> The author uses the power capacity of the ISS's solar panels as a point of comparison, but SpaceX has already successfully deployed many times that capacity in Starlink satellites[1] without even needing to use Starship,
Your link here isn't really a fair comparison, and also you're still short a factor of 10x. Starlink has deployed 50x the ISS's solar cap across its entire fleet (admittedly 3 years ago); the author's calcs are 500x the ISS for one datacenter.
> and obviously the heat dissipation problem for those satellites has already been solved so there's little point in hand-wringing about that.
This reasoning doesn't make any sense to me, the heat dissipation issues seem very much unresolved. A single Starlink satellite is using power in the order of watts, a datacenter is hitting like O(1/10) of gigawatts. The heat dissipation problem is literally orders of magnitude more difficult for each DC than for their current fleet. This is like saying that your gaming PC will never overheat because NetGear already solved heat dissipation in their routers.
> The author also worries about ground communication bandwidth, claiming it is "difficult to get much more than about 1Gbps reliably", which seems completely ignorant of the fact that Starlink already has a capacity much greater than that.
Don't their current satellites have like 100Gbps capacity max? Do you have any idea how many 100Gbps routers go into connecting a single datacenter to the WAN? Or to each other (since intrahall model training is table stakes these days). They have at most like O(1)Pbps across their entire fleet (based on O(10K) satellites deployed and assuming they have no failover protection). They would need to entirely abandon their consumer base and use their entire fleet to support up/down + interconnections for just 2 or 3 datacenters. They would basically need to redeploy a sizeable chunk of their entire fleet every time they launched a DC.