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Comment by kolbe | Hacker News Reader

Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.

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It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up

Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.

You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.

That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.

Maybe.

If starcloud integrated with something like starlink, using the laser inter satellite links to distribute ground comms across a network of satellites, then the datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is probably a non-issue for most purposes.

You can have sun synchronous around an earth orbit. L1 would do nicely

Depends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate into Earth's shadow seamlessly.

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