Musk's SpaceX applies to launch 1M satellites into orbit

bbc.co.uk

15 points·mellosouls··7 comments

I think the heat dissipation relative to volume of the ISS is way lower than these satellites, yet that already needs sizable thermal radiators to cool: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/150004

GPUs are also very power hungry, I need about 2 square meter of solar panels on my room to feed a single RTX 5090 during summer. How many do you want to send up in a single satellite?

What about the data link? Real world Starlink speeds are capping around 300 Mbps. I understand that is a shared link with plenty of peers but what is a realistic bandwidth between these satellites and some fixed, earth receiving stations?

Pretty sure the plan is to use Starlinks for Earth communication.

The whole idea of orbital data centres just doesn’t seem to pan out… the heat management issues are immense and the bandwidth is never going to be as fast as good old fibre

The big advantage is 24/7 unblocked solar energy.

Source: Just Trust Me Bro

It’s not 24/7 — depending on the orbit they’ll spend significant time in the earth’s shadow

I forget the term in the press release, but the plan really is to place them in orbits that are always out of the earth’s shadow.

I assume that means they're pretty far out, which is OK for AI training.

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