[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).