This will never ever be viable for painfully obvious physics reasons. The big problem with data centers even on Earth is getting rid of heat. In a near vacuum, there’s no air to try and shunt that heat off to - you’re just fucking stuck with it, only slowly radiating it out a little bit at a time.
Yeah you’d need huge ass radiators, just for heat management. It’s why the TPUs on this sat are only running for 15 minutes each time, because they start getting too hot. Besides any maintenance would be astronomically more expensive, launch costs are also very high.
This will never ever be viable for painfully obvious physics reasons. The big problem with data centers even on Earth is getting rid of heat. In a near vacuum, there’s no air to try and shunt that heat off to - you’re just fucking stuck with it, only slowly radiating it out a little bit at a time.
Yeah you’d need huge ass radiators, just for heat management. It’s why the TPUs on this sat are only running for 15 minutes each time, because they start getting too hot. Besides any maintenance would be astronomically more expensive, launch costs are also very high.
Huge ass being like football fields in space, like the biggest things ever launched needing to unfold neatly and likely get a bunch of maintenance.