sun is very hot, while the side facing space is incredibly cold. No fans or heat sinks - all the heat has to be conducted from the electronics and radiated into space.

* Orbit keeping requires continuous effort. You need some sort of hypergolic rocket, which has the nasty effect of coating all your stuff in horrible corrosive chemicals

* You can't fix anything. Even a tiny failure means writing off the entire system.

* Everything has to be able to operate in a vacuum. No electrolytic capacitors for you!

So I guess the question is - why bother? The only benefit I can think of is very short "days" and "nights" - so you don't need as much solar or as big a battery to power the thing. But that benefit is surely outweighed by the fact you have to blast it all into space? Why not just overbuild the solar and batteries on earth?

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Findeton 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult, but perhaps not as difficult?

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nkrisc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds more difficult. Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it and you also have fine, abrasive dust to deal with. There’s no wind of course, but surely material will be stirred up and resettle based on all the landing activity.

And it’s still a vacuum with many of the same cooling issues. I suppose one upside is you could use the moon itself as a heat sink (maybe).

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thephyber 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Almost none of the parent’s bullet points are solved by building on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit.

The energy demands of getting to the 240k mile Moon are IMMENSE compared to 100 mile orbit.

Ultimately, when comparing the 3 general locations, Earth is still BY FAR the most hospitable and affordable location until some manufacturing innovations drop costs by orders of magnitude. But those manufacturing improvements have to be made in the same jurisdiction that SpaceXAI is trying to avoid building data centers in.

This whole things screams a solution in search of a problem. We have to solve the traditional data center issues (power supply, temperature, hazard resilience, etc) wherever the data centers are, whether on the ground or in space. None of these are solved for the theoretical space data centers, but they are all already solved for terrestrial data centers.

	▲	ethbr1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In situ iron, titanium, aluminum?

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sdenton4 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The 2.5s round trip communication latency isn't going to be great for chat. (Alongside all the other reasons.)

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ahoka an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It has all these problems, plus more.

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kakacik an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, carrying stuff 380k km and still deploying in vacuum (and super dusty ground) doesn't solve anything but adds cost and overhead. One day maybe, but not these next decades nor probably this century.

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wombatpm an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It would make more sense to develop power beaming technology. Use the knowledge from Starlink constellations to beam solar power via microwaves onto the rooftops of data centers

	▲	habinero an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Why? We have solar panels and fossil fuels at home.