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Comment by __patchbit__ | Hacker News Reader

> The orbital datacentre concept is just plain nutty

It's edge computing. Obsoletes the round trip for ground based AI crunch and power draw, cooling.

You still need a round trip to space and back - which with a Starlink-like orbit means a distance of at least 400km. At that point it makes significantly more sense to place your "edge computing AI engine" at a 5G base station a few dozen km away.

Unless the other computing stuff isn't on Earth?

Except there is little cooling or power in space, depending on your position in orbit you could only have one of those at a time.

military/industrial customers want this for tactical operations fully discreet low latency compute that integrates with there existing space hardware so the ability to run drones, and meatbots from space, with low hardware requirements on the ground, but with lets say 1000~2000 users max, power users, but not that many. so batteries, heat sinks,he refrigeration radiators, on a sattelite fleet. they have been trialing this for years and are pitching putting ALL of the military compute in space, no more dirty civilian hands on there toys

I saw Musk discussing that and his main argument in favour is there's unlimited solar power whereas on earth there are a lot of power constraints.

Sure, in the same way that there is unlimited solar power on earth.

There are orbits with 24/7 or near-24/7 sunlight - but those are very undesirable if you want a low-latency data link back to Earth. Just like you can get 24/7 sunlight on the North / South Pole - but they are still pretty bad locations for a data center.

LEO orbits like those used by Starlink have far better connectivity, but about the same sunlight exposure as the surface as the planet will be between you and the sun about half the time.

Also, power is the easy part. Cooling is far harder.

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