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SpaceX's newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
- avgarrison 3mo agoHow are they going to deal with the heat dissipation problem?
- pfdietz 3mo agoWhy do you think they've suddenly become unable to do straightforward engineering? If they think they can handle that, they likely can.
- archagon 3mo agoBecause they’re lead by a cult of personality?
- pfdietz 3mo agoThis is skating into Musk Derangement Syndrome territory.
- archagon 3mo agoWhat's even the point of making this kind of thought-terminating, smooth-brained quip? Do you actually feel it passes for some sort of clever gotcha? I can exhaustively list the reasons why Musk is an abhorrent leader and human being, but I'm pretty sure you know them all already. Whatever intelligence the man may have once had has long been flushed down the Twitter toilet, as evident from even a cursory look at his social media feed.
- sfmz 3mo agoThey already have space-based compute in terms of Starlink and Starshield. Is it much more difficult than that ?
- chancitag 3mo agoIt is much more difficult than that. Starlink is essentially IT infrastructure, which certainly produces heat but nothing on the level of pure compute. Ejecting heat in space is a difficult problem that is currently solved on the ISS with large IR radiators which take up weight and space. The size, weight, power, cost tradeoffs lean heavily in favor of ground-based compute.
- dlcarrier 3mo agoThe ISS dedicates more space to solar panels than radiators, despite the occupants having a very tight temperature requirement, which is about 20% cooler than the max most semiconductors can indefinitely run at. Just putting the radiator on the surface of the satellite might be enough, without even needing a panel. Even if a heat radiator as large as a solar panel is needed, it'd be only a small portion of the overall cost. Radiating waste heat on earth is a much more substantial portion of the total cost, especially so considering the social backlash it creates.
- dlcarrier 3mo agoPut a radiator in the shadow of the satellite. The radiator size needed is similar to the solar panel size. Look at the International Space Station; the solar panels are larger than the radiators, and the occupants are far more heat sensitive than semiconductors. The hotter the radiator, the better it radiates.
- youngtaff 3mo agoAccording to the authors numbers it'll take at least 20,000 launched to put a million satellite's in orbit And that's before you consider the issues of operating a DC in space It's just a a load of nonsense
- pfdietz 3mo agoWhy is 20,000 launches a load of nonsense?
- youngtaff 3mo ago20,000 launches is 11 Starship launches a day for 5 years It's an unsustainable rate and even if we do get to that rate it'll wreck the planet
- pfdietz 3mo agoWhy is that unsustainable? You need to present an argument that is more than just "large number! wave hands!" It's just like the arguments used by anti-renewable energy forces here on Earth. "Large number (of PV modules and wind turbines and batteries)! Unpossible!" And no, that launch rate does not "wreck the planet".
- youngtaff 3mo ago> And no, that launch rate does not "wreck the planet". What's the impact of the atmospheric pollution from both launches and the burn of space craft and satellite's burning up on re-rentry?
- pfdietz 3mo agoThe most significant limitation on Starship launches is from injection of water into the stratosphere and mesosphere, but 20,000 launches is far away from that limit.
- dlcarrier 3mo ago
- jfengel 3mo agoI just don't get it. It's really cool that SpaceX has the ability to put stuff in orbit without it being a billion-dollar event. But I don't see any advantage to having unmaintainable tech in orbit, where all you can do is throw away an entire satellite. What's the advantage? You can get solar power here on earth. We're not running out of land; we could put them in the middle of nowhere if we wanted, for way less than orbit. I just can't think of any reason why we'd do this, other than "it's cool". Which, fair, but it seems like a waste.
- pfdietz 3mo agoWell, I don't know if they're doing this, but PV can be much lighter in space. Much of the mass (and cost) of PV on Earth is structure to support it against gravity and weather. In space, a thin film PV array could be as little as a few microns thick (using for example CdTe, which absorbs light much more strongly than silicon). Combine that with the 5-10x higher production from being in constant unfiltered sunlight, and lack of need for storage, and it could well be much cheaper to make the power in space.
- youngtaff 3mo agoHow are you going to get rid on the heat? And they won't all be in constant unfiltered sunlight some will be in the earth's shadow