zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
> In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries.

Sure. Now do cooling. That this isn't in the "key challenges" section makes this pretty non-serious.

A surprising amount of the ISS is dedicated to this, and they aren't running a GPU farm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...

>>ceejay+a7
Point solar panels away from the Sun and they work as rudimentary radiators :).

More seriously though, the paper itself touches on cooling and radiators. Not much, but that's reasonable - cooling isn't rocket science :), it's a solved problem. Talking about it here makes as much sense as taking about basic attitude control. Cooling the satellite and pointing it in the right direction are solved problems. They're important to detail in full system design, but not interesting enough for a paper that's about "data centers, but in space!".

>>TeMPOr+yl
Cooling at this scale in space is very much not a solved problem. Some individual datacenter racks use more power than the entire ISS cooling system can handle.

It's solved on Earth because we have relatively easy (and relatively scalable) ways of getting rid of it - ventilation and water.

>>ceejay+Vl
No, I meant in space. This is a solved engineering problem for this kind of missions. Whether they can make it work within the power and budget constraints is the actual challenge, but that's economics. No new tech is needed.

>>TeMPOr+Cm
> This is a solved engineering problem for this kind of missions.

Which mission of this kind exemplifies the solution? Where's the datacenter in the sky to which I can point my telescope?

> Whether they can make it work within the power and budget constraints is the actual challenge, but that's economics.

It's a weird world, where economics isn't a fundamental part of engineering, any engineering proposal's got to include it, much more one that has never been done beopre.