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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Starlink satellites don't generate the sort of heat a datacenter full of GPUs does. The ISS has enormous radiators, and it's only in space because it's a space station. Putting datacenters there is just goofy given the amount of available space on the ground.

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All of that has been repeatedly addressed in anything that discusses it, if you care to try to understand. It has ~nothing to do with available space, the US grid can’t handle the current rate of expansion. It’s bad enough that apparently Span, the smart electrical panel company, is pitching a box full of Blackwells that’ll sit outside new construction homes and use all the headroom on residential 200A circuits. Space is starting to look reasonable.

Related, US readers should call their reps and ask them to support a successor to EPRA, the Energy Permitting Reform Act, the vast majority of the generation that’s waiting for approval is from clean energy sources. It nearly got over the line before the last Congress ended, and it’s one of the most impactful things we can do to combat climate change, combined with electrifying various carbon intensive activities.

> the US grid can’t handle the current rate of expansion

This is a self defeating argument. Neither can space!

Any scenario in which you can get data centers and power into orbit is easier on land.

Not quite, I'm rooting for the solar/battery microgrids down here, one of the startups I've invested in is working on those, but you don't really even need batteries for panels in a dawn-dusk sun synchronous orbit, which is a pretty huge advantage. Also, there aren't weeks where you have 1/4 the output because it's just cloudy all week, and your output isn't crushed during winter.

And the hardest part of my home solar install, by far, was the counterparties (inspectors, power company, and subcontractors). My understanding is that it's much worse when you're trying to get a grid scale install online, the interconnection queue is currently years long. This avoids most counterparties except the ones they're already routinely dealing with.

Why are you comparing the output of a datacenter to the output of a single sat?

How much power do starlink sats draw and how does it compare to say 8x H200s?

> This gives us access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within the month.

27,500 satellites need launching - fast! - just for Claude to meet a demand spike?

There are over 10k starlink sats in orbit already. They’re obtaining approval for another ~30k.

So clearly not a problem for them.

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