Hacker News Reader

Comment by Izmaki | Hacker News Reader

This sounds amazing until something needs replacement. Until data centers on earth has a 99.99% (or higher) level of autonomous operation with very minimal requirements to maintenance and part replacements, they're not sending anything into orbit...

View on HN

It sounds amazing for 14yo boys who are not specifically into hard sci-fi.

I guess we'll see, because most 14 year olds don't have a lot of money to put into SpaceX.

'Stock goes up so we buy it' has sufficient explanatory power to resolve this conundrum.

I also sounds amazing until you remember how hard it is to cool something when your only option is radiative cooling.

You could also transfer the heat to tungsten rods and drop them on rivaling earth-bound data centers.

Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

The idea is to use tungsten because of the high melting point and hardness so that it survives re-entry in order to best strike the rival datacentre.

This has zero advantage over drones or ICBMs. It’s a joke, a Cold War fever dream.

It was a joke, but now it's a totally serious proposal because it can help with heat dissipation in orbital datacenters. Very serious. No joking here.

Starlink already operates this way. You don’t replace parts, you launch new sats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com