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Comment on A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth

They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they’re certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn’t mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren’t environmental disasters anymore.

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how_we_burned@lemmy.zip ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.

It’s called Starlink. It’s already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware.

Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it’s already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.

The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)

youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI

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- Wigners_friend@piefed.social ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Starlink satellites carry antennae. That’s all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
  
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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It’s either data centres in space or giant mirrors to reflect sunlight.

Presumably his engineers have explained this to him but he didn’t listen

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- fishy@lemmy.today ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  To cool the iss they’re exchanging heat into water pumping to ammonia exchangers then radiated through infrared. The radiators for a space data center would need to be prohibitively massive as I understand it.
  
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  - sunnie@slrpnk.net ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    For real. Thermal regulation of spacecraft is a problem that current, non-data center, satellites are struggling with and increasing the load by orders of magnitude isn’t going to make things easier. You can easily calculate the area needed for radiative heat transfer for a perfect radiator and you quickly end up with some gargantuan panels. Perfect radiators are also perfect absorbers, so the whole system goes to shit if the panel isn’t facing deep space.
    
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