261–270 of 325 posts
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James Webb is a trainwreck. It took 20 years of delays to launch it.
Wait until you hear how long this project winds up taking. Webb took a long time because this stuff is very, very challenging. One of its primary engineering challenges was… cooling!
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Just spitballing here, but what if you built it on Earth, and then used the savings to build a second one on the opposite side of Earth? Now you have equivalently continuous power via solar array and also, as a bonus, air.
Not continuous because weather is a thing. Also the sun isnt directly overhead the entire time so need a much larger array
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I thought your question was interesting. The ChatGPT quote was not. If I want to know what an LLM “thinks”, I can ask it. I have more respect for and am more interested in reading people’s thoughts than machine output. I do appreciate your at least labeling at such, so I could skip over it.
If you're under the impression that all the content on here is 100% human, that's probably slightly optimistic, and the reason why I labeled it explicitly rather than regurgitating / rewording. That said, I'd rather read GPT output than skim the meta-discussion that ruins so many HN threads. Totally stoked that we're now contributing to that rather than talking about the actual content.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> That said, I'd rather read GPT output than skim the meta-discussion that ruins so many HN threads. Totally stoked that we're now contributing to that rather than talking about the actual content.
You brought this meta-discussion on yourself and upon the rest of the community, knowing the likely result beforehand. It’s hard to say you’re not part of the problem you rail against when you create the initial start conditions for the thread.
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The one benefit is being able to be in a synchronous orbit with the sun, so you don’t have to contend with night. However, that’s just another ~doubling of efficiency, which I think still nowhere near makes up for the additional costs.
It also makes the cooling problem more difficult.
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Could they concentrate the energy and beam it down to earth as a source for electricity generation on the ground?
This is the best idea to come out of this whole scheme. Space solar panels are super cheap and efficient? Prove it! Launch them and transmit the energy down. This is orders of magnitude easier than the original proposal -- and yet still nonsensical.
"Dr. Glaser is best known as the inventor of the Solar Power Satellite concept, which he first presented in the journal Science for November 22, 1968 (“Power from the Sun: It’s Future”). In 1973 he was granted a U.S. patent on the Solar Power Satellite to supply power from space for use on the Earth."
One thing that always struck me was that you wouldn't want to be living near the "collectors". A very small angular error in beaming could result in being literally microwaved.
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For continuous you need to either go for a polar orbit or go very far in space. Most launch centers & providers are not well situation for polar orbits because its not a common use case, so you need to sacrifice launch mass. The same goes for far away orbits - you need to sacrifice launch mass to go further. Also if you are far then you get latency issues. So it skews the economics pretty harshly. I think OP is right…
I think the proposal suggested an orbit where the solar panels are always in sun and always properly aligned and always clean due to space gophers. But more seriously, GPU loads are super spiky. Ground-based power grids and generators and batteries have trouble keeping up with them. You can go from 1MW idle to 50MW full power in 10ms. Unbuffered solar cells are right out.
That sounds like something that could be addressed in software, if necessary? Cap/throttle the GPUs according to the available power, and ramp power up/down gradually if spikiness is the issue.
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Followup question, wouldn't nearly any cooling solution that works in space also work on the ground? Radiative cooling is the most basic/common cooling solution on the ground, the main challenge is just figuring out how to to move heat from the component to the radiator, which I don't think is solved by simply putting it in space?
> Radiative cooling is the most basic/common cooling solution on the ground Thats tricky. I know the heat exchange components are called radiators but most of the heat they give off is by convection not radiation. (At least here on the ground.) I heard 80%-20% rule of thumb. But you are right in the broad strokes. Cooling is not easier in space. Mostly because you have no convective heat transfer.