I’ve had to explain these points a few times to my friends who love the muskrat. They think he’s a genius for wanting orbital data centers.
All without explaining heat radiation, total power budget, physical maintenance, etc.
Data transmission/delays and damage from debris not just radiation
Delays - if you use the internet and request an answer from an LLM, you won’t notice if it’s 300-500ms slower than usual. But if you deploy and run a software stack, a delay of 5ms betweenntze app and the database can make the difference between a usable application and an inperfomant one.
Once I was asked to troubleshoot problems with a screen share app. Turned out that the far-side was in Gurgaon. The packets were routed bia 2 geosync sats. One second up, one second over, one second down. 3 second latency.
Time for a classic: The Case of the 500-Mile Email
Edit: The site seems to be overloaded, but it’s also on Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20260220060645/https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
A true classic.
Every single time…
SpaceX has done some great things to revolutionize space access, and already launches to orbit 80% by mass of all the worlds space “stuff”
Now they’re getting close with StarShip/Superheavy, designed to carry 10+ times that every year. It will become much cheaper than anything before it, partly based on that economy of scale.
But where’s the market for that scale? How the heck are they launching 800+% of the world’s satellites every year? Business as usual will not support that. SpaceX needs to create new markets to drive that business, perhaps mars colonies or datacenters in space. Think of it as them wanting to create new businesses to justify their new product
Yeah, like when he undermines/debases mass transit to sell electric cars and shitty tunnel machines…for…Mars colonies…yea…there is a definitely plan in there, sort of…certainly not a grift.
space is cold!
No, space is empty. If you want to be pedantic, space is very hot actually
How do you measure the temperature of particles that aren’t there?
Also, the hot argument refers to intense solar radiation, which is available only on one side of the satellite. The other side doesn’t receive sunshine, so it will loose heat.
That’s the thing, there are particles there, just very few. Temperature is measuring how fast the particles move, and they move pretty fast in space. We feel heat based on how much energy the particles transfer to us, but because there’s so few particles, it would feel cold.
This is the same reason why getting rid of heat is so hard in space. The best ways of cooling here on earth involve giving those particles the energy we don’t want, but because there’s so few in space, conventional cooling is nearly impossible.
Cooling is still possible if you radiate the heat away. Convective cooling won’t work though.
The temperature of those few particles doesn’t really matter much since there are so few of them. The overall energy density is low. The whole concept of temperature begins to fall apart in an extreme environment like that.
Wouldn’t the more logical first approximation be to bury them underground, and then progress towards (perhaps) placing them in or near the ocean (obviously, within sealed containers, yadda yadda, salt corrosion, yadda yadda, inhospitable environ yadda yadda makes Poseidon angry).
I like the “yeet them into the sea” idea conceptually because (1) yeet them into the sea (2) in theory, you could power them via tidal/wave/OTEC (3) water cooling.
Seems…too obvious. There’s probably a good reason (or bad ones - $$$) why this hasn’t been tried yet. But I bet those reasons are eminently more solvable that “send em into space”
Yeah, I mean take advantage of geothermal heating/cooling. It does seem obvious. The only actual advantage to space is the 100% solar availability, but that’s actually not a huge advantage in the grand scheme of things.
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People don’t read enough hard sci-fi, in a realistic space battle you use missiles and other projectiles because they don’t heat up your ship
If you have any kind of laser crap, you need to dissipate the heat and that requires surface area
And that surface area is an easy target for your enemy’s kinetics… take out the cooling system and everyone is cooked alive. Nice.
The positive is that lasers are undodgable by any means other than random jinking at distances where the light travel delay is significant which can force your enemy to waste all their fuel or die.
Don’t you need an atmosphere to transfer heat? Otherwise the dissipation is super slow.
This seems monumentally stupid.
A swarm of ideally flat slab-like satellites could actually work. Sun side for solar, back side a surface optimized for infrared heat radiation.
But still, even with 10x10 meters and x1000 pieces, you only get the equivalent to a small crunching center. Ignoring the problems of strong radiation and replacing parts.
