Comment by rklaehn

This article is written as if SpaceX does not exist. Every single comparison is against 30, 35 year old obsolete technology.

Power:

It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.

The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.

Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211102134305/https://techtaiwa...

Cooling:

Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.

A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.

Cosmic radiation:

The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.

Communications:

Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-opens-up-its-starlink-lase...

This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.