4 ms·

Their website pitches it as 16 square km

GCUMstlyHarmls 1y ago
Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field. Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.
- stevage 1y ago
  It says "Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length." So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.
  - GCUMstlyHarmls 1y ago
    I know. I'm saying what if you build lower density data centers that could be more passively cooled. Apparently being in space is no issue for latency, so I can't see why building it on earth in a remote-ish area would matter.
    - notahacker 1y ago
      I can think of some parts of earth where passive cooling isn't a major problem, and some of them even have power sources...
      - spockz 1y ago
        Should we be adding massive sources of heat (datacenters) to regions that can easily passively cool them? It sounds like that would be somewhere around the Arctics. These are already seeing record high temperatures both in winter and summer. Maybe if we manage to radiate all the heat directly back into space by mimicking snow…?
perihelions 1y ago
There's already about 0.4 square km of solar panels across the Starlink constellation. (~4,000 v2 satellites at ~100 meter^2 each).
- LunaSea 1y ago
  This project seems 40x larger than all of Starlink's constellation combined. So quite huge.
dlisboa 1y ago
Wouldn't a 16km² gigantic solar roof on Earth already cover the energy needs that they're pitching will be saved with this space data center?
- Polizeiposaune 1y ago
  No. It would need to be larger, probably by a factor of 3 or 4, for a couple reasons. 1) The atmosphere attenuates sunlight (even when it's not cloudy) 2) The solar array in orbit can pivot to face the sun all the time. 3) While most orbits will go into earth's shadow some of the time, on average they'll be in sunlight more of the time than a typical point on the surface. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance

Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field. Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.

stevage 1y ago
It says "Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length." So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.
- GCUMstlyHarmls 1y ago
  I know. I'm saying what if you build lower density data centers that could be more passively cooled. Apparently being in space is no issue for latency, so I can't see why building it on earth in a remote-ish area would matter.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    I can think of some parts of earth where passive cooling isn't a major problem, and some of them even have power sources...
    - spockz 1y ago
      Should we be adding massive sources of heat (datacenters) to regions that can easily passively cool them? It sounds like that would be somewhere around the Arctics. These are already seeing record high temperatures both in winter and summer. Maybe if we manage to radiate all the heat directly back into space by mimicking snow…?

perihelions 1y ago

There's already about 0.4 square km of solar panels across the Starlink constellation. (~4,000 v2 satellites at ~100 meter^2 each).

LunaSea 1y ago
This project seems 40x larger than all of Starlink's constellation combined. So quite huge.

dlisboa 1y ago

Wouldn't a 16km² gigantic solar roof on Earth already cover the energy needs that they're pitching will be saved with this space data center?

Polizeiposaune 1y ago
No. It would need to be larger, probably by a factor of 3 or 4, for a couple reasons. 1) The atmosphere attenuates sunlight (even when it's not cloudy) 2) The solar array in orbit can pivot to face the sun all the time. 3) While most orbits will go into earth's shadow some of the time, on average they'll be in sunlight more of the time than a typical point on the surface. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance