The upside is it avoids the power, cooling, connectivity, location, environmental, staffing and physical security complexities of terrestrial data centers.
But this is the harder choice. It’s like saying ”look undersea cables have problems so instead of putting them under the sea, why don’t we put cables above the sea instead and have helium balloons holding up the cable from Europe to North America. We solve the underwater problems…
It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed.
> cooling
Cooling off in a vacuum is hard. You’ll need radiators to emit the heat, you’ll need a lot of radiators for data center level heat. This is more mass you need to get into orbit
> location
The location is in space, it’s significantly more expensive to get mass into space than it is to move it someone else on the planet
> environmental
The day to day operations of a space based data center seem like they would be a benefit, but I haven’t seen the math on the environmental cost of the rocket launches vs the lifetime of a terrestrial data center
> staffing
Why would the location in space vs terrestrial change the staffing at all? Any technological change that could/would reduce staffing could be applied to terrestrial data centers as well
> physical security
You’re more secure from people, but now you’ve introduced the physical security risk of space debris where something with the mass of pocket lint could cause serious damage if it impacts your system.
The whole space data center idea is just Musk trying to gin up more demand for his SpaceX IPO with no real benefit behind the idea. He’s been lying like this for years for money like with “Full Self Driving”(lol, don’t take your hands off the wheel because we’ll disengage right before a crash and it’s your problem) or his “robots”(actually remote controlled by humans). I don’t know why anyone listens to him anymore if he doesn’t show up with concrete results first.
> It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed.
SpaceX will be putting them in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning always sunlight.
I wonder if "battelites" might be profitable. Like an pay-per-usage energy grid in space with battery backup that can beam power around to other satellites that might not have easy access to power, or have their power grids temporarily obstructed.
Yes, but it’s a guaranteed event, so it needs to be accounted for if you’re serious about engineering.
The accounting could just be, we accept that downtime, it’s all calculated in advance and we’ll prepare the system for it, but it still needs to be considered.