What about the rough weather and difficulty of maintenance, especially in rough weather?

Maintenance for a mountaintop data center only requires a team of skilled mountaineers. In space you'd need astronauts. It's at least an order of magnitude cheaper, perhaps two or three.

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fc417fc802 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Nobody is doing maintenance on a small cluster in a satellite. It's disposable with a timespan of less than a decade to recoup all costs. Note that the usual argument to retire hardware is the electrical costs but when you've got lifetime solar you can run it indefinitely.

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zarzavat an hour ago | parent [-]

Nobody is doing maintenance on an orbital data center because it's too expensive and dangerous, not because it wouldn't be useful. Maintenance in space would in fact be way more useful than on land because the redundancy required by a lack of maintenance necessitates extra mass.

If you could pay a few space sherpas $100k to head up into LEO and service the thing, it would definitely be worth it.

	▲	fc417fc802 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I never said it wouldn't be useful, only that it isn't likely to happen. Amortized costs would reflect that. So it seems we agree? > If you could pay a few space sherpas $100k to head up into LEO and service the thing, it would definitely be worth it. Would it? Whatever you pay to launch the repair tech plus the replacement parts could instead be spent launching new hardware. Obviously the repair payload is a fraction of the total weight of new hardware but is it a small enough fraction to make repairing things worthwhile? I think it's likely that disposable is cheaper in this scenario.