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
Maybe this is reductive, but there are times that I'm concerned the only thing keeping me from getting gobs and gobs of startup funds are the facts that I understand basic principles of engineering in space.

I could be wrong and this will be a slam dunk. To me, however, the costs/complexity (Cooling, SRP perturbation, stationkeeping, rendezvous, etc.) far outweigh the benefits of the Cheap as Free (tm) solar power

>>dablue+VO
Reading the paper they wrote on this from their GitHub site, it does take into account the thermal management aspects quite considerably.

https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

Your thinking seems more risk averse, which is similar to myself. However that doesn't mean that without the business drivers these types of things can't happen if enough attention is given too it. Costs are often because we're comparing one thing which has significant efficiencies built into the supply chain, vs something that doesn't, which by virtue drives up the cost. Perhaps Nvidia have money to burn on trying something.