From the article:

Conclusions

Orbital data centers look more viable than we expected going in and the case rests primarily on launch cost. The engineering challenges seem significant but none appear intractable. Commercial off-the-shelf solar, passive radiators, and standard error-correcting codes seem sufficient for a baseline architecture. We expect limited demos and shipments of compute to orbit in the coming years but our best estimate is that orbital data centers are unlikely to represent a meaningful share of compute before 2030. They might scale quickly thereafter however, and are more likely to be bottlenecked by chip production rates rather than by launch cadence. A generally important dynamic is that terrestrial data centers likely face headwinds that worsen as compute scales up while orbital data centers face constraints that relax with scale.

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rightnutwingjob 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is complete bullshit.

Anyone who thinks we’ll have data centres in space before we have a civilisation changing step up in surface to orbit space drives and materials science is an idiot.

How the hell does anyone think a rocket is ever going to compete with a prime mover towing two trailers, or an ocean going vessel.

We’re not exactly short of land.

And no, space is not cold.

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carabiner 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All of this sounds a lot like how ULA, ESA thought reusable rockets were a pipe dream. These are engineering challenges, not physical laws that need to be broken.

	▲	rf15 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		yeah, but: Data centers, fundamentally, are a solved problem. The rest is just cost balancing - and space looks like complete rubbish when it comes to all kinds of costs, including and especially when it comes to maintenance.
	▲	EA-3167 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This sounds like someone who concludes that FTL is possible because “once people thought that flight was impossible!” But we have and had ample evidence of flight in nature, we just didn’t understand how it worked. A similar search across the observable universe reveals no sign of FTL behavior. Sometimes when you understand the science a comparison to some time when people didn’t isn’t as moving or compelling as you seem to imagine.

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ordu 6 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> space is not cold.

Yes, it is. There is such a phenomenon as infrared radiation. You feel it on your skin right now. It is hard normally to separate them from other ways you exchange heat with your environment, but in some conditions it is easy. Like when there is a hot object you can feel it to be hot even if you don't touch it or the air heated by the object. Likewise you can feel that a cold object is cold thing without touching it or cold air around it.

These experiments would be hard to run in space, because it is highly polluted by vacuum and it is not a good idea to expose human limbs to vacuum. But artificial sensors could be used for that.

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marcosdumay 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And all those conclusions take is cost to space to reduce 15 times; new cooling tech that isn't used anywhere to work at scale but only in space (if ground datacenters can use it too, their cost decrease); that ops cost line to not do anything useful so it can be just dropped; those 10mm radiation shields to not weight anything, because they didn't enter the costs; and that ground datacenters to use more expensive tech than they use today (just not improving is not enough).

We will have space datacenters some day. But I'm not holding my breath.

	▲	rightnutwingjob 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We can just repurpose Deep Space 9, the Cardassians aren’t using it and nobody really cares about Bajor.