[dzhiurgis]

Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away.

And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC).

FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.

[vel0city]

He just mentions and walks through idea of having some amount of compute up there and what the heat rejection calculations roughly look like. He doesn't actually explore the economics of doing such a thing or discuss if it's actually worth doing.

It's not that you can't put a server in space, but the costs to do it almost assuredly don't make any sense. Because, if you can do it in space you can do it easier on the ground and save yourself millions in launch cost and extra complexity. Your cooling challenges are way cheaper and simpler in an atmosphere.

There's nothing much being in space really gets you, other than it makes it harder for a government to take your computers away. Not impossible, just harder.

[scottyah]

Especially with everyone clamoring to have datacenters built in their backyards. There's absolutely no way there can be an advantage to figuring out compute outside Earth's magnetosphere, especially since none of the engineers as SpaceX would ever think of any long-term benefits of that.

[dzhiurgis]

I'm just responding to op saying it's impossible to get rid of heat. None of us touched economics.

[mcmcmc]

“YouTuber” is an extremely poor qualification for a supposedly trusted source

[boredatoms]

He's a physicist though, not just a mic jockey

[kibibu]

Let's hear what Big Money Salvia has to say about all this