| ▲ | XorNot 3 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
The real issue is that the power situation in LEO is still actually terrible! Your solar is a little more performant, but you're plunged into hard shade every 45 minutes. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | adrian_b 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
There exist the so-called Sun-synchronous orbits, which exploit the precession effect caused by the fact that the Earth is not a sphere, to pass over the same point of the Earth at the same local hour. On a small subset of these Sun-synchronous orbits the Sun is always visible from the satellite (i.e. on the subset of orbits whose plane is approximately perpendicular on the radius that connects the Sun to the Earth). Without the precession effect, a satellite that sees the Sun for an entire day would lose this property after a few days, because of the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, which alters the direction in space of the radius from the Sun to the Earth. However, the number of slots that are available in Sun-synchronous orbits with permanent view of the Sun is limited, and many potential users want them. So those who desire to build datacenters would have to compete for such orbital slots. There are much less such slots than for geosynchronous orbits. Other countries would certainly be outraged if USA occupied all the available slots with datacenters. Improved control of the satellites for collision avoidance could allow smaller slots, but maneuvering heavy datacenters would require a lot of fuel, so they might require periodic refueling, greatly increasing the costs. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | athrowaway3z 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
I think calling solar a little more performant is underselling it. Once you have LEO getting to a better orbit costs relatively little. Getting from LEO to the moon is only like 30% more than getting from ground to LEO. | |||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | echoangle 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
They are mostly planning sun synchronous orbits afaik. That means the orbit is tilted so the earth’s deformed shape continually moves the orbital plane so the satellite is always in the sun (or generally the plane has the same angle to the sun). | |||||||||||||||||
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