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I've heard this before. A datacenter and a starlink sattelite are not in the same ballpark of power usage and heat dissipation needs. The are orders of magnitude off from each other.

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The point is that you don’t need to put a whole datacenter into a single satellite. You can put a single rack per satellite and have different racks communicate via antennas, laser links, or perhaps even wires since they’ll be launched in groups of 10-50 anyway. You could also dock them to each other, but that’s not necessarily needed.

I don't understand what makes these "datacenters" if they're distributed across satellites with WAN-esque interconnect.

Are we overloading the term "datacenter"? Or is it not overloaded but somehow able to achieve datacenter-like speeds / (tail) latency even when distributed across satellites?

Ok, but then what's the point? How is having a small amount of compute in space useful?

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