Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

The real point is power limitations, putting stuff in space in the right orbit lets you turn solar power into reliable base load.

View on HN

The disadvantage is that your power generation infrastructure needs replacing at the same time as your chips (at least under current designs) which negates any advantage of needing fewer solar panels at any one point in time and less energy storage.

Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.

Why stop somewhere in between? You can go straight to the Sun and directly tap into near infinite source of energy. No need of solar panels, direct access to thermonuclear energy, too cheap to meter. The economics already works out, zero capex, zero opex for the next ~4 billion years. Just needs a few small problems to be worked out, like a pipe to transfer energy.

I guess we'll see if their idea warrants your ludicrous comparison soon. Google is putting out a lot of real resources to test theirs out, so presumably it wasn't obviously insane to them when they ran the numbers.

I do not presume that. Plenty of projects that happen don't actually make economic sense.

That's usually in hindsight? And I said it wasn't obviously insane to them, not that it would pencil out in the end.

Can also just be an asymmetric bet - relatively small outlay with low chance of working, but massive upside if it does, such that it's still positive expected value.

But mostly, I think all these armchair quarterbacks should not have very strong opinions about something that they almost certainly don't know much about compared to the people who build these. The person I responded to cited a random blog that ran some numbers, and includes such gems as "In space, a broken fan or a fried motherboard is a crisis." Just... lol

There are lots of motivations other than "this could be a profitable project". Something can be completely insane in a monetary way while not being insane in other ways. A pilot project being built is pretty weak evidence of larger practicality.

Yeah, fair. We’ll see!

Or it's just a media project to further increase the hype around the topic, or to show how "future proof" google is.

I guess no one dares calling out that the emperor is naked.

I don’t think they’re getting enough press on this to justify this level of investment. But I could definitely be wrong.

The problem with space is that you need to radiate all that waste heat.

Easy enough to do with a long tall stalactite shaped satelite.

Getting it up there and unfolding is an engineering problem, but if you have about 5 times the height as the width of your solar facing front it’s just a matter of moving heat around internally

No it's also all the minor problems: lubricants don't flow the same, grease dries out on bearings, rocket launches shake the hell out of their payloads, the thermal differentials across a structure are enormous, vibration doesn't damp into the earth it just rings through the structure till it's lost as heat.

All solvable, but all difficult and unexpected problems which make everything about operating in space difficult.

And probably the biggest one: absolutely no possibility of service or cheap replacement (sure you don't repair a computer on earth, but you don't need a rocket launch to put a new rack in).

Sure. But radiating the heat isn’t a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com