Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you’d have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can’t keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that’s more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.
Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.
The energy I don’t know about really, but at least it doesn’t sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You’d have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don’t see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.
Yeah I don’t know why anyone entertains the idea.
Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you’d have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can’t keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that’s more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.
Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.
The energy I don’t know about really, but at least it doesn’t sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You’d have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don’t see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.