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by WalterBright 4 days ago
> targeting orbital data center launches

I am regularly assured by HN denizens that orbiting data centers will never work.

1 comments

Because they won't for commercial usecases (which was never the point of an ODC).

For C4ISR usecases they solve the latency problem and are worth the spend needed.

Everyone on HN is talking about a commercial usecase that isn't under serious consideration.

It's funny, people here said the same thing about Starlink. "Sure, it's technically possible, but you could only lose money by doing something like that. There's just no market for it."
What I repeatedly read here was it is physically not possible to build an ODC because of heat problems and alpha particle problems.
At 1GW scale, I'd agree. But if you need around 40-50 racks to do image processing and alerting, that's largely a solved problem.

The whole thesis around ODCs is to basically mass deploy a bunch of replaceable racks en masse and consistently, such that any geospatial intel can be processed at the edge.