Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
cause of ping?
No, that works well with Starlink for example. But only because it’s in low earth orbit. In geostationary orbit You do in fact have a horrible ping.
Not being familiar with the details of this Elon brain fart I would hope they didn’t aim for geostationary… Because why?? Then again who knows with that idiot.
alr ty
If it’s close enough for respectable latency, it’s close enough to experience drag. Given the maddeningly high power/cooling and resultant large surface area, then that satellite will have a tendency to incur re-entry.
So either close enough for “ok” latency but will burn up relatively soon or high enough to keep an orbit longer but terrible latency.
Hmm. Assuming you have some small hydrazine or whatever booster you could maintain a low orbit for a while. But yes not endlessly. That bring said there is a middle ground between 400km and 34000km that might provide for a good orbit and acceptable ping. That all depends on the application of course.
ianonavy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There’s nowhere to dump heat! Modern data centers rely on heat exchange systems that move excess waste energy into the air or earth. The servers will be thermally throttled to a crawl.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
water cooling?
ianonavy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Sure you can have fancy liquid cooling to move heat away from the processors, but you still need something to move the heat into. You can radiate it into space, but not quickly enough to do useful work 24/7.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
oh i get it