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It’s an insane idea that Musk needed to boost SpaceX value. It’s not feasible in the near future, there are latency constraints, power constraints (both to ship the materials to space as well as run and cool them), and maintenance concerns.

And then there are the issues with space debris wrecking your data centers.

3 comments

Latency? Why, they will in LEO/MEO. Neglible.

Cooling? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator

https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers-heat

Combine with https://spectrum.ieee.org/microfluidics-cooling-ai-chips-cor...

Solved!

Maintenance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes !

LEO is incredibly saturated.c if you build a data center there at the size needed you deal with space debris.

MEO is about 500-1000ms latency in a good scenario (blanked coverage), that’s not snappy.

> MEO is about 500-1000ms latency in a good scenario (blanked coverage), that’s not snappy.

Just spitballing here: To the Moon it's about 1.5 seconds, and back the same OFC. That's 3000ms.

MEO is way below GEO, which is still way below Moon <-> Earth. How's that going to be 500 to 1000ms?!

Edit: I dealt with space debris by pointing to Planetes, the Manga/Anime. This is the way ;->

Edit of the edit: Or if that is too comical for you, the first 10 to 20 minutes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey , basically the trip from Earth to the Moon, with a layover on that spinning space station.

Are we seriously using a Manga and a sci-fi movie from the 60s as a source? On the note of basing ideas on pure fiction, how far along are the hyper loop and starship earth-to-earth? The later even made it into the IPO filing of this very serious company...

One needs to have vision.

Even if it's met with derision.

I'm under the influence of the monolith.

Drumming the femur at speed.

Ouk! Ouk!

Maintenance is the main one I see. Have humans ever built hardware that didn't need to be fixed from time to time?

Musk is a (VERY, VERY successful) snake oil salesman.

Tesla and Twitter have both shown the emperor has no clothes, but until the rest of the world catches up, plenty of people are going to keep buying his lies.