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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is, yes, cooling is a significant engineering challenge in space; but having easy access to abundant energy (solar) and not needing to navigate difficult politically charged permitting processes makes it worthwhile. It's a big set of trade offs, and to only focus on "cooling being very hard in space" is kind of missing the point of why these companies want to do this.

Compute is severely power-constrained everywhere except China, and space based datacenters is a way to get around that.

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Of course you can build these things if you really want to.

But there is no universe in which it's possible to build them economically.

Not even close. The numbers are simply ridiculous.

And that's not even accounting for the fact that getting even one of these things into orbit is an absolutely huge R&D project that will take years - by which time technology and requirements will have moved on.

Lift costs dropping geometrically. Cost and weight of solar decreasing similarly. The trend makes space-based centers nearly inevitable.

Reminds me of "Those darn cars! Everybody knows that trains and horses are the way to travel."

Lift costs are not quite dropping like that lately. Starship is not yet production ready (and you need to fully pack it with payloads, to achieve those numbers). What we saw is cutting off most of the artificial margins of the old launches and arriving to some economic equilibrium with sane margins. Regardless of the launch price the space based stuff will be much more expensive than planet based, the only question if it will be optimistically "only" x10 times more expensive, or pessimistically x100 times more expensive.

I don't get this "inevitable" conclusion. What is even a purpose of the space datacenter in the first place? What would justify paying an order of magnitude more than conventional competitors? Especially if the server in question in question is a dumb number cruncher like a stack of GPUs? I may understand putting some black NSA data up there or drug cartel accounting backup, but to multiply some LLM numbers you really have zero need of extraterritorial lawless DC. There is no business incentive for that.

> Reminds me of "Those darn cars! Everybody knows that trains and horses are the way to travel."… … said nobody ever.

You must be very young. This was well-known back in the day. Lots of articles (some even posted here some time back) of rant on cars, how they were ruining everything.

Btw The cute one-line slam doesn't really belong here. It's an empty comment, adds zero to the conversation, contributes nothing to the reader. It only makes a twelve year old feel a brief burst of endorphins. Please refrain.

The idea that its faster and cheaper to launch solar panels then get local councils to approve them is insane. The fact is those Data Center operates simply don't want to do it and instead want politicians to tax people to build the power infrastructure for them.

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