Getting free power from large solar panels does not make up for it
For the power required “large” is actually a gargantuan understatement. It would need to be larger than what would be easily seen from the planet surface.
Elon is a complete moron.
Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I said so long ago. Flying masses of stuff into orbit, keeping it alive in a relative high radiation environment, cooling issues (there is no local river you can conveniently turn into steam), the list is long. Getting free power from large solar panels does not make up for it.
db2@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Thorry@feddit.org 5 days ago
Plus when you build a datacenter on Earth you can use it for decades. You can swap out small parts (like the servers and networking hardware), which keeps it useful. Cooling and power setups are often good for a very long time and those can also be upgraded if needed. The building itself and all of the supporting infrastructure is good for at least 50 years. And a lot of the building is dedicated to easy access for humans to do stuff like maintenance. This is a design requirement for any datacenter.
When shooting shit into space, that’s it, you can’t access it for upgrades or maintenance. And we’ve seen these past years cutting edge AI hardware is good for maybe 3 years at best. After that it’s basically worthless, maybe useful for some niche uses, but mostly useless and definitely not profitable. Not that this matters much, as to keep latency down the orbits would be so low they deorbit within 3-5 years anyways, like with the current Starlink constellation.
But this is of course very useful for a cheap launch provider, as it keeps them yeeting shit into space non-stop. And what a surprise, Elon Musk is one of the people pushing this concept hard. No alternate motives there for sure.