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How hard is it to build orbital data centers, actually? (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Editor’s note: … In this article, we discuss the technical challenges of building an orbital data center constellation: launching all of it, dissipating heat in space, dealing with radiation, and addressing latency issues in orbit. Read part one here.

I find the napkin math interesting, especially putting into light that given expected longevity of such satellites, 5 to 7 years, they will have to do 10 to 42 launches per day. SpaceX will need $1.5 to $10 trillions to make it happen. All of that so the slop machine doesn’t have to run into obstacles like democracy ? So it can destroy communities and the environment freely? What are we doing?

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[–] [S] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The article goes somewhat in depth about it. Basically, heat dissipation in space is a solved physics problem. It is now in the engineering domain to try to make it more lightweight, efficient, scalable and ultimately cheap. Ars Technica does reference a great video by Scott Manley where he just does the math to figure out how large the heat sink panels need to be. His back of the envelope math leads him to believe that a starlink sized solar panel or something in that order of magnitude will be enough.

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