[oceanplexian]

Why does it need to be robots?

On Earth we have skeleton crews maintain large datacenters. If the cost of mass to orbit is 100x cheaper, it’s not that absurd to have an on-call rotation of humans to maintain the space datacenter and install parts shipped on space FedEx or whatever we have in the future.

[verzali]

If you want to have people you need to add in a whole lot of life support and additional safety to keep people alive. Robots are easier, since they don't die so easily. If you can get them to work at all, that is.

[intended]

Life support can be on the shuttle/transport. Or it can be its own hab… space office ? Space workshop ?

[kranke155]

What about food, water and air filtration needs?

[Mtinie]

Presumably those needs are handled on the habitat where the orbital maintenance team lives when they aren’t visiting satellite data centers.

Treat each maintenance trip like an EVA (extra vehicular activity) and bring your life support with you.

[tokai]

Thats life support.

[monster_truck]

That isn't going to last for much longer with the way power density projections are looking.

Consider that we've been at the point where layers of monitoring & lockout systems are required to ensure no humans get caught in hot spots, which can surpass 100C, for quite some time now.

[Robotbeat]

You mean like every single kitchen?

[dweinus]

You might be thinking of 100F, a toasty summer day. 100C on the other hand (about 212F) is fatal even in zero humidity.

[globalise83]

Well, after a while. A decently hot Finnish sauna...

[monster_truck]

No, I mean like you crumple to the ground and cook to death if there isn't someone close enough to grab you within a few minutes. 212F ambient air. Like the inside of a meat smoker, but big enough for humans.

DC's aren't quite there yet, but the hot spots that do occur are enough to cause arc flashes which claim hundreds of lives a year.

[spauldo]

This sort of work is ideal for robots. We don't do it much on Earth because you can pay a tech $20/hr to swap hardware modules, not because it's hard for robots to do.

[Robotbeat]

Bingo.

It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to air travel (both air freight and passenger travel).

(Especially irritating is the continued assertion that thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a radiator surface much smaller than the solar array.)

[verzali]

It is really hard, and it is something you need to take into careful consideration when designing a satellite.

It is really fucking hard when you have 40MW of heat being generated that you somehow have to get rid of.

[HPsquared]

It's all relative. Is it harder than getting 40MW of (stable!) power? Harder than packaging and launching the thing? Sure it's a bit of a problem, perhaps harder than other satellites if the temperature needs to be lower (assuming commodity server hardware) so the radiator system might need to be large. But large isn't the same as difficult.

[MPSimmons]

Neither getting 40MW of power nor removing 40MW of heat are easy.

The ISS makes almost 250KW in full light, so you would need approximately 160 times the solar footprint of the ISS for that datacenter.

The ISS dissipates that heat using pumps to move ammonia in pipes out to a radiator that is a bit over 42m^2. Assuming the same level of efficiency, that's over 6km^2 of heat dissipation that needs empty space to dissipate to.

That's a lot.

[1718627440]

Wait, so we need 40MW of electricity and have 40MW of thermal energy. Can't we reuse some of that?

[weq]

Musk is already in the testing phase for this. His starship rockets should be reusable as soon as 2018!

[Nevermark]

And in the meantime, he has responsibly redistributed and recycled their mass. Avoiding any concern that Earth's mass could be negatively impacted.

[mavhc]

How will he overtake all the other reusable rockets at this rate?

[Robotbeat]

Well sure. If you think fully reusable rockets won’t ever happen, then the datacenter in space thing isn’t viable. But THAT’S where the problem is, not innumerate bullcrap about size of radiators.

(And of course, the mostly reusable Falcon 9 is launching far more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, launching about 150 times per year. No one yet has managed to field a similarly highly reusable orbital rocket booster since Falcon 9 was first recovered about 10 years ago in 2015).

[wmf]

Yeah, just attach a Haven module to the data center.