zlacker

>>mindra+(OP)
As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically.

On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs - the ISS is in LEO and gets SEUs on occasion. There’s also the South Atlantic Anomaly where spacecraft in LEO see a higher number of SEUs.

>>kevdev+N6
The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"

>>foobar+lk
Is it an advantage though ? One of the main objections in the article is exactly that.

There's no atmosphere that helps with heat loss through convection, there's nowhere to shed heat through conduction, all you have is radiation. It is a serious engineering challenge for spacecrafts to getting rid of the little heat they generate, and avoid being overheated by the sun.

>>nosela+7h1
I think it is an advantage, the question is just how big, and assume we look only at ongoing operation cost.

- Earth temperatures are variable, and radiation only works at night

- The required radiator area is much smaller for the space installation

- The engineering is simple: CPU -> cooler -> liquid -> pipe -> radiator. We're assuming no constraint on capex so we can omit heat pumps

>>foobar+Iu1
A typical CPU heatsink dissipates 10-30% of heat through radiation, and the rest through convection. In space you're in a vacuum so you can't disipated heat through convection.

You need to rework your physical equipment quite substantially to make up for the fact you can't shed 70-90% of the heat in the same manner as you can down here on Earth