Comment by kridsdale1 2 days ago
The performance bottleneck for space based computers is heat dissipation.
Earth based computers benefit from the existence of an atmosphere to pull cold air in from and send hot air out to.
A space data center would need to entirely rely on city sized heat sink fins.
And the presence of humans. Like with a lot of robotics, the devil is probably in the details. Very difficult to debug your robot factory while it's in orbit.
That was fun to write but also I am generally on board with humanity pushing robotics further into space.
I don't think an orbital AI datacentre makes much sense as your chips will be obsolete so quickly that the capex getting it all up there will be better spent on buying the next chips to deploy on earth.
Well, _if_ they can get launch costs down to 100 dollar / kg or so, the economics might make sense.
Radiative cooling is really annoying, but it's also an engineering problem with a straightforward solution, if mass-in-orbit becomes cheap enough.
The main reason I see for having datacentres in orbit would be if power in orbit becomes a lot cheaper than power on earth. Cheap enough to make up for the more expensive cooling and cheap enough to make up for the launch costs.
Otherwise, manufacturing in orbit might make sense for certain products. I heard there's some optical fibres with superior properties that you can only make in near zero g.
I don't see a sane way to beam power from space to earth directly.
For radiative cooling using aluminum, per 1000 watts at 300 kelvin: ~2.4m^2 area, ~4.8 liters volume, ~13kg weight. So a Starship (150k kg, re-usable) could carry about a megawatt of radiators per launch to LEO.
And aluminum is abundant in the lunar crust.