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Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

(angadh.com)
199 points angadh | 6 comments | 26 Jun 25 20:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.19s | source | bottom
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energywut ◴[26 Jun 25 20:49 UTC] No.44391208[source]▶
Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while.

Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries

Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?

Latency? Highly variable.

Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.

Radiation shielding? Not free.

Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!

Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.

There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.

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kolbe ◴[26 Jun 25 21:25 UTC] No.44391591[source]▶
Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.
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1. notahacker ◴[26 Jun 25 21:49 UTC] No.44391835[source]▶
It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up
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2. energywut ◴[26 Jun 25 22:13 UTC] No.44392006[source]▶
Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.
3. malfist ◴[26 Jun 25 22:22 UTC] No.44392066[source]▶
You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.
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4. mook ◴[26 Jun 25 23:25 UTC] No.44392439[source]▶
That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.
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5. malfist ◴[26 Jun 25 23:51 UTC] No.44392601{3}[source]▶
You can have sun synchronous around an earth orbit. L1 would do nicely
6. riknos314 ◴[27 Jun 25 01:16 UTC] No.44392992{3}[source]▶
Maybe.

If starcloud integrated with something like starlink, using the laser inter satellite links to distribute ground comms across a network of satellites, then the datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is probably a non-issue for most purposes.