331–340 of 447 posts
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Commonwealth Fusion Systems called dibs on next last year by saying they’re gonna have a Dominion (Virginia) commercial site up and running in the early 2030s. https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
Is there a way I can take bets on this not happening? Because I’d sure like to.
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The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.
For 24/7 solar... you are either in a sun synchronous orbit or in a very high orbit. The sun synchronous are polar orbits ($$$) that are preferred for earth observation (so that the sun is casting the same shadows). As these are polar orbits, the satellite is not overhead all the time and getting a satellite into such an orbit takes a bit of work. A SpaceX is at about $3k / kg to LEO. The numbers I see suggest a $20k…
And geostationary isn't necessary for this. You could go a bit higher or lower and still have 24/7 sunlight. Relay your communications through Starlink or something and you have full connectivity.
That said, I think orbital data centers still don't make sense, for all the reasons described in the article.
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The Moon doesn't have a magnetic field, though, so the second half of the article discussing difficulties due to radiation would still apply, right?
We will need to develop very robust, space-worthy electronics eventually. We can't rely on natural magnetic fields forever.
Elon Musk considered data centers in space simply for the fact that more solar power is available in space than Earth
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It didn't work, it was an utterly terrible idea and they are almost certainly lying about the sentiment that it "worked". No ability to perform maintenance is a complete nonstarter. Communications and power is a nightmare to get right. The thermal management story sucks - just because you have metal touching water doesn't mean you have effective radiation of heat. Actually scaling it up is nearly impossible because y…
Presumably it didn't work well or they wouldn't have shelved it. But do you actually know about what happened or is this all based on your priors?
To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.
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>You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.
I can see you lack imagination. That's good! It indeed makes no sense, you're right.
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>"A City on Mars" (2024) I wasn't terribly impressed with this one. I found it mostly just a bundle of vague negativity and insufficient (disingenuous?) use of problem-solving. However if you want to try it then give the rebuttal a fair shake too. https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...
I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth. > As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing en…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.
For 24/7 solar... you are either in a sun synchronous orbit or in a very high orbit. The sun synchronous are polar orbits ($$$) that are preferred for earth observation (so that the sun is casting the same shadows). As these are polar orbits, the satellite is not overhead all the time and getting a satellite into such an orbit takes a bit of work. A SpaceX is at about $3k / kg to LEO. The numbers I see suggest a $20k…