[titanomachy]

What advantage does a mountaintop have versus a more accessible earth-based location?

I suspect one of the motivations for space datacenters is to try to stay out of the reach of all jurisdictions so you Musk can start to run his companies as an autonomous state.

[fc417fc802]

If the goal is to avoid various national jurisdictions, what about floating a barge out into international waters? Do it near the equator in the middle of the pacific to maximize the difficulty of humans getting there. Use the money saved by not needing to launch into orbit to purchase massive gun turrets to prevent piracy.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

A submarine comes by, says hi by torpedo, bye. Woe!

blub °Oo.

[XorNot]

Yes because when your infrastructure is Earth based, your staff is Earth based and your customers are Earth based, your company's legal registration and owner are Earth based, it would be absolutely impossible for a government to enforce any type of jurisdictional control if your datacenters were in space.

And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...

[simondotau]

Absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy many hundreds of satellites (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner).

[XorNot]

> (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner)

really think about that statement when discussing deliberately avoiding government jurisdiction...

(perhaps also consider that it is not the case that no one can damage a lot of satellites in orbit, but that up until recently no one has had any incentive to build the number of interceptors you would need to do it. But how viable is a space-based datacenter business if you decide to try and pretend you're untouchable, and one of the _many_ governments which operates anti-satellite weapons simply shoots one of your satellites? The debris field from ASAT weapons tests has been of considerable concern everytime they've been used - and given the proximity of useful orbital slots for such a service, the number of intercepts required to render a constellation completely inoperable is going to be _far less_ then the number of satellites).

(in the vein of motivation too: it is well within the power of most well-funded governments to build laser systems would would degrade or destroy orbital satellites, but again, no one has had considerable motivation to do so till recently)

(and of course all of this is - again - competing against the simpler option of simply arresting the people on Earth, or interdicting their ground stations)

[simondotau]

Lots of words. Can’t honestly say I read them all. Meanwhile Russia had a pretty strong motivation to destroy Starlink. Motivations don’t get much stronger than that.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

As I understand it the idea is to have many of such sats. Literally clouds of them.

Not necessarily in orbits which are easily reachable for current ASATs, nor 'economical'.

For now...

[Arodex]

China already has a ground based laser array for military purposes (blinding more or less permanently spy satellites). Some think it could be upgraded to hard killing satellites, which I don't think is yet possible (the amount of energy to burn a sat is also enough to ionise air and thus waste and disperse the laser's energy), but with something heavily constrained by heat dissipation like an orbital datacenter, that last array could overload it and fry it...

[fc417fc802]

> the amount of energy to burn a sat is also enough to ionise air and thus waste and disperse the laser's energy

Why would you use a single beam? Place them far enough apart that they don't begin to converge until the atmosphere has thinned out.

[simondotau]

Instead of one large floating barge, make it a thousand smaller floating barges connected with Starlink. Monitor vessel activity near them and autonomously move the fleet to make intercepting them as difficult as possible. Rig them to explode upon capture to deter theft.

(Hint to the downvoters: I'm not being serious.)