This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Getting rid of the heat is going to be an issue for that... along with the massive pollution from the many launches required to get this in orbit.
The heat will just dissipate in the air, and they can launch it at night when it's colder. Science!
/s in case, there are a few mouth breathers out today
They could build them so that they stay in perpetual dawn or dusk. One edge with the solar panels in the su, the other edge with the cooling fins in the night’s cool breeze.
Geostationary orbit is far higher than low earth orbit and I would assume following earths twilight zone would not be much better. I do not see why you would either, with reaction wheels you could orient the satellites towards the sun regardless of the relative position of the earth, with the caveat that earth may block the sun which is hard to avoid entirely anyways.
Also, there is not that much cool breeze in space, famously known for not having vast amounts of air (still have IR-radiation to help though).
Edit: Probably ate the onion, didn't I?
Oh! Oh! Attach it to a meteorite! Almost infinite heatsink in space!
Free advice: The economics don't work out.
We just need to invent space construction, cheap fusion power, autonomous robotics, improve AI and set up astroid mining first, then it'll be a snap.
Me too. I'll even make them full AI.
Please send me $2 billion by Tuesday. My salary as yetAnotherUser CEO & CTO is a modest 20 million/year. Results are expected to appear by 2030.
Hey Gemini, make me a business plan, a marketing site and some presentations with fancy graphs.
Hey hey, I'll make them on Mars! Send the cash to me instead!
I'll do it right here on earth for only 75% of the cost. Think of how much you'll save versus mars.
But where's the vision? Is it even AI managed?
Stare into my asshole to find out.
Data centers in the ocean didn't work out. This doesn't seem smarter
The Chinese have done it apparently.
I didn't realize there was a paywall, I use the bypass paywalls clean extension.
Wasn't the Mocrosoft test run very successful?
What should that babble even mean?
In a data center, you have 4 main problems:
Being in orbit helps with exactly none of that. For example, the heat: In orbit, there is no air or water which would work as a cooling medium, but just a vacuum which cools almost nothing. It is like a vacuum flask. Get your smart phone when running hot in such a vacuum flask and tell me how it worked....
So what is the purpose of all that bullshit??
Yeah I don't know why anyone entertains the idea.
Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you'd have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can't keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that's more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.
Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.
The energy I don't know about really, but at least it doesn't sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You'd have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don't see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.
Isn’t it incredibly difficult to shed heat in space since the only real way to move heat is radiation?
In the (fiction) novel Artemis by Andy Weir, which takes place in a city on the moon, they have a heat management system that seemed pretty cool. They convert heat to light, and radiate the light out into space. Not sure how feasible/scalable that is, but I thought the concept was cool.
If they can turn it into light why not turn it into energy to be used?
If I had to guess, maybe they had a surplus of energy and needed some way to dissipate excess energy. I read the book years ago though, so I don't really remember.
Imagine getting sent up because a pos rj45 cable got hit by a micrometeorite
Because they swore the server was powered on...
Back when the capacitor plague hit I had to manage locating & replacing over 500 motherboards in the datacenter of my then-employer. Imagine if a hardware glitch like that happened in one of these.
I had some of these bad capacitors blow in my video card, back in the day. I was extremely proud of myself for managing to order some replacement capacitors and soldering them in myself.
The most impressive part might be that I ordered the right items. I knew nothing about electronics repair at the time, I just wanted to be able to play World of Warcraft again.
In before someone wants to reboot a server and the hypervisor is unresponsive.
Welp, that's a fuckin stupid idea. Next!
Yeah me too! Give me money.
The only thing better than grifting is grifting on an astronomical scale.
Come on now, people can't actually be humoring this fever dream, can they? It's just so fucking stupid...
News headline in the future: "Orbital Data Center Crashes Into Los Angeles in a Mass Casualty Event"
Why not on mars? It's even farther away and too cold anyway.
Isn’t this how Skynet started?
No, it started when a scriptwriter came up with an idea for a movie that would sell a lot of tickets.
Do you want furries in space??
Bcs that is how you get furries in space.
Even if this was an economically sound proposal, the next X45 magnitude solar flare might be a nasty surprise for reliability metrics...
Edit: at some point, this would also likely contribute to Kessler Syndrome, but at least we'd have chat bots.
