zlacker

>>ajyoon+(OP)
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.

Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.

But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.

>>sheeps+Yu
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.

>>pgalvi+Bv
Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.

>>sheeps+2x
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.

>>cybera+Jz
There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.

Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments.

I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime.

It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.