China launches orbital data center satellites

spacenews.com

2 pointsseanwatson4 comments

I don’t understand the motivation. The cooling and radiation resistance on orbit make satellites a very challenging and expensive place to deploy computing. Can they even use standard server chips for this? Or does it have to be something more exotic?

They state it reduces reliance on ground based computing, but it’s not obvious what would make use of this computing power other than ground based systems. Is this for processing sensor data prior to downlink? Is this for censorship of a starlink style internet constellation? Is there some military purpose?

They are to support the real time computation needs of other satellites without a global network of ground stations and data centers.

right, what would those computation needs be? That's the question I was asking.

One can imagine that for remote sensing like real time tracking of moving objects it is more efficient to have the nano sats with optics flying at lower orbits and have processing done in sats in higher orbits. This way the resolution is higher with the same optics while the compute resources can be pooled in larger, more powerful sats in more durable orbits.

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