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Starlink Satellite Data Centers
Suggestion: Consider building a "data center satellite", perhaps in
synchronous orbit, that contains a continuous upload of the whole
internet (a petabyte fits in a relatively small cube of silicon chips).
Add a "local cache" capability to each low earth satellite that holds
recently accessed pages. Pages can be marked with Time-to-live
before needing a refresh so relatively static pages (like youtube)
can be kept and only highly active pages (e.g. news) can be swapped
(and cached based on least-recently-used). This is essentially a CDN
(e.g. an Akamai-like service).
The result is a much lower lag time, lower round-trips to Earth,
and less need for Earth stations.
Plus, in the future, they could put such "satellite data centers"
in orbit around Mars, thus minimizing Mars internet access times
for the Mars human data settlements.
- andymoe 5y agoNot quite the same but they are working to collocate ground stations at data centers of the big cloud providers around the world so you’ll get most of the advantages you laid out for much less complexity.
- CompuHacker 5y agoA petabyte of flash memory consumes several hundred watts and is susceptible to damage from particle radiation. A cube shape allows compounding damage. Perhaps several Starships could be put in a medium Earth orbit, filled (or refilled over several missions) with a liquid for radiation shielding. The shape of the data storage array is decided such that one linear event cannot strike all of three redundant devices.