zlacker

>>jonbae+(OP)
This is absolute nonsense.

The first thing to consider is that this thing won’t be stationary!

Geosynchronous orbit is much more expensive to reach per kg launched, even for Starship… when it starts working properly.

Lower orbits… aren’t stationary. Who wants a data centre that’s “over the horizon” from the owning country most of the time!?

If you think AWS egress costs are bad? Just add some zeroes! No, more zeroes than that…

>>jiggaw+K3
Nothing stopping the satellite data center from communicating back to homebase via Starlink network right?

Would probably need to negotiate for a huge amount of dedicated priority bandwidth, but latency shouldn't actually be that bad.

>>non-+x4
Round-trip to GEO will add 238.7 milliseconds to whatever other infra you have over the last 200 km vertically* and whatever along the ground. It's probably fine for some things, but not for everything.

* while there could, in principle, be no extra infra in the last 200 km vertically, that means someone on the ground is talking directly to GEO. As per similar discussion about big PV space stations beaming power to the ground, your minimum ground spot size for a transmitter this big and this far away is still tens of km, which limits the other parts of your overall system design.