4 ms·
Skepticism of the bottom line will be short-lived. Consider the economics of starship + starlink 2.0: No more second stage cost, cheap propellant, an order of
by elif 4y ago
Skepticism of the bottom line will be short-lived. Consider the economics of starship + starlink 2.0:
No more second stage cost, cheap propellant, an order of magnitude more connectivity per satellite, way fewer ground links required.
When the laser line of sight distances surpass those of terrain-constrained cables, it might start making sense to host latency-dependent servers in orbit. At that point, starlink begins to resemble internet 2.0
- justapassenger 4y agoEconomic of starship are wishy washy aspirations of a guy who’s known to pull numbers out of his ass, without any research. Very successful in creating business, but never based on original numbers.
- tengbretson 4y agoIt sounds crazy, but I think edge computing in space is really going to be a killer advantage.
- candiddevmike 4y agoEdge computing at the cell tower is more of an advantage, at least until starlink or whoever figures out mesh networking in space.
- more_corn 4y agoYou are right. That does sound crazy.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoHeat dissipation is hard in space and probably makes this infeasible.
- tsimionescu 4y agoHow exactly do you imagine running software somewhere heat can't be dissipated, expensive shielded electronics are required, and software needs to be redesigned so that it handles the constant random bit flips is a "killer advantage"?
- tsimionescu 4y agoHow exactly do you imagine a server in space can be an economical option, even for a latency-sensitive application? There are huge anti-economies of scale: the more clients it serves, the more heat it dissipates, which is extremely hard to do in space. Furthermore, to get any advantage you would need to either run your server in its own constellation, or on a significant fraction of Starlink satellites - otherwise, you server will only have good latency a few dozen minutes a day for any particular point on Earth.