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Starcloud

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Starcloud

#231

Post by i_am_jl »

teleforce wrote: post #226
i_am_jl wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming these people don't understand that their ideas are unworkable is a mistake. Don't believe for a second they are stupid or ignorant. The difference between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen isn't that the citizen knows that crimes are wrong, it's that the citizen cares that crimes are wrong and the criminal doesn't.

>they are stupid or ignorant. Nope, probably the more apt description is 'in denial'.

I think that's very charitable.

I'd describe it as "kayfabe".

Re: Starcloud

#232

Post by drunx »

porphyra wrote: post #196
drunx wrote: post #193

I'm by no means closer or educated enough on astrophysics or anything to do with space. Hence I have a very "commoner" question: - asteroids? Debris? It's there even any risk of anything significantly big to be damaged by something flying by? "About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface." I assume a good old "Prius"…

The solar array is 4 km by 4 km. The whole Earth, with its 6400 km radius, only gets hit by a Prius-sized asteroid once per year. So the risks are much lower. I guess the array may be hit by many micro-asteroids though, but it should be possible to engineer some level of tolerance for that.

Yeah.. right after writing the comment I went on to get my frame of reference a bit adjusted about the sizes of everything...:) Risks are very small! So small that it's not even worth worrying about it too much. The whole cooling/heat transfer reality check is way more critical here than anything else indeed.

Re: Starcloud

#233

Post by yencabulator »

Reubend wrote: post #3

Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost s…

Figure 3 shows they're hoping to have a 4km x 4km combo solar panel and radiator. The main truss of ISS is 110 meters long.

These plans are so much larger than anything built so far that they're scifi.

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