zlacker

>>jonbae+(OP)
Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost savings from the "free" solar power.

More discussion: >>43977188

>>Reuben+o1
Even beyond cooling, just getting all the hardware up there is extremely costly, and for what benefit over ground based DCs? The cooling is the ongoing problem but the cost of lifting it there obliterates all the other problems, IMO.

>>burnte+2J
And who is The Law, in space? What's to prevent E.G. Amazon Kuiper or Musk Starlink from crashing one of their vehicles into the array, when they want to takeover their market?

>>ncr100+T51
My understanding is that the normal rule here is that the launching state has jurisdiction over (and international legal responsibility for) what is done by a spacecraft, but I’d bet that if private parties crashing their spacecraft into those of other private parties with widespread, economically significant use became a thing, a whole lot of countries in which one or more of the companies have assets or interests would discover jurisdiction in underused provisions of their domestic law rather quickly, no matter where either of the craft involved were launched.